Symposium on ‘Do ethnographers make markets?’

This special issue has been a truly collective inquiry. It began with a simple intuition: the fact that social researchers, who normally study how practitioners make markets, are invited to collaborate in market interventions is something worth thinking about. Those who contributed with their articles generously agreed to work with this premise (Björklund Larsen Citation2023; Geiger and Gross Citation2022; Onto and Fernandes Citation2025; Ossandón and Pallesen Citation2025; Våland, Pallesen, and Møller Citation2024). While in their work, they usually report on what they find about those they study – the practices, instruments, and issues of the practitioners they investigate – and reflect on how these findings connect and challenge ongoing academic conversations – in anthropology, sociology, market studies, marketing, etc. – here they wrote on their own experiences as collaborators in market interventions. As we all realized, this was more difficult than how it first seemed. Not only did contributors have to write new papers for the issue, but they also had to conceptualize a type of problem that was new to them. The introduction to the issue (Ossandón and Onto Citation2026) is like our collective inquiry’s final report. We reflect on how this minor transition, from observing to collaborating, does something to the concepts we use, to how we understand our practice, and to how we think about market making. More generally, rather than a clear recipe on how to collaborate, how we should behave in market interventions, the issue reports on a shared sense of confusion, ambiguity, and frustration. Our hope is that these reflections will nevertheless help colleagues in similar situations to reflect on their conundrum and to see that what they encounter is a shared and difficult problem. As a CODA, we have this symposium. What contributors to the symposium have in common is that they have, not necessarily knowingly, greatly helped us think about the common problems emerging from this special issue. With this symposium we thought we could invite them to properly join the conversation. In terms of the format, we asked them to provide no full papers but rather more flexible short essays or reflections. We also told them that we were not looking for a debate on the quality of the papers. This was not an invitation to review the issue, like in a book symposium, but rather to use the symposium to take the conversation on ethnography, collaboration, and market intervention further. Because the work of each contributor helped us in different ways, when we contacted them, we posed different questions to them. Even though each of the following texts is self-contained, we thought that it could be a good idea to close this introduction with an edited version of their invitation.