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

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Nov 1, 2025

In this discussion, Nancy Neiman, a Scripps College professor and author, dives into her book on markets, community, and justice. She critiques conventional economic binaries and highlights how cultural and political contexts shape market outcomes. Neiman shares fascinating case studies, including a Ugandan coffee cooperative, to illustrate the importance of community values over pure profit motives. She also addresses wealth inequality and its implications for market justice, while emphasizing the need for just infrastructures to combat issues like environmental harm and structural racism.

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INSIGHT

Rationality Of Justice

Nancy Neiman argues justice can be framed as a form of economic rationality, reclaiming efficiency language for just outcomes.
She calls this approach the "rationality of justice" to counter universalist market narratives.

ADVICE

Use Econ Language To Argue For Justice

Reclaim mainstream economic language to argue for justice; explain justice using terms economists respect.
Teach students how to challenge universal market narratives with grounded, economic arguments.

INSIGHT

Markets Are Shaped By Infrastructures

Markets are embedded in cultural, political, and ideological infrastructures that shape incentives and outcomes.
Those infrastructures determine whether markets produce just or unjust results, not markets alone.

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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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