Markets, infrastructures and infrastructuring markets

Abstract

Despite a growing understanding of market infrastructures—the rules and socio-material arrangements that enable agreements on the properties of goods, and the calculation of value, equivalence and exchange—we know little of what lies beneath the arrangements that underpin and are implicated in exchange. The socio-material lens has done much to explain how specific assemblages circulate information and goods, but has done little to explain how different infrastructures configure relations between dispersed market practices. Using the history of the development of the market for market research we show how knowledge-based infrastructures constitute markets as knowledge objects: new expertise emerged through alliances between academia, government, and private actors form a new occupation embodied in specialist agencies that set themselves up in an infrastructural relation to marketing practices. Our conceptualization of markets as knowledge objects extends extant understandings of markets by showing how: (1) extant knowledge-based infrastructures are drawn on to construct new markets; (2) infrastructural relations emerge between different markets to constitute multiple systems of provision and demand, leading to an increasingly valuable knowledge infrastructure; and (3) organized practices in one market are often heavily reliant on connections to other markets, including knowledge-based infrastructures such as market research services.

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Vol.:(0123456789)
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AMS Review
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-021-00212-0
THEORY/CONCEPTUAL
Markets, infrastructures andinfrastructuring markets
LuisAraujo1 · KatyMason2
Received: 10 December 2020 / Accepted: 25 October 2021
© The Author(s) 2021
Abstract
Despite a growing understanding of market infrastructures—the rules and socio-material arrangements that enable agree-
ments on the properties of goods, and the calculation of value, equivalence and exchange—we know little of what lies beneath
the arrangements that underpin and are implicated in exchange. The socio-material lens has done much to explain how specific
assemblages circulate information and goods, but has done little to explain how different infrastructures configure relations
between dispersed market practices. Using the history of the development of the market for market research we show how
knowledge-based infrastructures constitute markets as knowledge objects: new expertise emerged through alliances between
academia, government, and private actors form a new occupation embodied in specialist agencies that set themselves up in an
infrastructural relation to marketing practices.Our conceptualization of markets as knowledge objects extends extant under-
standings of markets by showing how: (1) extant knowledge-based infrastructures are drawn on to construct new markets; (2)
infrastructural relations emerge between different markets to constitute multiple systems of provision and demand, leading
to an increasingly valuable knowledge infrastructure; and (3) organized practices in one market are often heavily reliant on
connections to other markets, including knowledge-based infrastructures such as market research services.
Keywords Markets· Infrastructures· Market research as a knowledge-based infrastructure
Introduction
While the market studies discipline recognizes the socio-
material structure of markets as dynamic and always in-the-
making (Kjellberg & Helgesson, 2006), little has been done
to explore the making of what lies beneath these emergent
structures, or to explain how these infra-structures are drawn
on to construct new markets and new worlds (Kjellberg
etal., 2019). Put differently, we know little of how infra-
structure, and infrastructural work contribute to the itera-
tive and distributed governance of markets (Cochoy etal.,
2016). Using the market for market research services, this
paper illustrates how a particular form of infrastructure—a
knowledge-based infrastructure—is formed by the emer-
gence of novel forms of expertise that become gradually
sedimented into market practices, pervading the private and
public sectors.
We claim that knowledge-based infrastructures con-
stitute markets as knowledge objects by accumulating a
highly structured and interrelated set of data, information,
knowledge, and expertise concerned with and useful to
the organization of market exchanges. Furthermore, this
knowledge-based infrastructure is part of what Scott (1998)
called the construction of sight through the distantiated rep-
resentation and organization of modes of intervention in
socio-economic life. Thus, the knowledge infrastructure that
serves markets has benefited from and contributed to how
states developed forms of classification, information, and
governance of citizens.
We start from the notion that formal markets rely on socio-
material infrastructures that organize agreements on the prop-
erties of goods, calculative spaces, equivalences of value, and
other common operating principles (Callon & Muniesa, 2005;
Thévenot, 2015). The establishment of these principles and
spaces of equivalence is the product of significant investments
in classification, valuation, calculation, standards, measure-
ment devices that underpin the regular, structured and pat-
terned exchanges that constitute markets (Lee etal., 2018).
* Katy Mason
k.j.mason@lancaster.ac.uk
Luis Araujo
luis.araujo@manchester.ac.uk
1 Alliance Manchester Business School, Manchester, UK
2 Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK

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Whereas market infrastructures are often transparent, con-
temporary markets can also feature complex socio-material
infrastructures that are opaque to outsiders or even market
participants. For example, Özden-Schilling’s (2016) (study of
deregulated electricity markets shows how exchanges depend
on electronic communication networks connecting buyers
and sellers, and distributed forms of expertise to operate and
maintain those networks. Pardo-Guerra (2019) highlights
how global financial markets depend on the range of critical
infrastructural work upon which market trades depend.
In this paper, we shift our attention away from the
socio-material infrastructures directly implicated in market
exchange and explore their more opaque counterparts that turn
markets into knowledge objects. Our aim is to understand
how knowledge-based infrastructures that are physically
and temporally distantiated from market exchanges, con-
struct knowledge that is “…inscribed in and constitutive of
economic objects as relevant to the practical activities of
economic agents” (Knorr-Cetina & Preda, 2001: 31). We
examine how these knowledge-based infrastructures become
markets in their own right, producing and selling informa-
tion, knowledge and expert advice to downstream markets,
involving both the private and public sectors.
