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2025ECO006
Doctoral thesis

Exploring market responses to modernist pressures in traditional industries

  • 2025

PhD: Università della Svizzera italiana

Organization theory
Market sociology
Traditionalist markets
Modernism
Market transformation
Singularization
Collective identity
Legitimation
Craft
Tradition
English This dissertation examines how traditionalist markets - those rooted in cultural heritage and craft-based practices - endure and evolve under persistent modernist pressures of standardization, efficiency, and scalability, while also responding to the broader culturalization of economic life. Using the handmade cymbal industry as a longitudinal case, the research investigates how actors negotiate tensions between tradition and modernity across product, identity, and market-structural levels. The first study analyzes the valuation struggles of hand-hammered cymbals in the 1980s, when machine-made alternatives gained prominence. It shows how producers, intermediaries, and consumers collectively preserved the traditional product category by sustaining singularity through iterative processes of singularization, desingularization, and resingularization. The second study explores the identity work of independent cymbalsmiths who entered the market in the 2000s without lineage ties, demonstrating how identity and practice bridging strategies enabled them to reinterpret tradition and establish legitimacy while expanding the scope of the market. The third study conceptualizes liminal markets - configurations in which the contradiction between tradition and modernity is not resolved but institutionalized - arguing that symbolic heterogeneity can be stabilized and even serve as a durable foundation for market order. Together, these studies advance a relational and temporal perspective on market evolution. They show that tradition is not a static inheritance nor simply an oppositional stance but a dynamic, negotiated reassembly of meanings, practices, and values in the present. The dissertation contributes to organization theory and market sociology by illuminating how valuation, legitimation, and coordination processes allow traditionalist markets to persist and transform, offering new theoretical tools to analyze the endurance of tradition in symbolically rich and culturally saturated markets.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
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Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1332713
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