A fish market in Tokyo, a stock exchange in New York, a grain bazaar in Kano, a data marketplace on the dark web – each of these is a market, yet no two are alike. “The market” circulates readily in economic theory, policy discourse, and everyday language, but its apparent self-evidence conceals the manifold work required to make exchange possible. This special issue approaches markets as infrastructures in order to examine how abstraction and materiality are not opposites but rather mutually sustained through social, technical, and political labor.

Neoclassical economy has traditionally relied on efficiency as a key ingredient for market success, enabled by a seemingly universal human desire for profit optimization. Despite all faith in rational choice, algorithmic calculation, and optimized knowledge acquisition, economic theory has done little to reconcile the divide between such abstraction and markets as they physically exist – the latter of which, more often than not, evade standardized equations (Peck 2010; Berndt, Peck and Rantisi 2020). Prices do not circulate on their own; goods do not move without transport; payments do not clear without technical systems and legal guarantees. They are embedded in social, spatial, and historical processes (Polanyi 1957). Even the most automated of markets depend on personnel who maintain platforms, verify quality, enforce contracts, move goods, and absorb risk. Economic anthropology and work that emphasizes the diversity and ingenuity of economies have long shown that exchange takes many forms and that so-called informal markets are neither marginal nor temporary (Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004; Simone 2004; Gibson-Graham 2014; Ledeneva 2018). What remains less visible is the ways in which abstraction itself is sustained: how numbers, categories, and standards acquire authority through material arrangements and political decisions (Roitman 2005; Chalfin 2010; Callon 2021). Without an analytic that scrutinizes the social production of markets’ relational, processual, and cross-scalar infrastructures, embeddedness risks reproducing the very abstractions that it seeks to undo.

Foregrounding infrastructures brings these processes into focus; it draws attention to what must be built and maintained for exchange to occur, and to what happens when these systems fail or are withdrawn. Legal definitions of property, standards of quality, digital payment systems, transport corridors, zoning laws, and border controls do not simply support markets, they in fact shape the market. Market stability depends on shared expectations about returns, institutional protections against uncertainty, and devices that make comparison possible, whether through prices, ratings, or benchmarks (Fligstein 2001; Beckert 2009).

Many contemporary markets rest on colonial histories of extraction, land dispossession, and racialized labor, yet these foundations are rarely acknowledged when markets are framed as neutral or universal (Dutt, Alves, Kesar and Kvangraven 2025). The promise of “market access” is frequently accompanied by new regulations that undermine existing practices while benefiting distant actors. What appears as integration or efficiency may instead deepen dependence, uneven exposure to risk, or loss of local control. A decolonial perspective expands the critical potential of the market-as-infrastructure approach by asking where market infrastructures originate and whose interests they serve. This perspective also highlights labor that is routinely overlooked. Feminist political economy reminds us that markets depend on care, repair, and social reproduction, including unpaid and underpaid work that sustains trust and endurance in unstable conditions (Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004; Gibson-Graham 2006; Gago 2017). Foregrounding infrastructure brings these forms of labor into view – alongside the warehouses, servers, and roads – showing how markets are maintained through uneven and often gendered work.

We are particularly interested in contributions that connect long-term, in-depth, or participatory insights on market forms and practices to theoretical approaches in critical political economy, decolonial studies, and world system theory. By focusing on how markets are built, maintained, and contested, this special issue invites contributions that move beyond abstract critiques toward grounded analyses of how economic life is organized, and how it might be organized otherwise.

To explore these dynamics, we invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Market materialities: Built forms, platforms, and technologies that structure exchange.
• Flows and frictions: How disruptions of goods, money, or information reshape market-spaces.
• Temporal infrastructures: Rhythms of labor, speculation, and expectation that sustain markets.
• Moral and affective economies: Trust, care, fear, hope, and negotiation in circulation.
• Governance and regulation: Formalization, informalization, and the role of law, standards, and bureaucratic structures.
• Failure, maintenance, and repair: Labor, improvisation, and strategies that keep markets alive.
• Speculative and hybrid markets: Digital platforms, futures markets, barter networks, or informal economies.
• Alternative economies and imaginaries: Grassroots practices, artistic interventions, or counter-hegemonic experiments in market-making.