We use the example of market research services to show
how infrastructural relations between these services and
their client markets were established and developed, and how
they came to underpin and sustain a wide range of practices
beyond markets. Put differently, we ask: what underpinned
the emergence of market research professional services and
how did market research establish itself as a wide-ranging
knowledge infrastructure in its own right?
We make three conceptual contributions to the litera-
ture on market infrastructures. First, we show that extant
knowledge-based infrastructures are drawn on through a
range of activities necessary to enroll, assemble and repur-
pose socio-material structures to enable and sustain the
construction of a new market. Secondly, the emergence of
infrastructural relations between different markets connects
multiple systems of provision and demand, leading to an
increasingly valuable knowledge infrastructure. Finally, the
notion of infrastructural relations highlights how organized
practices in one market are often heavily reliant on connec-
tions to other markets, including upstream markets but also
knowledge-based infrastructures such as market research.
The paper is structured as follows: first, we provide a
brief overview of the literature on market infrastructures.
We then draw on historical accounts of the emergence of
market research services to illustrate how they established
an infrastructural relation to its downstream markets. Finally,
we draw lessons from this example and make an argument
as to why an infrastructural lens helps us understand market
innovation and change.
Conceptualizing market infrastructures
In this section, we start by providing a brief review of the lit-
erature on infrastructures that has emerged over the last two
decades (see e.g. Misa etal., 2003; Harvey etal., 2016; Shove
& Trentmann, 2018; Bowker etal., 2019) before we move on
to market infrastructures. The term infrastructure, as Bowker
etal. (2010: 97) remind us, “…evokes vast sets of collective
equipment necessary to human activities, such as buildings,
roads, bridges, rail tracks, channels, ports, and communica-
tions networks. Beyond bricks, mortar, pipes or wires, infra-
structure also encompasses more abstract entities, such as
protocols (human and computer), standards, and memory.”
Larkin (2013) suggests infrastructures are visible and
palpable (e.g. a computer cable plugged into a data point),
as well as invisible and difficult to apprehend (e.g. a data
point is connected to a larger system, comprising power and
data networks, cloud services). These different layers are
mobilized to enable a computer to work as part of a larger
system. What constitutes the relevant infrastructure at any
one moment, depends on the standpoint we choose (e.g. the
user, the software specialist, the communications engineer).
Thus, what constitutes an infrastructure is a categorizing act,
cutting up a network by privileging a particular standpoint.
As Star and Ruhleder (1996: 113) remind us, “…infrastruc-
ture is a relational concept. It becomes an infrastructure only
in relation to organized practices.” Thus, rather than asking
what an infrastructure is, we should ask when and how some-
thing stands in an infrastructural relation to a particular set
of practices (Cass etal., 2018).
An infrastructure thus exists when it underpins organ-
ized practices. It is always in a dynamic relation with those
practices as well as other infrastructures. Secondly, infra-
structures are scripted with political, corporate, regulatory,
and social expectations about their use, who benefits from
their use, who organizes and pays for their maintenance and
so on. Finally, although infrastructures are often portrayed as
invisible or silent, they invite reflexivity regarding the multi-
ple and diverse uses they can be put to. As Kornberger etal
(2017) suggest, infrastructures are generative; they enable
the creation of new elements and connections rather than just
link up pre-existing and stable elements.
The notion of market infrastructures owes an intellectual
debt to this literature. The notion was first invoked by business
historians who associate the emergence of formal markets
with “…a concentration of transactions at a specific location,
such as a marketplace, where infrastructure (e.g., a market hall
and surrounding shops, inns, and taverns for refreshment) is
provided” (Casson & Lee, 2011: 14). These infrastructures
delimited market spaces where authorities enforced the stand-
ardization of weights and measures, adjudicated on disputes,
and promoted the transparency and fairness of exchanges.

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The institutional literature follows in the same vein, albeit
with an emphasis on the socio-cognitive aspect of infra-
structures. As a recent example, Lee etal. (2018) conceive
markets as arrangements that enable structured exchanges
and routinization requires agreements on items such as
product categories, norms, standards, measures, means
of payment and so on. It is these conventions that enable
regular exchanges, stabilize expectations, enable long term
investments and ward off uncertainty. Product categories,
for example, play an infrastructural role in generating agree-
ments that enable valuations, comparisons amongst peers
and help market actors to position their offerings (cf. Anand
& Peterson, 2000; Durand & Khaire, 2017; Kennedy, 2005;
Navis & Glynn, 2010; Negro etal., 2010; Rosa etal., 1999).
Zhao (2005: 192) went as far as suggesting that classifica-
tions are the “…invisible infrastructure and the cognitive
basis of the social order.”
Categories vary in terms of their form, formalization,
and consequences (Schneiberg & Berk, 2010). They exist
in trade directories, specialist publications, government sta-
tistics, consumer guides, ranking systems and in the way
retail stores configure their space and displays (Azimont &
Araujo, 2007). Thévenot (1984, 2009, 2015) coined the term
‘investment in form’ to denote the distributed and socio-
material character of classifications. Forms are inscribed
in statistics, models, standards, and tools, and acquire an
infrastructural character when they span a wide range of
organizations and markets.
