Are Contemporary Industrial Economies Really Dominated by Impersonal Markets?
Braudel points to ways in which price-based market processes are observable in pre-nineteenth-century, traditional economies. A different critique of market theory has emerged recently within economics itself, arguing that modern economies, even if sensitive to underlying market conditions, need not be and often are not based on ideal-type, impersonal exchange. A central theme in the new institutional economics is that economic organization varies around a continuum defined at each end by markets and firms. Perfectly competitive markets-impersonal, atomized, arm’s length-may actually be quite rare, since various formal and informal arrangements have arisen that bring parties together into relationships that are enduring or governed by other, nonmarket mechanisms. “Much of economic activity takes place within long-term, complex, perhaps multiparty contractual (or contract-like) relationships: behavior is, in various degrees, sheltered from market forces” (Goldberg, 1980, p. 338, emphasi
