This course examines the market as a social institution.  Living in the modern world, markets shape our lives in profound, pervasive, and often invisible ways.  We sell our labor in a market transaction – a choice that largely determines the content of our daily activities, our social prestige, and often the identity of our colleagues and friends.  We choose where and with whom to live based on market transactions for a house or apartment, determining our physical environment and the character of our private lives.  We acquire the basic necessities of life through formal, impersonal market transactions.  Even our leisure time and most personal pursuits are mediated through the market – the enjoyment of music, literature, communication with our friends, and opportunities to travel or experience new things are strcutured through market exchanges.  The task of interpreting modern society, or indeed our own lives, is impossible without understanding what markets are and how they affect human behavior and social organization.

    But despite the importance of markets, the theories that the social sciences have developed to explain them are at best incomplete.  The formal theories used by economists rely on questionable assumptions and often ignore the fact that markets as they exist today are created and sustained by a range of private and governmental institutions.  More fundamentally, markets are always nested in a broader set of social institutions that shape their actual operation and character.  Because of this, it is necessary to draw on a broader range of theories than those offered by neo-classical economics to supplement our ideas of how markets operate and to place our understanding of markets in a meaningful context.  

    Even as the broader society and politics affect their character, markets shape many aspects of modern social and political life.  Because so many aspects of human behavior in the modern world are structured by markets, they affect how society is organized in areas that we normally think of as outside of economics.  Our political organization, our social relationships with people and institutions, and even our most basic values are affected by the way in which modern societies use markets. 

    Over the course of the semester, we will examine markets from the perspectives of economics, political science, and sociology.  Theories developed within each discipline will be used to explain how markets are organized, how they affect our political and social lives, and what impact they have on behavior and identity.