Bowker (2019: 2) brings together a range of disparate ele-
ments under the umbrella of thinking infrastructures that “…
configure entities (through tracing, tagging); organize knowl-
edge (through search engines); sort things out (through rank-
ings and ratings); govern markets (through calculative prac-
tices, including algorithms) and configure preferences (through
valuations such as recommender systems).” Kjellberg etal.
(2019) in their history of the emergence of barcode scanning in
retailing, emphasize the material side of socio-material infra-
structures. They define a market infrastructure as a “…mate-
rially heterogeneous arrangement that ‘silently’ supports and
structures the consummation of market exchanges” (Kjellberg
etal., 2019: 209). In their study, infrastructures emerge when
different modules come together (e.g. standards, barcode scan-
ners and printers) to form a large-scale system that gradually
comes to underpin a wide range of retailing practices.
Mellet and Beauvisage (2020) propose a novel reading
of market infrastructures as knowledge-based, fulfilling
three functions. First, they facilitate the production and
circulation of market information. Secondly, they are valu-
ation and capitalization infrastructures. They help qualify
and establish commensuration between goods, enable the
attribution of prices and so on. Finally, they fulfil a coor-
dination function, facilitating the organization of market
encounters.
We extend this view of knowledge-based infrastructures
to what Knorr-Cetina and Preda (2001: 31) called the epis-
temization of economic transactions, or the way transac-
tions “…rely on and are interstitched with multiple analyses
processes and systems in a variety of ways.” The work in
epistemizing transactions involves the production of distanti-
ated representations of economic realities involving a range
of expertise and related occupations such as securities and
industry analysts, management consultants, market research-
ers and so on. The purpose of this work is to produce action-
able knowledge, to intervene in the construction of market
objects and practices and do so as a profit-making business
(Diaz Ruiz & Holmlund, 2017).
In short, we propose to look at these knowledge-based
activities or representational practices as infrastructural to
exchange practices (Kjellberg & Helgesson, 2007). In doing
so, we heed the call for a sociology of business knowledge,
to examine the proliferation of professional services focused
on producing and selling business knowledge (Pollock &
Williams, 2016). Our argument is that these professional ser-
vices can be best understood as standing in an infrastructural
relation with downstream client markets.
The notion of knowledge infrastructures has been
deployed in the techno-scientific world. Edwards (2010: 17)
defines knowledge infrastructures as “…robust networks of
people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and
maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural
worlds.” Similarly, Bowker (2016: 391) sees knowledge
infrastructures as “… the network of institutions, people,
buildings, and information resources which enable us to
turn observation and contemplation of the world into a
standardized set of knowledge objects: journal articles and
monographs.”
Both these definitions emphasize that knowledge sys-
tems are based on distributed expertise, shared norms, and
practices. We suggest this notion is just as relevant to the
social sciences even though the epistemic status of knowl-
edge objects is different than those found in techno-science
(Camic etal., 2011). Our knowledge of the economy, for
example, depends on the production of statistics on gross
domestic products, inflation, the status of labor markets and
so on.
Our understanding of markets and business more gener-
ally, depends on knowledge infrastructures collecting, ana-
lyzing, and trading information, involving both private and
public institutions. They relate to what Scott (1998) called
the construction of sight through distantiated observation,
which underpinned the ability of the state to construct
instruments to represent and intervene in nature and society.
This conceptualization of market infrastructures marks a sig-
nificant departure from the functional explanation of market
infrastructures as existing to resolve collective action prob-
lems (Lee etal., 2018). Rather, it engenders a constructivist

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explanation that assumes market actors construct knowledge,
in relation to others in the market, and in other market sys-
tems, and incorporate this into their own knowledge schemas
and representations of markets and market action.
In the remainder of this paper, we are concerned with
the relation between markets and knowledge-based infra-
structures. Our overarching research question—how does a
knowledge infrastructure lens generate new insights into how
organized market practices emerge, evolve, are mediated,
and enable sustained market action?—is explored using
illustrations from the history of market research services.
Market research asaknowledge
infrastructure
In a seminal paper on the economics of information Stigler
(1961) ponders on the self-evident value of information as
an economic resource. As he laments, information “…occu-
pies a slum dwelling in the town of economics. Mostly it
is ignored: the best technology is assumed to be known:
the relation of commodities to consumer preferences is a
datum” (ibid: 213). Information-producing industries such as
advertising or market research, largely absent in the edifice
of neoclassical economics, are treated in the economics of
information as institutions that help overcome information
asymmetries.
For Berghoff etal. (2012), incomplete and imperfect
information is a characteristic of real, operating markets.
Marketing is concerned with the provision of information
goods, that overcome the asymmetries identified by informa-
tion economists. In particular, the construction of demand
functions requires the collection, analysis, and translation of
market information into a form that producers can interpret
and act upon. Fitzgerald (1995: 344) sees this as an essen-
tial step for producers to “…cater and respond to markets
rather than the preconceptions of entrepreneurs, managers
and production experts”. The production of market informa-
tion calls for a “…professional, even scientific expertise,
as well as special instruments and institutions” (Berghoff
etal., 2012: 2).
