Market relations and the competitive process

Abstract

There has been increasing interest and debate in recent years on the instituted nature of economic processes in general and the related ideas of the market and the competitive process in particular. This debate lies at the interface between two largely independent disciplines, economics and sociology, and reflects an attempt to bring the two fields of discourse more closely together. In many ways this is to return to a previous age when the study of institutional arrangements was at the centre of the study of capitalism. The contributions to this volume explore this interface in a number of ways. The purpose of this Introduction is to place these contributions in the wider context and briefly to outline the content of the various chapters.