Culture and Classification in Markets: An Introduction

Recent work at the boundary of culture and the economy focuses on relations between meaningful subjectivity and macro-level structure. This special issue features new directions in the study of culture and classification in markets, including research on vocabularies of organizing, cross-national comparisons of market identities, development of metrics and theory for assessing the recognition of market rivals by one another, and relational techniques for the identification of meaningful action in complex corporate fields. Classical concerns with these broad areas provide a means of situating the contemporary work. The new work also has some implications for unifying the study of power, politics, and culture in institutional analysis. The work of art interprets the meaning of the phenomenon itself. At the turn of the last century Georg Simmel took this proposition merely as a point of departure for his discussion of culture insofar as it relates to analysis of the modern economy. The paradox, as Simmel ([1900] 1978: 447) points out, is that in order to interpret the meaning of the phenomenon itself, “everything depends on discovering the meaning and secret of things in order to represent them in a form that is purer and clearer than their natural development.” The artistic ideal is to present the object in its unique significance (“l’art pour l’art”). But the cultural ideal is different: here the goal is to transcend and integrate various types of value (aesthetic, ethical, religious, and so on) “from the standpoint of the development of our energies or our being beyond the degree Forthcoming in Poetics, 33 (4), 2005.