Abstract
Almost 60 years ago, Wroe Alderson (1965: 23) suggested “a theory of marketing explains how markets work.” To us, markets are indeed central to our discipline, and we believe marketing scholars have a unique opportunity to contribute important insights about markets that complement those of economics and economic sociology. With this in mind, we have found it both surprising and worrying that the marketing discipline devotes so little effort, relatively speaking, to theorizing markets. Granted, the situation has improved in the past two decades. Pioneering contributions by Rosa et al (1999) and Jaworski et al (2000) have been followed by a surge in research on markets drawing on service-dominant logic (e.g. Storbacka & Nenonen, 2011; Vargo & Lusch, 2011), consumer culture theory (e.g. Peñaloza & Mish, 2011), actor-network theory (e.g. Kjellberg & Helgesson, 2006, 2007; Martin & Schouten, 2014), systems theory (e.g. Giesler & Fischer, 2017; Vargo et al., 2017), and neoinstitutional organization theory (e.g. Humphreys, 2010; Scaraboto & Fischer, 2012). Today, there are several partially overlapping research streams focusing on markets in our discipline, including market system dynamics (Giesler & Fischer, 2017), markets-as-practice (Araujo et al., 2008; Geiger et al., 2012), markets as service ecosystems (Vargo & Akaka, 2012), market shaping (Nenonen et al., 2019) and market driving (Maciel & Fischer, 2020; Schindehutte et al., 2008). This development has also benefitted from parallel efforts in other social science disciplines, notably in economics (Roth, 2008), economic sociology (Fligstein, 2001; Fourcade, 2007; White, 2002), (strategic) management (Gurses & Ozcan, 2015; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009), economic geography (Berndt & Boeckler, 2012; Christophers, 2014) and science and technology studies (Callon, 1998; MacKenzie, 2006).