Market research emerged as a hybrid set of practices,
closely tied to the development of corporate marketing
practices whilst borrowing, extending, and refining methods,
tools and instruments emanating from the social sciences
(Nilsson & Helgesson, 2015). Corporate marketing practices
as depicted in marketing management manuals presuppose
the existence of a market research infrastructure. Indeed,
the role of a market research infrastructure is seldom men-
tioned except where conventional marketing practices cannot
be implemented due to the absence or shortcomings of that
infrastructure (cf. Craig & Douglas, 2001; Jain, 1989; Young
& Javalgi, 2007).
Our purpose in the following sections is to examine
selected features of the history of market research to pro-
duce an argument about the role of market research as a
knowledge-based infrastructure. Our approach follows in
the footsteps of Power’s (2015) analysis of infrastructures,
focusing on the accretion of activities and the formation of
knowledge objects, reaching back into the history of their
connections with related infrastructures.
To develop and illustrate our argument, we draw on his-
torical texts as well as recent scholarly works on the devel-
opment of market research (e.g. Igo, 2007; McDonald &
King, 1996; Schwarzkopf, 2016; Stewart, 2009). For the
sake of brevity, we restrict the scope of our illustrations from
the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, and to
developments in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The emergence ofmarket research
asaknowledge‑based infrastructure
As Schwarzkopf (2016) suggests, teleological accounts of
the emergence of market research have been driven by suc-
cess stories based on the application of scientific expertise
to produce market information. Historians usually take a
longer view on how social scientific knowledge migrated
downstream to applied domains such as market research.
Original social science developments were driven by con-
cerns such as urbanization and poverty as well as the emer-
gence of the modern state, with its efforts to chart territo-
ries and population and render them legible (Scott, 1998;
Wagner, 2003). Raphael (2012) suggests that embedding the
social sciences in Western societies took place through four
routes: the emergence of experts as the protagonists of social
science programs; the clients and users of social science
knowledge; the biography of different tools and techniques
such as sampling, polling, interviewing, or classifying; and
the history of the institutions that promoted the diffusion of
social science knowledge in society.
The emergence of applied social sciences benefited
greatly from these early developments. As Schwarzkopf
(2016) notes, basic techniques such as sampling techniques,
surveys and focus groups, as well as statistical techniques
found their way to market research via the work of social
reformers and academics. In the UK, the work of Arthur
Bowley, a Professor of Economic Statistics at the Lon-
don School of Economics (LSE), on sampling, followed in
the wake of studies promoted by social reformers such as
Charles Booth and Seebhom Rowntree. As Osborne and
Rose (1999) noted, Bowley may not have been a pioneer
in developing representative sampling, but he was certainly
one of its most vocal and effective advocates. The advan-
tages of representative samples were obvious: “Because of
their scale, samples allowed for the possibility of a degree of
detail and exactitude that was not previously imaginable in

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social scientific research; they made for measurement rather
than mere surveillance” (Osborne & Rose, 1999: 384).
A similar pattern occurred in the United States where
studies of urban slums and working conditions in the oil
industry involved social scientists such as Robert Staughton
Lynd and Helen Merrel Lynd. Their 1929 Middletown study
proved seminal to the development of opinion and market
research (Igo, 2006, 2007). The Middletown study left a
strong impression on a Vienna-based group congregated
around Paul Lazarsfeld to whom Robert Staughton Lynd
became a mentor when Lazarsfeld moved to the US in 1933
(Pooley, 2015). Lazarsfeld arrived in the US armed with two
important qualifications: experience in the management of
research institutes and an impressive set of quantitative data
analysis skills (Fleck, 1998).
Lazarsfeld’s previous market studies in Vienna were con-
sidered early marketing classics (Fullerton, 1990). Once in
the United States, it did not take him long to make a mark
in the academic marketing community as well as social
research at the Columbia University Institute of Applied
Research (Schwarzkopf, 2016). Of particular relevance to
market research were two seminal papers that Lazarsfeld
(1935, 1937) published in the National Marketing Review
and its successor, the Journal of Marketing addressing sur-
vey questionnaire design.
Our argument is that the notion of a knowledge-based
infrastructure helps us describe the connections with extant
infrastructures that underpinned research practices that
later became central to the formation of a market for market
research services. It is to this task we now turn.
Infrastructuring thebusiness ofmarket research
The migration of academics into market research start-
ups took place in Britain, the US and further afield
(Schwarzkopf, 2016). Examples of academics leaving
their posts for business include George Gallup and Louis
Weld, who went on to offer research services through
the opinion polling firm Gallup Robinson Inc. and the
advertising agency McCann Erickson.
Many others made indirect contributions through a com-
bination of academic, government and institutional services.
Frederick Stephan, Professor of Social Statistics at Prince-
ton, is a case in point. His academic career was interrupted
by government service, including working as a consultant to
the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission,
and the US Air Force’s Evaluation Board during World War
II, and the Committee to Evaluate Employment and Unem-
ployment Statistics during the Kennedy administration (New
York Times obituary 7th August 1971; Deming, 1971). In
between his academic career and government service, Ste-
phan was also a chair of the American Statistical Association
and the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
The breadth of Stephan’s (1941, 1948, 1957)contributions
can be gauged by articles on sampling procedures and surveys
in the Journal of the American Statistical Association (1948),
the Journal of Marketing (1941) and Public Opinion Quar-
terly (1957). Individuals such as Stephan were notable not just
for their original contributions to develop methods and tools,
but for their ability to straddle and connect different discipli-
nary and professional fields. Their expertise was highly sought
after for commercial as well as public policy purposes.
