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market is an institution of ex post coordination for more than one competing unit of
commerce whose plans are particularistic only ab initio. For all commodities, there is
a market when at first staccato supplies and demands are no longer technically
fragmentary so that there is a formal continuum of exchanges and prices while the
former is always voluntary. However, markets are not spontaneous structures since
informal economies may always inveigle certain competitors out of a strict nihil
obstat to the terms of an otherwise formal market. The real extent of the market is
therefore not infinite. In fact power relations are an integral part of the very design of
markets.
Secondly, there is in fact a catalogue of configurations of markets as opposed to the
Marshallian/Walrasian ideal of a market so far as a bevy of economic units and the
particular pattern of relations within that modality of networking contrast with other
networks of competitors and the governance models for the terms of competition
elsewhere. A market can in fact be a ‘structure of roles with a differentiated niche for
each firm’(Boyer 1997a:67). Moreover, price competition cannot be the solitary
mechanism for the stagnant patterns of a market configuration since certain market
failures incessantly commove each market configuration. ‘Thus, a large variety of
markets are structurally embedded into a series of constraints’(ibid.). Research on
industrial economics and microeconomic theories of technical change have in fact
excogitated many forms of market configuration and/or forms of competition from
partial or otherwise monopoly to cartels to oligopoly and partial or otherwise
monopsony etc. to yet still other categories with contrasting degrees of competition.
Here Boyer would argue that not only market is a socially instituted variable but also
the exact patterns of its institutionalisation would have a definitive purchase on the
macroeconomic variables(eg. welfare, growth etc.) and ultimately on the very mode of
its ‘functioning’(1996a:101).
Not all General Equilibrium Theories are Walrasian(De Vroey). Although Walras has
been the cum laude theorist of general equilibrium, it is those tentative understandings
of the contrasts between his theory and Marshall’s method for partial equilibrium
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