Marketplaces as Realms of Activity: Arrangements, Ambiguities, and Adjustments: A Comment on Charles W. Smith

In addressing “Markets as Definitional Practices,” Charles W. Smith (2007) has rendered a valuable service to the study of community life. As Smith notes, he is not the first to take issue with those who would attempt to explain the marketplace by invoking models of economic exchange defined by profit maximization and related notions of rationality. Still, Charles Smith importantly emphasizes the dynamic, reflective, and interactive nature of human exchange.

Adopting a constructionist viewpoint, Smith argues for the importance of locating marketplace activity in historically emergent and situationally achieved contexts that involve actors who not only take the viewpoint of the other (generalized and situated) into account but who also anticipate, strategize, and adjust to the settings in which economic interchanges take place. Thus, while acknowledging the arrangements established by those involved in earlier instances of trade in particular settings, Smith’s argument is that rationality is a humanly achieved quality and, as such, is multiplistic, emergent, and adjustive.

Accordingly, Charles Smith focuses on the ways that people engage the marketplace in meaningful, reflective terms. Rather than view marketplace participants as the pawns of some overarching external rationality, Smith envisions people as agents who, in the course of pursuing their objectives, develop the activities that collectively shape the particular marketplaces in which they achieve their transactions. This involves developing understandings and working arrangements, invoking purposes and anticipations, building up stocks of knowledge and associated technologies, participating in immediate interchanges, attending to longer term relationships, and making highly situated as well as more enduring adjustments.

In presenting his case, Charles Smith discusses two different marketplaces — the advertising market associated with the Internet search engine and the equity options market. Focusing on pricing practices (the area of the marketplace that would seem most readily to lend itself to formalistic, factors-related conceptions of rationality), Smith addresses the emergent, anticipatory, role-taking, strategic and adjustive features of pricing practices within these two realms of economic endeavor.

Although precluded from providing highly detailed ethnographic accounts of these two marketplaces in his 2007 statement,¹ it is apparent from the material that Smith presents that attempts to reduce even the pricing features of the marketplace to rationalistic models are strikingly inauthentic. Indeed, only by invoking notably artificial images of the marketplace can models of rational determinism be sustained. Still, because rational-economic approaches are so firmly entrenched in sociological considerations of the marketplace, we can expect substantial and enduring resistance to approaches that challenge these paradigms.

In what follows, I build on and extend the central argument that Charles Smith makes; namely that even though marketplaces may be characterized by intendedly rational realms of interchange, marketplaces most fundamentally are socially achieved essences and are best studied and understood in these terms. Quite directly, marketplaces are to be comprehended, first and foremost, as realms of socially constructed activity.

In developing his statement, Smith relies centrally on the works of Anthony Giddens and George Herbert Mead. I also build on George Herbert Mead, but the statement developed here is much more explicitly grounded in the works of Herbert Blumer and Chicago-style symbolic interactionism.² Notably, compared to Mead and Giddens, Blumer and the interactionists (see Blumer 1969; Strauss 1993; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999; Prus and Grills 2003) are much more attentive to the centrality of ethnographic research for learning about all realms of human knowing and acting. The interactionists also are much more concerned with developing theory about the nature of human group life that is informed by sustained instances of comparative analysis of ethnographic research on a wide range of substantive contexts. Although Smith also appreciates ethnographic inquiry and shares broader concerns about achieving more generic, process-oriented concepts, I will be stressing these matters in the present statement.

To this end, I will (1) discuss marketplaces as realms of human interchange; (2) acknowledge the interdependencies of marketplace activities and participants; (3) attend to people’s definitions of objects in the marketplace; (4) consider the matters of purpose and rationality; (5) address ambiguity, influence, and risk as consequential aspects of human interchange...