W e usually think of markets as places where things are bought and sold. In this common everyday usage, the word ‘market’ may refer to particular markets that we may know of, such as the market next to the railway station, the fruit market, or the wholesale market. Sometimes we refer not to the physical place, but to the gathering of people – buyers and sellers – who constitute the market. Thus, for example, a weekly vegetable market may be found in different places on different days of the week in neighbouring villages or urban neighbourhoods.
In yet another sense, ‘market’ refers to an area or category of trade or business, such as the market for cars or the market for readymade clothes. A related sense refers to the demand for a particular product or service, such as the market for computer professionals. What all of these meanings have in common is that they refer to a specific market, whose meaning is readily understandable from the context. But what does it mean to speak of ‘the market’ in a general way without refering to any particular place, gathering of people, or field of commercial activity ?
This usage includes not only all of the specific senses mentioned above, but also the entire spectrum of economic activities and institutions. In this very broad sense, then, ‘the market’ is almost equivalent to ‘the economy’. We are used to thinking of the market as an economic institution, but this chapter will show you that the market is also a social institution. In its own way, the market is comparable to more obviously social institutions like caste, tribe or family discussed in Chapter .