Another notable case of mixing business and scientific
expertise is that of the behaviorist J.B. Watson and the
advertising agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT). After his exit
from academia in 1920, Watson found employment at JWT.
His academic credentials and breed of psychology based on
prediction and control, resonated with the concerns of the
business community at the time as well as the philosophy of
JWT’s leader, Stanley Resor (Kreshel, 1990).
JWT was an unusual agency and its philosophy closely
followed Stanley Resor’s quest for professional credibility
and a scientific approach to advertising. Resor had estab-
lished in 1912 his T-Square five basic questions that needed
an answer prior to developing an advertising campaign and
this approach guided the approach of the agency from 1919
to 1967. The five questions were: (1) What are we selling?
(2) To whom are we selling? (3) Where are we selling? (4)
When are we selling? and (5) How are we selling? (Nixon,
2013; Schwarzkopf, 2016; West, 1987). Watson’s contribu-
tions to the practice of advertising are hard to fathom but
there is little doubt that Resor saw his role in JWT as fitting
with a culture that promoted ‘science at the service of busi-
ness’ and ‘professionalism’ (Kreshel, 1990).
This approach produced a framework to produce adver-
tising copy as well an insatiable appetite for data to answer
the five basic questions. JWT’s New York Office established
a Market Research Department in 1916 and by 1919, felt
the need to establish a Planning and Statistical Investiga-
tion Department. The London office seems to have followed
the American lead in placing its faith in the value of mar-
ket research. In 1924 a promotional brochure for the Lon-
don office stated that “…haphazard publicity cannot stand
against carefully planned and executed advertising based on
market facts accurately compiled” (West, 1987: 204).
As business expanded in the London office in the late
1920s and early 1930s, the proportion of British staff had
increased, even though Americans dominated the sen-
ior posts. Douglas Saunders was the first British director
appointed in 1929 (West, 1987). In 1933, JWT set up a sepa-
rate market research organization. The main instigator of this
move was John Rodgers who had joined the agency in 1931.
The name British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) was
designed to get away from the American sounding JWT and
to sound British, authoritative, or even academic (Downham,
1995).

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The first Board of BMRB included three directors, two
of whom, John Rodgers and Bedford Attwood, became cen-
tral figures in subsequent developments. Rodgers eventu-
ally became Chairman in 1935 and retained that position
until 1955. Attwood was another graduate of the London
School of Economics and an accomplished statistician. He
was on the Board of BMRB until 1944 and in 1947 founded
another research company, Attwood Statistics (Downham,
1995). By the 1950s, BMRB employed over 150 people
including an array of research executives with degrees in
social science subjects and statistics, making use of official
statistics as well as data produced by the agency (Nixon,
2013).
The development of market research also benefited from
what Igo (2006) called the commingling of marketing with
various forms of opinion research. Two central figures in
American opinion research, George Gallup and Elmo Roper,
arrived at the area via a business route and considered them-
selves marketing consultants as much as pollsters (Igo, 2006,
2007). Opinion research was a business that marketed its
services to clients such as newspapers. The joining up of
marketing and opinion research was evident in the way these
firms conducted their business, mixing the same methods,
assistants and even respondents in the same operation. Mar-
ket research and opinion surveys were regarded by agencies
and some of their clients as effectively indistinguishable
(Igo, 2006).
In Britain, the cross-over between market and opinion
research can be traced back to a social research project called
Mass Observation, founded in 1937 (Moran, 2008). The
multidisciplinary and idiosyncratic character of this project
meant it was soon competing as well as collaborating with
market research and opinion polling firms. Founding fig-
ures of the Market Research Society had strong connections
to advertising, market, and opinion research firms. Moran
(2008) cites the example of Mark Abrams as an example of
the intersection of market and opinion research in the post
war period. Abrams’ career included stints at the advertis-
ing agency London Press Exchange prior to World War II,
followed by survey work during wartime, and the founding
of Research Services Limited, a firm that combined market,
opinion, and political work.
In short, an infrastructural analysis reveals how a mar-
ket for market research services was formed by its rela-
tions to knowledge infrastructures operating in other mar-
ket (e.g. firms buying advertising services, polling, and
opinion services) and non-market (academia, government)
domains. This opening-up of new market opportunities
through extended infrastructural relations, connecting mul-
tiple systems of provision and demand, render visible how
fragmented knowledge infrastructures became increasingly
related and valuable to a range of client markets.
Mediating knowledge infrastructures andmarket
infrastructuring
An infrastructural lens is also helpful to trace the links
between the growth state-making activities, evident from
the late nineteenth century onwards, and the emergence of
market research. As Asad (1994) and Scott (1998) noted,
state-making involved devising administrative techniques to
deal with changing populations and their needs (e.g. public
health, poverty, education). Social surveys and statistics thus
became integral to the representation of different facets of
socio-economic life and the ability of nation-states to gov-
ern themselves as autonomous political entities (Desrosières,
2002). Scott (1998) suggests that the state’s ability to see
depends on forms of classification and calculation infra-
structures that bring aspects of social reality into light, mak-
ing them legible and susceptible to measurement.
