Making Markets

“[This is] a great must-read. Abolafia’s central thesis is that markets cannot be viewed simply as anonymous fora where nameless economic forces work their mysterious ways to determine equilibrium price-quantity outcomes. Instead, they are better seen as stages on which diverse groups of actors seek to further their own, often conflicting, interests… The view that markets are social constructs has a particularly significant consequence for understanding and reacting to the phenomenon of manipulation. Abolafia’s view that manipulation ‘arises out of a conflict between buyers and sellers where one side is pressing its advantage’, rather than being either a legal definition or an economic phenomenon, is extremely convincing… It is impossibly infuriating that one’s assumptions about how the financial world works should be overturned by a mere sociologist.”—Ruben Lee, London Financial News

“Mitchel Abolafia’s fascinating…book…is a great take on the other side of world finance, on life’s most bruising sport—making money—and on how to think about markets as interdependent social structures.”—Peter Evans, Contemporary Sociology