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The chapter studies the functioning of the so-called “voluntary” carbon offset market, a market in which moral controversies take place. The analysis dwells on the theoretical framework that enables us to study the functioning of a contested market through particular devices. The chapter seeks to contribute to the literature on moral struggles within markets by focusing the attention on one specific device: relational work, including several dimensions like meeting between seller and buyer, establishing contracts and maintaining the relationship with clients in the long run. By studying relational work, the authors highlight how this basic market activity is a crucial device that makes it possible for a contested market to continue to exist.

With only a few exceptions, economic sociology scholarship remains almost silent about illegality and crime in the economy. The implicit premise in the literature on market sociology is that institutional structures and exchanges taking place in markets are law abiding in nature. As a consequence of this legality bias the study of morality in markets has so far only addressed commodities – like human organs, gambling, drugs, alcohol, or tobacco – whose legal status depends on broad social agreements and has excluded markets whose workings are dependent on formally legitimized institutions like property rights, trademark laws, or copyrights. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic research, this chapter addresses the phenomenon of emerging moral justifications in the context of a marketplace for counterfeit and sweatshop-produced garments. In line with Anteby’s proposal on a “practice-based view of moral markets,” it argues that despite the broad moral consensus around trademark laws and the absence of professionals who advocate for legalization, moral justifications views arise from rising aspirations in such illegal markets. The case expands existing understandings of morality and contestation in economic sociology literature and shows its relevance in the context of recent academic scholarship on perceptions of the future as a source of moral justification of market exchanges.

Moralized markets are economic markets in which moral aspects are explicitly used to legitimize decisions. Companies involved in such markets have to cope simultaneously with opposing logics: While they strive for economic growth, their existence is bound to their moral integrity, too. This chapter investigates how ecopreneurs manage this inherent conflict of moralized markets. Based on interviews, documentary analysis and sample purchases, an empirical case study highlights the example of well-renowned ecopreneurial dairies distributing their milk via ecologically disreputable discount stores. By looking into the related struggle between moral and economic expectations, the chapter sheds light on one particular coping strategy: The tacit creation and maintenance of separate fields for moral and economic logics. This strategy of fragmentation is referred to as ‘double game.’ The study emanates from competing logics approaches to hybrid organizations by adopting a field theoretical, Bourdieusian perspective. Its explicit focus on opposing logics and on coping strategies that go beyond reconciliation opens up new perspectives for both sustainability and organization studies.