The early development of markets relied heavily on the
classification drive that characterized state-making in this
period. As Asad (1994) suggests, three interrelated develop-
ments internal and external to state practices, were impor-
tant in advancing statistical representations: social security
legislation, consumer goods markets, and market and poll-
ing research. All these developments produced a knowledge
infrastructure fit for representing and intervening in a wide
range of domains.
Early developments of market research helped to promote
as well as benefited from these developments. In the US,
Lockley (1950) mentions the early role of the Department
of Commerce in supplying market information to businesses
and lays the groundwork for studies such as distribution sur-
veys and distribution cost analysis. As Lockley (1950: 736)
acknowledged: “With the collection of economic and market
data on a large scale by the government, market research
flourished.”
Stapleford’s (2007) study of Consumer Expenditure by
New Deal agencies in the 1930s shows how businesspeople
became involved in the process and the outcome favored
market researchers more than the economic planning aims of
the New Deal. Whereas the aim of the survey was to forecast
aggregate demand, market researchers seized upon a trove of
information on income distribution and demand in specific
regions. Alderson (1940: 1) summarized the rewards of the
Consumer Expenditure Survey as follows:
Where does the market analyst go for his knowledge
of consumer markets? Often, he must go to consum-
ers, or at least to a sample group of them, for such
information as they are willing to give about their
incomes and their habits of spending and saving.
Fortunate is he, indeed, when a public agency such
as a branch of the Federal Government undertakes
to gather such information for him on a more com-

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prehensive scale than most marketing organizations
could afford to do it for themselves.
The state did not just sponsor large-scale studies that
were of direct interest to marketing practices. They were
also active in undertaking market research on their own or
in cooperation with others. Engle (1940), who had moved
from President of the American Marketing Association
in 1939 to Assistant Director of the Bureau of Domestic
and Foreign Commerce at the time of publication, pub-
lished a survey of commissioned market research projects
between 1935 and 1939. Of the 676 projects surveyed,
University agencies undertook 57% of the projects, gov-
ernment agencies 30%, with business firms accounting for
11%. Another 2.5% of projects involved University and
government agencies.
Schwarzkopf (2012) paints a similar picture for Britain.
Benefiting from the crossover of tools such as surveys and
statistics, market researchers became active in both com-
mercial and government-sponsored activities. As in the US,
market researchers benefited from Social Surveys and run-
ning surveys on food consumption and expenditure. From
1941, the Social Survey unit run by Louis Moss, with prior
associations to polling and public opinion agencies, relied
on methods such as random sampling, survey question-
naires and household panels. All these methods became
routinely utilized by commercial market research agencies.
Indeed, Social Survey work was regularly outsourced to
prominent market research and advertising agencies.
The Market Research Society founded in 1946 by
twenty-three individuals, mostly with connections to the
London School of Economics, with strong representation
from governmental and public organizations (McDonald &
King, 1996; Moran, 2008). Schwarzkopf (2012: 187) con-
cludes that: “Looking at the case of pre-war and wartime
surveys, it is abundantly clear that market and consumer
research was not a birth child of the marketplace alone, but
instead emerged as a set of instruments within the public
sector and was often driven by governmental departments.”
In sum, an examination of infrastructural relations
reveals how organized practices in one domain relied on
and fed into connections to other domains. In particular,
the state played a range of roles that fostered the emer-
gence of market research as a professional service busi-
ness. It played a background role in providing the official
statistics and nurturing the expertise that underpinned
market research. It also came into the foreground as a
major client of market research services and a supporter
of its professionalization and regulation. Lastly, an infra-
structural lens recognizes the circuits of learning at play
across multiple infrastructures, with changes in one infra-
structure feeding back and affecting others in a chain of
re-actions and re-forms.
Market infrastructuring
In the above account of the early history of market research,
and its relations with opinion and political surveys, we
presented a selection of illustrations to show how an infra-
structural lens helps reveal the complex genealogy of mar-
ket research services. We have shown how market research-
ers drew on extant infrastructures from non-market (social
sciences, academia, government) as well market domains
(opinion and polling service markets) to establish the area
as a substrate to a wide range of practices. The trajectory we
portrayed is neither teleological nor functionalist. Rather,
our narrative shows how a multiplicity of activities, exper-
tise and materials at hand were brought together to build
market research services as a knowledge-based market
infrastructure.
The notion of expertise and materials at hand is an impor-
tant one for those seeking to understand and intervene in
markets (Mason & Araujo, 2021). What is at hand, in our
market research illustration, is knowledge of methods, tools
and techniques. This knowledge is held together and pro-
gressed by infrastructures. Knowledge infrastructures are
important because, as Edwards (2010: 19) explains: “With-
out the infrastructure …knowledge can decay or even disap-
pear. Build up a knowledge infrastructure, maintain it well,
and you get stable, reliable, widely shared understanding.”
Knowledge infrastructures ensure that various forms of
knowledge and knowing are at hand for service providers
and their clients across a wide range of markets. We rep-
resent these infrastructural relations in Fig.1 and concep-
tualize market infrastructuring as the work of bringing to
hand the assemblages of expertise and materials to generate
innovative market infrastructures that develop and sustain
market exchanges downstream.
We make three key observations to help us better under-
stand what it means to do market infrastructuring work:
O1 A range of activities are necessary to enroll, assemble,
and build a knowledge-based infrastructure that enables
and sustains a market for professional services such as
market research.
