GLOBALIZING RESTRICTED AND SEGMENTED MARKETS: Challenges to Theory and Values in Economic Sociology

The efforts by the world’s most powerful corporations to develop global markets have spawned a substantial sociological and economic literature on how transnational markets form, what stages characterize market development, and what rules of exchange are most effective. As the authors of a prominent article put it, “…the central question is…what kinds of rules and structures promote market activity and what kinds stifle it” (Fligstein and Stone Sweet 2002:1212). Such a goal assumes market activity to be a per se good, part of the grand globalization blueprint for a better society. But as Robert Merton emphasized throughout his writings, such grand purposive actions may have unintended consequences and serve latent functions or dysfunctions. Alejandro Portes (2000), in his extension of Merton’s analytic framework, adds four other possibilities pertinent to good research on globalization: concealed goals to achieve covert ends, emergent means and altered outcomes, backfire or results contrary to those intended, and unexpected changes that facilitate outcomes or frustrate them.