Marketization and Geography of Markets

The project analyzes international and Latin American cases of extreme market orientation and seeks to identify and discuss the promotion of other hybrid and plural markets, beyond those that are specifically capitalist.

“Far from the mainstream and hegemonic view in so-called economic science, media, and common sense about the omnipresence and mechanical action of the so-called ‘Market,’ there is a multitude of markets being structured, existing, and ‘functioning’ in the concrete, everyday, mundane reality. There is no such thing as the ‘Market’—pure, general, abstract—an entity naturalized by neoclassical economists and conservative thinking, ideologically turned into an evident and trivialized truth. In concrete reality, what exists is a plurality of polymorphic markets, which should not be naturalized or seen as the realm of freedom, individual-rational, and spontaneous action. Markets or economies should not be viewed as opposites of the State or politics. They have an inherently multifaceted nature, always appearing in contextual forms and heterogeneous configurations in each time and place. As a theoretical counterpart to a critical view of social space, or its various scales, the market is a social construct—conflictual, contingent, and relational—having boundaries in contestation and movement. Thus, markets are social constructs expressed and supported by complex interpersonal relations and interactions. They are not static, rigid, or uniform forms, but rather plastic, hybrid, contextual, and plural, requiring institutionalized frameworks and structures to provide stability to the dynamic and changing social relations. Research on various markets must, therefore, defend and develop a non-static approach to how each specific market is prepared, shaped, and formed” (Brandão, 2024).