The illustrations we presented earlier shed light on the
work done by individuals and their organizations to enroll
the infrastructures of social science, academia, and govern-
ment, as well as produce, make use of and validate research prac-
tices and instruments, survey instruments, questionnaires,
analytical and statistical techniques. These practices trav-
elled from universities through the experts that carried them
and the start-up agencies they founded, or helped to found,
into diverse domains such as corporations, government
departments, public bodies, research institutes and polling
organizations.

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When clients framed research problems, key actors
worked to address them, mobilizing different aspects of
extant knowledge infrastructures. For example, when market
research agencies struggled to gain the trust of a suspicious
public in post-war Britain, the UK Market Research Society
took upon itself the task of promoting market research as
both scientific and ethical through activities such as drawing
up a code of practice, sponsoring publications about mar-
ket research, and acting as a representative of the emerging
profession (Moran, 2008). Prominent industry figures and
founder members of the society appeared in the national
press extolling the democratic value and credentials of
market research and opinion surveys. Similarly, in the US,
pioneers such as George Gallup and Elmer Roper busily pro-
moted opinion research as representing the people’s voice in
the corridors of power, and market research as the means to
restore the link between manufacturers and consumers in a
mass market era (Igo, 2006).
Our second observation is:
O2 Infrastructural relations between different markets con-
nect multiple systems of provision and demand lead-
ing to increasingly valuable but fragmented knowledge
infrastructures.
This observation has wide-ranging implications for
understanding market infrastructuring. The emerging mar-
ket research conventions were the result of investments of
boundary spanning individuals such as JB Watson, Paul
Lazarsfeld and Fredrick Stephan in the US, or Arthur
Bowley in the UK, made possible because they crossed
from academia to government and the private sector, from
social and opinion survey research to market and political
research. These norms circulated and were further devel-
oped through professional associations (Fligstein, 2001).
These individuals acted as what Abbott (2005) called
hinges, enabling productive alliances between individu-
als located in different socio-professional ecologies. These
hinges were critical to market infrastructuring work, with
felicitous consequences for the emergence of market
research services.
Our final observation is:
O3 Infrastructural relations show how organized practices
in one market rely on connections to other markets and
to non-market domains.
This suggests that the work done to build knowledge
infrastructures to represent populations and territories for
the state played an important role in the early development
of market research and created a web of interdependencies
that persists to this day. A recent example from the UK
provides an apt illustration. A response by the UK Mar-
ket Research Society (MRS) Census & Geodemographics
Group to the wide-ranging consultation about the UK 2021
Census stated:
Questions included in this topic were used in the 2011
Census to derive Approximate Social Grade, and we
will continue to need this classification on the 2021
Census. Social Grade is the primary social classifica-
tion used in Advertising, Market Research and Media
Fig. 1 Market infrastructuring: the work of selecting and assembling aspects from extant knowledge infrastructures to construct and sustain a
market

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Research; literally millions of pounds of advertising
expenditures are allocated based on it. Approximate
Social Grade from the census is the only source of
social grade profiles for small areas.
If the emergence of market research relied on state-making,
the dawn of digital economies partially reversed this relation,
with states profiting from the vast amounts of market data
collected, analyzed, packaged, and sold by private firms. As
Scott (1998) remarked, seeing like a state relied on simpli-
fications, control, and predictability. Conventional market
research relies on similar premises: extract individual con-
sumer insights from data about their preferences and motiva-
tions; subdivide them into segments; choose which segments
to target; design marketing mixes to reach the selected targets
(Darmody & Zwick, 2020).
By contrast, digital economies work with a multitude of
footprints across a variety of media (e.g. social media plat-
forms, websites, payment systems, geolocation data) rather
than data about whole individuals. As Cluley and Brown
(2015: 138) put it: “Markets are, as a result, not broken up
into individual consumers but increasingly constructed out
of components extracted from anonymous and aggregated
consumer data”.
The power of large companies of the digital age such as
Google, Amazon or Facebook, rests on a different knowl-
edge infrastructure, based on expertise such as search and
data analytics which allowed them to carve strong positions
in the digital advertising market (Lammi & Pantzar, 2019;
Mellet & Beauvisage, 2020). The skills that underpin this
infrastructure were primarily developed for commercial mar-
kets but have quickly spread to the public sector. We also
witness the widespread mashing of data sets culled from
both market and public sector sources (e.g. credit
scoring, health data) to impinge upon decision-making in
the public sector.
Put differently, in the digital age states have increasingly
learned how to see like markets (Fourcade & Healy, 2017).
The citizen-consumer of the twentieth century has been
gradually replaced by a data citizenship with the citizen-
consumer becoming a data producer as well as a source of
value creation for private and public gain (Lammi & Pantzar,
2019).
One example of data citizenship is citizen scoring in the
UK defined as “…typical practices of data analytics in pub-
lic services to do with the categorization and segmentation,
and sometimes rating and ranking, of populations according
to a variety of interoperable data sets, with the goal of allo-
cating resources and services accordingly” (Dencik etal.,
2019: 3). Citizen scoring is thus built on the same principles
that led consumer credit scoring to become the information
infrastructure for a range of consumer credit and lending
markets in the US and elsewhere (Poon, 2009). A survey
of UK public sector applications uncovered a wide range of
uses, involving public services (e.g. policing, social care)
and local government authorities. Some of these applica-
tions were based on aggregate judgments to identify trends
(e.g. crime maps). Others rely on identifying or ranking
types of risks (e.g. child welfare) for specific populations
or individuals. In short, market infrastructuring work estab-
lishes figure-ground relations that tend to evolve over time
depending on how methods, skills, techniques, and resources
come together in configurations that are susceptible to be
overturned by changes in these elements or their linkages.
