Mehr lesen
How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the quality of a product in relation to other products. Only by recognizing qualities and perceiving quality differences can purchasers make non-random choices, and price differences between goods be justified.
"Quality" is not a natural given, but the outcome of a social process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits, and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space. While we normally take the quality of goods for granted, quality at a closer look is the outcome of a highly complex process of construction involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries engaged in judgment, evaluation, categorization, and measurement.
The authors in this volume investigate the processes through which the quality of goods is established. They also investigate how product qualities are contested and how they change over time. The empirical cases discussed cover a broad range of markets in which quality is especially difficult to assess. The cases include: halal food, funeral markets, wine, labor, school choice, financial products, antiques, and counterfeit goods. The book contributes to the sociology of markets. At the same time it connects to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through cognitive processes of classification.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 1: Jens Beckert and Christine Musselin: Introduction
- Part I Investing in Quality
- 2: Zsuzsanna Vargha: Realizing Dreams, Proving Thrift: How Product Demonstrations Qualify Financial Objects and Subjects
- 3: Patrik Aspers: Quality and Temporality in Timber Markets
- 4: Agnÿs van Zanten: A Good Match: Appraising Worth and Estimating Quality in School Choice
- Part II The Quality of Labor
- 5: Emmanuelle Marchal: Uncertainties Regarding Applicant Quality: The Anonymous Resume Put to the Test
- 6: Philipp Gerlach: Evaluation Practices in Internal Labor Markets: Constructing Engineering Managers Qualification in French and German Automotive Firms
- Part III The Quality of Aesthetic Goods
- 7: Elena Bogdanova: Account of the Past: Mechanisms of Quality Construction in the Market for Antiques
- 8: SÃ(c)bastien Dubois, Pierre François: Seeing the World through Common Lenses? The Case of French Contemporary Poetry
- Part IV The Morality of Quality
- 9: Frans van Waarden and Robin van Dalen: Halal and the Moral Construction of Quality: How Religious Norms Turn a Mass Product into a Singularity
- 10: Dominic Akyel: Qualification under Moral Constraints: The Funeral Purchase as a Problem of Valuation
- Part V Consuming Quality
- 11: Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier: From Qualities to Value: Demand Shaping and Market Control in Mass Consumption Markets
- 12: Frank Wehinger: Fake Qualities: Assessing the Value of Counterfeit Goods
- 13: Jörg Rössel and Jens Beckert: Quality Classifications in Competition: Price Formation in the German Wine Market
- Postscript
- 14: Wendy Nelson Espeland: Vigorous Verbs: Conveying the Action of People Producing Qualities
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Jens Beckert is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, Cornell University, the European University Institute, and Sciences Po in Paris. The main focus of his research is economic sociology with a special emphasis on markets, organization studies, the sociology of inheritance and social theory. He is the author of two monographs on the sociology of markets (Princeton University Press 2002) and on the sociology of inheritance (PUP 2008). His articles have been published in journals such as
Theory & Society, Sociological Theory, Organization Studies, and the
European Journal of Sociology. Christine Musselin is the director of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, a research unit of Sciences Po and the CNRS. She has been a DAAD fellow in 1984-1985 and a Fulbright and Harvard fellow in 1998-1999. She has held visiting positions at Harvard University and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Her work focuses on comparative studies on university governance, public policies in higher education and research, state-universities relationships, and academic labor markets. She is the author of two monographs on the French higher education system (Presses Universitaires de France 2001) and on the academic labor market in France, Germany, and the US (Presses de Sciences Po 2005), that were both edited in English by Routledge. Her articles have been published by
Sociologie du Travail, Revue Française de Sociologie, Revue Française de Science Politique, and
Higher Education.
Zusammenfassung
This book explores how value and quality are established in markets and society by means of a series of empirical studies across a diverse set of topics. It contributes to the sociology of markets, as well as connecting to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through classification.
