The social construction of “green” markets: environmentalism and the dynamics of economic fields

Abstract

The paper discusses how specific economic sociology approaches may contribute to understanding the transformations in the economic realm, which resulted from the rise of environmental criticisms. Over the past decades, the rise of environmental forms of justification has transformed the dynamics of specific markets. Assuming that both, markets and the relation between society and nature, as cultural, political and historical constructions, the contributions from the institutional theory, pragmatic sociology of critique and field approaches are combined to account for the changes on markets due to the incorporation of environmental criticism. Some limits and possibilities of these unfolding transformations are discussed by assessing empirical studies on the social construction of green markets.