Making sustainable markets and the forming of a circular economy

Abstract

In this chapter we explore what it means to conceptualise and create sustainable markets and the implications of the making of sustainable markets for the Circular Economy. In so doing, we consider extant market studies research that seeks to explain how collectives are mobilised into generating new conceptualisations of concerned markets (Fernandes, Mason and Chakrabarti 2019; Geiger et al. 2014; Mason, Friesl and Ford 2017), where market action needs to be changed to make a market work well for society and for the environment (Geels 2010). We also draw on the notion of moral markets. That is, how markets that adopt certain forms of market action become understood as valuable in their own right. We see this as central to understanding how circular economies are created. We see moral markets as being revealing something of the value of anarchistic actions, of concerned entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs that aim to bring about such change. ways – to generate new and more holistic forms of knowing and acting. Three specific forms of marketization work are identified: 1) the conceptualisation of actors' roles, 2) the conceptualisations of markets, and, 3) the conceptualisation of goods. These findings show the strategic net as a well-positioned and well-equipped institutional form for engaging in marketization, and more specifically a particular form of marketization work, that Mason, Friesl and Ford (2017) label conceptualisation work .