Download ADDING COLOUR AND CONSCIENCE TO MARKETS:

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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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).
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