Market system dynamics: Moral, ontological, and posthuman stakes
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Market System Dynamics (MSD) scholarship has established markets as institutionally embedded systems through which societies coordinate value, morality, and power. This article extends that perspective by examining how contemporary market transformations strain key assumptions underlying existing theorization. We identify four domains in which new forms of market dynamics are particularly salient: artificial intelligence and machine market systems, climate and energy in the Anthropocene, financialization and consumer risk, and biopolitical markets. Each domain is organized around a constitutive tension (human and machine, nature and capitalism, calculation and trust, and life and economy) that reveals how markets increasingly operate as hybrid moral infrastructures. Across these contexts, markets redistribute agency, reorganize time, and sustain participation under conditions of profound uncertainty by structuring trust, affect, delegation, and hope. The article positions these domains as developmental vectors for market system dynamics research and highlights their implications for understanding markets as evolving moral and institutional arrangements.
Source: Marketing Theory
Authors: Markus Giesler, Eileen Fischer
Institution: York University
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,900
OpenAlex ID: W7166056236