Pricing Activities: Bridgeing the Performativity - Coordination Divide in Economic Sociology

A fundamental question for economic sociology is: how are prices set? In economic sociological theory, a price is generally conceptualized either in terms of the performative construction of economy (e.g. a market device), or in terms of co-ordinational effects of power relations between buyers and sellers (e.g. the effect of social structures and institutions). In this paper, I set out to show how these two theoretical approaches may complement each other, making the argument that the practical activities involved in pricing are constitutive of intertwining products, values, and power-relations in market contexts. Prices are, in other words, both performative and co-ordinational outcomes. Pricing activities are therefore more informative than prices themselves when it comes to explain how specific markets work.

The argument rests on extensive ethnographic materials from three interlinked markets in the Swedish meat supply chain. These materials are used to highlight the relevance of both performative and coordinative (or, structuralist) theories of pricing, distinguishing “pricing activities” as an explanatory concept for how prices configure, and are configured by, social reality. The paper further suggests two types of pricing activities: vertical and horizontal. The papers contribution is, in short, an empirically grounded, theoretical conception of price formation, which solves a number of problems embedded in existing sociological theories of pricing.