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This chapter draws on the concept of orders of worth to generate understanding into how sustainable, good markets might be enabled at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). Through an ethnographic study of the efforts of a non-government organisation (NGO) to create spaces where values and value at the BoP are unearthed, articulated, contested and translated into market-making practices. Insights are generated into how interventions to make-markets in sites of extreme poverty become ‘worth the effort’. In keeping with the market studies literature, the authors explore how multiple, contested and reframed needs generate insights into the efforts (and practices) that shape orders of worth in economic life. Orders of worth are the everyday practice of social values that constitute economic value and are framed through the moral values of social worlds as these values are put to work to calculate economic value. This work provides a contribution to the market studies literature through our understanding of the relationship between social and economic values in the creation of orders of worth, by showing how this happens at the BoP. Second, the authors contribute to the BoP literature by showing how places and spaces can be created and used to enable markets to unfold and happen. Finally, the findings contribute to our understanding of the types of practices and market-making devices that interventions might adopt and adapt in order to prod potential actors into action. The chapter identifies three types of enabling practices that make markets possible: connecting, integrating and reclassifying.

Law and Film both enjoy the power to mediate the social imaginary. Here, we explore the resonance of this insight in the register of affect and intensity, movement, and change. This demands a different approach to doing theory. As Andrew (1976, pp. 66–67) argues, ‘film is not a product but an organically unfolding creative process in which the audience participates both emotionally and intellectually.’ Seeing a film is not just an exercise in imagining alternatives; it is an unfolding experience in time. It is an event shaded with particular embodied dimensions: one's heart races, pupils contract, skin shivers, muscles tense. Involuntary sensations of nausea or vertigo combine with cognitive responses to produce the lived experience of viewing a particular film that is incorporated into one's sensibility, sometimes very powerfully. It is not just that the mind has spent time in a darkened theatre. The body has also had an affect-laden auditory, visual, and tactile encounter. The affect-rooted experience of the film is a piece of the subject's past, its history, its self. This is another way to understand how film not only represents the world, but participates in its making.

Purpose – To present detailed examples of the social construction of understandings, exploring interplay between social and individual sense making.

Methodology/approach – A form of ethnomethodological discourse analysis is undertaken using text from online discussions groups for people with kidney failure. Sense making is theorised using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (1999) as a starting point. Chatman's Theory of Normative Behaviour (2000) and Pettigrew's Information Grounds (1999) are considered for their potential to theorise social impacts on individual understandings, while a practice theoretic approach (Gherardi, 2009a, 2009b) illuminates dynamics between social and individual sense making.

Findings – Local understandings developed out of repetition with gradual modification of ideas. Meanwhile, generic information such as facts was usually contextualised by descriptions of lived experiences. In this way, specifics were emphasised rather than generalities. However, the detailed, non-prescriptive commentaries provided by individuals gathered into usefully loose (non-specific) fields of possibilities.

Research implications – Information and knowledge manifest as transient and customised. This suggests a need for caution if researchers conceive people as having stable ‘knowledge structures’ which can be mapped by research, and it raises questions about durable incarnations of information.

Practical implications – People must produce flexible understandings particular to their situation. This requires time, reiteration and access to contributions from a range of sources. Provision of generic information during one-off interactions is only a first step towards support of these larger needs.

Originality/value of paper – Extends relational conceptions of information and verb-based metaphors for sense making, by proposing sense making, information and knowledge as transient and customised.