The Labor of Markets: Reproducing, Reworking, and Repairing an Online Marketplace

• In Event: 554 - Regular Session. Economic Sociology: Making New Markets, New Firms: Global, Local, Online

Abstract

As the field of economic sociology has come to be dominated by the study of markets, scholars have largely turned away from questions pertaining to labor and production. Since the dawn of e-commerce in the 1990s, hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. entrepreneurial firms have created brokered markets designed to allow their companies to profit off of the activity of market participants. Which social conditions matter, and how do they matter, in the making of brokered market institutions? I present ethnographic data from a startup firm that created a nationwide marketplace for local services in the U.S. My observations reveal that three types of labor are required to create and sustain the market: one team works to reproduce the market and its actors; another attempts to balance the competing needs of buyers, sellers, and the firm by reworking market rules; and a third creates personal, emotional connections with users to repair relationships that can be damaged by market outcomes. I then demonstrate how the specific nature of the market broker’s supply and organization of labor, and the interactions between different work functions, contribute to the possibilities for, and the shape of, the market institutions that ultimately structure the conditions of exchange within the market. Market brokers must grasp not just the dynamics of markets, but also the labor of markets, to produce thriving ventures in a competitive landscape.

Author

• Benjamin James Shestakofsky, University of California-Berkeley