In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.

In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.

This collection of essays rediscovers the physical space that markets inhabit and explores how political, social, and economic factors determine the shape of a particular market space. The essays present new research from the fields of geography, economics, political economy, and planning and show how markets are contested, constructed, and placed.

In this book Elmar Altvater, one of Germany's leading radical economists, considers the discordant state of the capitalist world today, drawing on bpth green and socialist economics. The end of 'actually existing socialism' has been widely hailed as confirmation of the supremacy of market forces. Yet both the post-Communist societies of the East and large parts of the South face a protracted crisis to which the apparently victorious West offers no solution. Against this background Altvater explains why Soviet planning ended in failure, having reproduced many negative features of the Western model without being able to sustain a global challenge to it. Altvater examines the claims currently made for the market, both in the history of capitalism and in the globalized market economy today. Has a free market ever existed, in the sense of imposing itself on the will of political actors? Can the free market ever lead the debt-ridden societies of Africa or Latin America out of mass poverty? Can the world crisis of civilisation, in all its dimensions, be overcome by relying on market models of production and consumption? These questions are addressed in the context of an economic theory that puts human needs and capacities, and a sustainable model of development, at the centre of analysis.

'...a quick, and exceedingly engaging, tour of economic history...' Financial Times What is a market? To most people it is a shopping center or an abstract space in which stock prices vary minutely. In reality, a market is something much more fundamental to being human, and it affects not just the price of tomatoes but the boundaries of everything we value. Reading the newspapers these days, you could be forgiven for thinking that markets are getting ever more efficient - and better. But as Tim Sullivan and Ray Fisman argue in this insightful book, that view is far from complete. For one thing, efficiency isn't always a good thing - illegal markets are very often more efficient than legal ones, because they are free of concern for laws and human rights. But even more importantly, the chatter about efficiency has obscured a much broader conversation about what kind of economic exchange we actually want. Every regulation, every sticker price, and every sale is part of an ever-changing ecosystem - one that affects us as much as we affect it. By tracing 50 years of economic thought on this subject, Fisman and Sullivan show how markets have evolved - and how we can keep making them better. This leads to fascinating and surprising insights, such as: - Why your £10,000 used car is likely to sell for £2,000 or less; - Why you should think twice before buying batteries on Amazon; and - Why it's essential that healthy people buy medical insurance. In the end, The Inner Lives of Markets argues for a new way of thinking about how you spend your money - it shows that every transaction you make is part of a grand social experiment. We are all guinea pigs running through a lab maze, and the sooner we realize it, the more effectively we can navigate the path we want.

Our lives have gradually become dominated by markets. They are not only at the heart of capitalistic economies all over the world, but also central in public debates. This insightful book brings together existing knowledge on markets from sociology, economics and anthropology, and systematically investigates the different forms of markets we encounter daily in our social lives. Aspers starts by defining what a market actually is, analyzing its essential elements as well as its necessary preconditions and varied consequences. An important theme in the book is that a whole host of markets are embedded within one other and in social life at large, and Aspers discusses these in the context of other forms of economic coordination, such as networks and organizations. Combining theory with empirical examples, the book cuts to the core of understanding how different markets function, the role they have played in history, and how they come into being. This accessible and theoretically rich book will be essential reading for upper-level students seeking to make sense of markets and their complex role in social life.