On any account of human society, in any time period or cultural context, markets and/ or practices of exchange have played a key “economic” role. In the neoclassical tradition, which has effectively dominated the economics discipline since the end of the nineteenth century, markets are understood abstractly as spheres of free exchange between autonomous, asocial individuals. This way of thinking has produced a powerful economic discourse that is often embedded in mainstream public policy. Yet the observed nature, practice and evolution of real-world markets is not well captured in this orthodox approach, which is, as a result, contested on many fronts. Indeed, the broad non-neoclassical modes of economic thinking provide useful alternative conceptions of the historical, spatial and institutional diversity of markets and market activity in capitalism. These include traditions within both heterodox economics and economic sociology as well as elements in economic geography and anthropology.

It is the contention of this chapter that, despite some important differences, the various alternative economic approaches represent a “multidisciplinary” heterodoxy that coheres around a “social ontology” of markets (Paton 2011), which also opens up the possibility for a spatially grounded analysis. The shared conception of capitalist markets as socially constituted points to a clear methodological cleavage between the neoclassical and non-neoclassical approaches to theorizing and analysing markets. Furthermore, an appreciation of the social, relational and spatial character of markets prompts us to remember agency and to recognize that market institutions and processes can be – indeed, are – shaped by purposive human activity. This holds open the possibility of developing practical alternatives to the individualized, market-centric discourse and its attendant practices that have come to dominate policy-making across the capitalist world since the 1980s.

Below, we first outline the conceptual foundations of the neoclassical understanding of markets as this evolved in the history of economic thought, pointing to the abandonment of concrete economic concerns in favour of abstract conceptions of market activity. The chapter then considers a range of theoretical perspectives populating the two broad areas of heterodox economics and economic sociology. We explore how this multidisciplinary heterodoxy effectively understands “markets” (whether explicitly or implicitly) as embedded in broader social institutions and processes and suggest how a Polanyian lens also extends this to the spatiality of markets.