Introduction Jens Beckert and Christine Musselin1 How Can We
Introduction Jens Beckert and Christine Musselin1 How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? This is the question addressed in this book. Each chapter focuses on situations where quality is highly uncertain: such situations provide excellent opportunities to analyze how quality is the outcome of a construction process involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries. This book is a contribution to the study of the sociology of markets. We are interested in the role of “quality” for the development of markets. Here “quality” refers to the explicit and implicit, visible and invisible aspects of a good, service, or person being valued. Qualities create incentives or disincentives for purchasing decisions on markets. For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the qualities of a product in relation to other products. This holds true for consumer markets, labor markets, and investments. “How could we describe, in practice and theory, the structures of competition within the same market, or between related markets, if relations of similitude or dissimilitude between the goods that circulate could not be established?” (Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa 2002: 196). Only by recognizing quality and perceiving differences in quality can purchasers make nonrandom choices and can the price differences between goods in a market be justified. “Quality” is not something that is naturally given, but the outcome of a collective process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space.
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