Constructing Quality

How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the quality of a product in relation to other products. Only by recognizing qualities and perceiving quality differences can purchasers make non-random choices, and price differences between goods be justified. "Quality" is not a natural given, but the outcome of a social process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits, and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space. While we normally take the quality of goods for granted, quality at a closer look is the outcome of a highly complex process of construction involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries engaged in judgment, evaluation, categorization, and measurement. The authors in this volume investigate the processes through which the quality of goods is established. They also investigate how product qualities are contested and how they change over time. The empirical cases discussed cover a broad range of markets in which quality is especially difficult to assess. The cases include: halal food, funeral markets, wine, labor, school choice, financial products, antiques, and counterfeit goods. The book contributes to the sociology of markets. At the same time it connects to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through cognitive processes of classification.1. Introduction ; PART I INVESTING IN QUALITY ; 2. Realizing Dreams, Proving Thrift: How Product Demonstrations Qualify Financial Objects and Subjects ; 3. Quality and Temporality in Timber Markets ; 4. A Good Match: Appraising Worth and Estimating Quality in School Choice ; PART II THE QUALITY OF LABOR ; 5. Uncertainties Regarding Applicant Quality: The Anonymous Resume Put to the Test ; 6. Evaluation Practices in Internal Labor Markets: Constructing Engineering Managers Qualification in French and German Automotive Firms ; PART III THE QUALITY OF AESTHETIC GOODS ; 7. Account of the Past: Mechanisms of Quality Construction in the Market for Antiques ; 8. Seeing the World through Common Lenses? The Case of French Contemporary Poetry ; PART IV THE MORALITY OF QUALITY ; 9. Halal and the Moral Construction of Quality: How Religious Norms Turn a Mass Product into a Singularity ; 10. Qualification under Moral Constraints: The Funeral Purchase as a Problem of Valuation ; PART V CONSUMING QUALITY ; 11. From Qualities to Value: Demand Shaping and Market Control in Mass Consumption Markets ; 12. Fake Qualities: Assessing the Value of Counterfeit Goods ; 13. Quality Classifications in Competition: Price Formation in the German Wine Market ; POSTSCRIPT ; 14. Vigorous Verbs: Conveying the Action of People Producing Qualities