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Market Studies Meet Organization Theory: The Making and Maintenance of Cut Flower Exchange in Turkey Özlem Öz* Boğaziçi University Department of Management Bebek, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey Tel: +90-212-359 7582 / Fax: +90-212-287 7851 [email protected] Koray Çalışkan Boğaziçi University Department of Political Science and International Relations Bebek, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey Tel: +90-212-359 6526 / Fax: +90-212-287 2455 [email protected] *Corresponding author 1 Market Studies Meet Organization Theory: The Making and Maintenance of Cut Flower Exchange in Turkey Abstract Markets have frequently been criticized for their structural bias towards producing inequality. Yet the cut-flower market in Turkey provides the literature, the peasants and consumers with an alternative form of designing markets that introduces democratic participation to the organization of exchange relations. This paper scrutinizes the structure and functioning of the cut-flowers market in Turkey with the ultimate purpose of contributing towards a better understanding of how more sustainable and less asymmetrical forms of market exchange can be designed and maintained. Introducing a conversation between new social studies of markets and organization theory, the article calls for going beyond seeing markets as universal institutions of exchange that produce either negative or positive results simply by virtue of their mere presence. Markets can foster or impede justice, depending on the form of their organization. Cut flower markets in Turkey present a unique case that illustrates not only the possibility of market design from below but also rethinking the findings of new social studies of markets and organization theory. Keywords: markets, cut flowers, auctioning, cooperatives, social studies of markets, organization theory 2 Acknowledgements Özlem Öz would like to thank TÜBA for their financial support. Koray Çalışkan thanks Boğaziçi University Scientific Research Fund (BAP 07C302). The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Volkan Yılmaz for his support as a research assistant in the early stages of this project. We are also grateful to Mustafa Yazıcı for introducing us to flower growers and traders, and Peter Karnoe for encouraging us to write this paper. Finally, for their useful comments, we would like to thank the participants of the Conference on Energizing Markets – Making and Breaking Boundaries for the Regimes of Value (Copenhagen, Denmark, October 30 - November 1, 2008), at which an earlier version of this paper has been presented. 3 Biographies Özlem Öz Özlem Öz received her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She now works as an associate professor at the Department of Management, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, where she teaches courses on organization theory. She is the author of many articles as well as the books titled The Competitive Advantage of Nations: The Case of Turkey (Ashgate, 1999) and Clusters and Competitive Advantage: The Turkish Experience (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). She won the Encouragement Award in Social Sciences and Humanities (2005) and GEBIP Successful Young Scientists Award (2007) from the Turkish Academy of Sciences. Her latest articles are “Spatialities and the Making of Transnational Communities: The Case of Shuttle Traders in Laleli, Istanbul” (with M. Eder, forthcoming in 2009 in Djelic, M. L. and Quack, S., Transnational Communities and the Regulation of Business, Cambridge University Press) and “Path Dependencies, Lock-In and the Emergence of Clusters: Historical Geographies of Istanbul’s Film Cluster” (with K. Özkaracalar, forthcoming in 2009 in Sydow, J. and Schuessler, E., The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, Palgrave MacMillan). Her current research interests include local development and geographic concentration, poverty, cooperatives, and methodological issues in caseoriented research. 4 Koray Caliskan Koray Caliskan is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. His dissertation on world cotton market passed with distinction at New York University in 2005 and won the best dissertation award in social sciences from Middle East Studies Association. His research maps global markets as articulated in different locales. A certificated commodity futures and options trader, Caliskan now works on the interaction of individual economic markets in global trade and alternative forms of economization organized by workers and peasants. He teaches Middle East Politics, Anthropology of Markets, Social Movements and Comparative Politics and won the award for excellence in teaching from Bogazici University in 2006. He has a forthcoming book from Princeton University Press, “Making a Global Market: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a World Commodity” and two articles with Michel Callon to appear in Economy and Society on old and new directions in market studies. His latest articles are “Price as a Market Device: Cotton Trading in Izmir Mercantile Exchange” (2007, Market Devices, Callon, M, et al. eds., Blackwell Publishing) and “Markets and Fields: An Ethnography of Cotton Production and Exchange in a Turkish Village” (2007, New Perspectives on Turkey, Vol. 37). 5