Nancy Neiman, "Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures" (Routledge, 2020)

Nov 1, 2025

Nancy Neiman is a Professor at Scripps College and author of Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures. In this discussion, she explores the interplay between market structures and social justice, emphasizing the cultural and political influences on market outcomes. Neiman critiques the polarized narratives on markets and highlights case studies from Uganda and Cuba that showcase community-driven economic strategies. She argues for a broader understanding of justice in markets, touching on issues like racial capitalism and the necessity of labor protections.

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INSIGHT

Rationality Of Justice

Nancy Neiman argues that justice can be framed as a form of economic rationality, not opposed to it.
She reclaims economic language to show just outcomes are compatible with rational policymaking.

ADVICE

Evaluate Markets Contextually

Stop treating markets as universal solutions or universal evils and evaluate their institutional context.
Focus reform on reshaping infrastructures that direct market incentives toward justice.

INSIGHT

Markets Are Infrastructure-Dependent

Markets are embedded in ideological, cultural, and political infrastructures that shape incentives.
Those infrastructures determine whether markets produce just or unjust outcomes.

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A series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – reinvigorated the debate about markets and social justice. Since then, counter-hegemonic movements all over the globe are attempting to redefine markets and the meaning of economic enterprise in people’s daily lives. Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalization advocates and anti-globalization movements, those on the political right and those on the left, all facing off to argue the benefits or harms brought about by markets. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analyzing the conditions under which markets result in just outcomes.

Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge, 2020) explores how culture, politics, and ideology help shape market incentives in an attempt to reclaim the language of economic rationality and the policymaking legitimacy that accompanies it. Through a variety of case studies – labor relations in the U.S. meatpacking industry, the globalization process in Juaìrez, Mexico, financial reform in Cuba, and an interfaith Ugandan coffee cooperative – this book provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote just or unjust outcomes (e.g., discrimination, income inequality, environmental degradation, or racial justice, human rights, and equitable growth).

This book touches on subject matter as varied as food, religion, banking, and race and gender equality, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It offers an analysis of markets based on community rather than pure individualism that has the potential to change the way we think about economic rationality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars in political science, economics, sociology, geography, gender studies, critical race studies, environmental studies, and all those interested in the critique of mainstream economics and neoliberal logic.

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