How Markets Form: Intermediation in the UK Social Investment Market

Questions about market formation have engaged economic sociologists and organization theorists for decades. Research so far has shown that, rather than studying how supply meets demand, we need to look at networks, culture, and power relations if we want to understand how markets are shaped. In this research project I conduct a field ethnography of the social investment market in the UK, focused on the period from 2000 to 2014, in order to ground these insights around market formation in a context that is full of experimentation, ambiguity, and contestation. I find three overall processes – connecting actors, lobbying, and creating a discourse – that are central to the formation of this nascent market, each with different mechanisms, and I link these findings to a new perspective on theories of intermediation.