Conclusions
This paper has used the notion of knowledge-based infra-
structures as a means of understanding how market practices
have turned into knowledge objects or become epistemized,
to revisit Knorr-Cetina and Preda’s (2001) terminology.
Using market research services as an example, we sought to
illustrate how the construction of sight in states and markets
share a common ancestry and have had an ever-evolving
relation of mutual dependence. Our reading of infrastruc-
tures suggests market innovations may depend on the abili-
ties of expert actors to identify, mobilize, and draw on extant
infrastructures in pursuit of their own ends by connecting
them to extant market infrastructures.
Our illustrative example “…renders visible, knowable and
thinkable complex patterns of human interaction in and out
of the market, in feedback loops of learning, reformatting,
and redoing (Bowker etal., 2019: 1). Methodologies, tools,
and techniques are built, adopted, or modified, marketing
practices transformed and ways of representing markets
revised. While our illustrations do not claim to be system-
atic, we suggest they reveal the potential for an infrastructure
lens to uncover socio-material arrangements that underpin
representational market practices.
Our argument can be summarized in three points: (1) a
range of activities are necessary to enroll, assemble and
repurpose social-material structures to enable and sustain
the construction of markets; (2) the emergence of infrastruc-
tural relations between different markets connects multiple
systems of provision and demand leading to an increasingly
valuable knowledge infrastructure; and (3) the notion of
infrastructural relations highlights how organized practices
in one market are often heavily reliant on connections to
other markets, including upstream markets but also knowl-
edge-based infrastructures such as market research.
We extract four implications from our arguments. First,
an infrastructure lens directs the researcher’s attention to the
actions, expertise and materials at hand; an exploration of how
these materials come to hand, are brought together by dispa-
rate and seemingly unrelated expert agencies. Our illustrative

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1 3
example shows that this ‘coming to hand’ is sometimes pur-
posive and sometimes accidental, producing and performing
new versions of markets. This happens when expert individu-
als operating at the boundaries of markets forge novel connec-
tions to open up new professional and business opportunities.
These, in turn, may serve as infrastructures for other markets,
connecting to extant institutionalized practices as well as cre-
ating new ones (see Kjellberg etal., 2019).
To date, the notion of knowledge infrastructures has
been largely neglected as a foundation for representing and
intervening in markets. We suggest that expertise, as a key
element in the cannon of infrastructure studies, offers a valu-
able domain to inquire into the emergence of new markets
as well as the role of market infrastructures in spawning
market innovations.
Second, the conceptualization of markets as standing in
an infrastructural relation to other markets focuses attention
on how infrastructures underpin multiple markets, providing
a useful vocabulary to describe how systems of provision
and demand are linked, and how particular markets become
connected through these relations. To date, the literature has
focused on understanding the emergence of a single market
(cf. Palo etal., 2020) or the overlaps that emerge between
adjacent markets (cf. Kjellberg & Olson, 2017; Pflueger
etal., 2019) but have seldom considered how infrastructures
grow to support organized practices across multiple markets.
Thirdly, an infrastructural lens makes visible seemingly
unrelated issues such as the regulation of markets based on
the balance between public and corporate interests, policy
interventions in markets and the provision of public goods.
A few recent studies on how health policies influence the
development of healthcare markets (cf. Mason & Araujo,
2021), or how media systems play a role in food markets
(cf. Hopkinson, 2017), made inroads in this domain, but
few studies have attempted to capture the multiple systems
that construct and perform markets. An infrastructure lens
provides a theoretical vocabulary to explore this theme and
encourages research that examines how multiple markets are
connected by related infrastructures.
Finally, the notion of knowledge infrastructures holds
promise to study what constitutes marketing expertise, how
it is organized, bought and sold as a professional service.
Studies such as Diaz Ruiz (2013), Diaz Ruiz and Holmlund
(2017), Nilsson (2019, 2021) Jacobi etal (2015) and Hafezieh
(2019) on market research, advertising and digital marketing
services provide examples of how different aspects of market-
ing expertise are constructed and enacted in provider–client
relationships. These studies provide useful templates to exam-
ine the epistemological status of marketing expertise but also
how that expertise stands in an infrastructural relation with
marketing practices cutting across a variety of sectors, both
private and public.
In sum, we call for studies that make use of the concep-
tual tools developed and discussed by infrastructure schol-
ars. We hope that these insights inspire others to pursue
empirical work, exploring the opportunities to see market
innovation more broadly through the prism of what we have
called market infrastructuring.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the invalu-
abe contributions of the Guest Editors and the anonymous reviewers
to the development of this paper. Their comments and observations
throughout the review process were always insightful and constructive.
We are deeply grateful.
Declarations
Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that they have no
conflict of interest.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-
bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source,
provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes
were made. The images or other third party material in this article are
included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated
otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in
the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not
permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will
need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a
copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.
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