The Social Organization of Merchants’ Activities. An Interactionist Study of Urban Marketplaces

The article briefly presents the empirical results of a large research project focused on Polish urban marketplaces, commonly known as bazaars, and their interactional order. Due to the spatial separation and legal regulations concerning bazaar trade, a relatively constant community of market vendors is created in the area of the particular marketplace. The primary activity of each merchant is to offer and sell goods; however, the specificity of marketplace trade results in the necessity to maintain relationships with other vendors to keep this primary activity going. Thus, the activities of merchants are carried out in the same direction for both economic results and performance (sales and profit) and social action, that is, building and managing relations with vendors operating in the same marketplace. A wide range of activities and interaction strategies is developed that create an order of interactions between vendors, both in terms of perceiving and assigning meanings, interpreting, and taking actions. The consequences of such an interactional foundation affect the economic layer of the market, embedding, on the one hand, economic phenomena in social phenomena, and, on the other hand, generating paradoxes of prices and competition—the two economic concepts that cannot be analyzed without their social contexts.