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Moral struggles in and around markets abound in contemporary societies where markets have become the dominant form of economic coordination. Reviewing research on morality and markets across disciplinary boundaries, this introductory essay suggests that a moral turn can currently be observed in scholarship, and draws a direct connection to recent developments in the sociology of morality. The authors introduce the chapters in the present volume “The Contested Moralities of Markets.” In doing so, the authors distinguish three types of moral struggles in and around markets: struggles around morally contested markets where the exchange of certain goods on markets is contested; struggles within organizations that are related to an organization’s embeddedness in complex institutional environments with competing logics and orders of worth; and moral struggles in markets where moral justifications are mobilized by a variety of field members who act as moral entrepreneurs in their striving for moralizing the economy. Finally, the authors highlight three properties of moral struggles in contemporary markets: They (1) arise over different objects, (2) constitute political struggles, and (3) are related to two broader social processes: market moralization and market expansion. The introduction concludes by discussing some of the theoretical approaches that allow particular insights into struggles over morality in markets. Collectively, the contributions in this volume advance our current understanding of the contested moralities of markets by highlighting the sources, processes, and outcomes of moral struggles in and around markets, both through tracing the creation, reproduction, and change of underlying moral orders and through reflecting the status and power differentials, alliances, and political strategies as well as the general cultural, social, and political contexts in which the struggles unfold.

Busch focuses on what he regards as the three broad causes of immorality in the modern world: scientism, statism, and marketism. He views these three “isms” pejoratively and originating respectively with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. Each is treated as a “leviathan” spewing immorality from its multiple heads in the form of undue faith in the three different kinds of social order they generate.

This paper uses the case of Islamic banking in Amman, Jordan, to assess the wide moral range of expectations, levels of satisfaction, and means of evaluating banks’ “Islamicness.”

The information is gathered from interviews conducted during over 21 months of ethnographic research and one month in participant observation and research access as an intern at the Middle East Islamic Bank (MEIB) in Amman, Jordan.

I found three modes for evaluating “Islamicness” when actors decide whether or not to become customers of Islamic banks.

These modes demonstrate that Islamic banking is no longer the cultural protectionism of a relatively homogeneous community of Muslims. Rather it is a fraught and tense field for actors’ debates about types of moralities in the markets and modes of moral assessments of “Islamicness.”

The amplification of the individual and individual choice and authority in the moral assessments of Islamic banking may ultimately serve to unseat prior dichotomous theoretical framings of morality’s presence or absence as “Islamic” or “not Islamic” and “good” and “bad.” By unleashing to individuals the construction of morality in the markets, moral rights and wrongs, and moral evaluations, fragmentation of moral consensus in market practices will occur.

By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst waste-pickers and recycling traders in the waste paper, plastic and scrap metal sectors, and engaging with literature from economic anthropology and history, as well as archival sources, this paper documents changing perceptions of just price, morality and fairness in the Turkish recycling market. The paper suggests that multiple markets imply multiple prices, which are contingent and contested. When dealing with price mechanisms largely outside their control, actors tend to associate a fair price with the going market price, rather than factors such as state regulation. Approaches to morality and assessments of fairness become more ambiguous when prices are mediated by actors’ own practices. These range from gift relations to paternalism, envy and deception.

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.

While certain contested goods do manage to make their way to market, others have moved less far in this direction and others seem permanently unable to do so. Moral contestation promotes, holds back or blocks the emergence of contested markets. This chapter examines the conditions that make the operation of these markets possible, and those that block their appearance. From a comparison between two cases (organs for transplantation and gambling), the authors focus attention on the one hand on those devices that make transactions possible, and on the other, on the “vulnerable populations” that these devices are intended to protect, either from or by the market.

This article looks at corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a discursive social practice that attempts to interrogate the global market economy and its neoliberal underpinnings and that reflects as well as frames and shapes domestic and global politics and institutions. Drawing upon Karl Polanyi’s notions of reciprocity and redistribution while also emphasizing the normative content of the concept, the article inquires into the position that the CSR discourse occupies in addressing the corporate transnational risks derived from social tensions and conflicts and more generally, in answering social expectations for justice. The Polanyian perspective highlights the CSR discursive quest for a missing conceptual consistency and implicitly, for a constructive “critical” core. From this perspective, the article shows CSR to reside within controversial conceptual boundaries; a discursive social practice that engages with the social aspiration of embedding market economy in society while it is also in need of reclaiming its critical core and its potential for social change.

Entangled Political Economy, the idea that the economy and the polity are a nexus of interrelations often with unplanned outcomes, is close to the concept of economics that Adam Smith presents, a concept which was not shaped by strict discipline barriers. I show that Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the wealth of nations by analyzing the interaction of the economy with politics, ethics, and the law. In particular, Smith presents each of these systems as a network of relations with all the other systems: the economy is entangled not just with the polity, but also with other systems of behavior such as the law and morality. Adam Smith may help expand the horizons of the entangled political economy analysis and the explanatory powers of economics.