Call for Papers: Contesting Markets: How Organizations and Social Movements Shape the Political Economy

Special Issue of Socio-Economic Review

Guest Editors:
Neil Fligstein (University of California-Berkeley)
Doug McAdam (Stanford University)

Timeline:
Submission deadline: September 1, 2017
Publication of the special issue in the Socio-Economic Review: 2019

Background
For the past 20 years, scholars of social movements and those who study corporations have been in dialogue. We have witnessed a vibrant exchange about how social movements challenge firms to change their strategies, create the conditions to support new industries, and explain the emergence of new markets as reflecting social movement like processes. For example, social movements have successfully altered the tactics of firms in the apparel and forest product industries (Bartley, 2003) and in biotechnology (Weber, Rao, and Thomas, 2009; for a review see King and Pearce, 2010). They have led to the legitimation of new industries like hospice care (Livne, 2014) and the market for insurance viaticals (Quinn, 2008).  Scholars interested in the process of market emergence and change have viewed market formation processes as akin to social movements as they require the creation of new products, new firms, new identities, and political solutions to market contentiousness (Haveman, Rao, and Thomas, 2007; Lounsbury, Ventrusca, and Hirsch, 2003).  Fligstein and McAdam (2012) have proposed a more general theory of social spaces that explain why these different kinds of links exist between social movements and market fields.

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