Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop

Flowing Markets “At the end of each street, a mountain...” Stendhal wrote of Grenoble, the capital of the French Alps, a city that seeks to add to its reputation as a major research and technology centre the noble aspiration of being the next “green capital” of Europe. The International Market Studies Workshop, Grenoble [3-5 June] 2020, sets out to explore markets through the prism of goods, people and money circulation. The acceleration and dematerialization of flows through digitization and commodification, the intense urbanization at the heart of globalization, the emergence of platform economies and ‘uberization' of work – these are just some of the transformations of contemporary markets. At the same time, facing environmental overflows and the critique of global capitalism, our changing social and political agenda aims to regulate, re-territorialize or even decrease the flows of goods and materials, a project of reorganizing markets around sustainable goals. In theoretical terms, the idea of circulation reflects classical issues such as valuation, (re-)qualification, match making, market boundaries, processes of segmentation. Empirically, it speaks to financial markets, logistics activities, urban economies, entrepreneurship or digital work, big data management, market and non-market boundaries, and so forth... For its 6th meeting, the IMSW will again bring together multidisciplinary social science scholars to present, discuss, and debate their research on market societies and their transformations. A PhD market studies workshop will be organized on the first day.