This year’s workshop offered four keynote sessions and around 100 insightful presentations by more than 120 senior and early career academics interested in the social studies of markets. Whilst sharing a common focus on the workshop’s overarching theme, topics discussed included science and technology studies, sociology, organisation studies, marketing, information systems, political science, history, anthropology, and geography.
The presentations were organised into six parallel tracks – Concerning, Financial, Spatial, Technological, Design, Hyping – all constituting distinct but related vantage points for studying Future Markets – Market Futures.
Around 40 of the presenters were PhD students, making a third of total contributions and keeping the conversation - that was once started in the fringes of the social sciences - lively, lasting and evermore stimulating.
The interdisciplinary nature of market studies as a discipline could be encapsulated by the topics of the 4 keynotes: scams (Lana Swartz), sneakers (Sharon Zukin), Silicon Valley (Pierre Benoît Joly) and social needs (Michell Callon, Koray Caliskan & Donald MacKenzie). There was a real excitement about how utilising markets as a focus of exploration brings together different disciplines, methods, scales of inquiry and scholars at various career stages. There was also a mixture of theoretical and empirical contributions, spanning the quirky to that of the current permacrisis, and altogether bringing a sense of academic purpose and play.
Thanks to the highly-engaged presenters and audiences, the workshop fostered a truly stimulating interdisciplinary conversation that spanned two and a half days and which continued over coffee and lunch on the Business School Concourse, and then to the conference dinner at The Playfair Library, Old College.
We would like to thank to everyone who participated in the Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop, and we very much hope to continue these stimulating interdisciplinary conversations on the topic of Market Studies with you next year in Stockholm!
Signed, The Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop 2023 Organising Committee (Liz McFall, Teea Palo, Neil Pollock, Gemma Milne, Elif Buse Doyuran, and Alex Christian)