The 'stuff' of Markets: an Institutional Analysis of Impact Investing

This paper examines market building and emergence through an institutional lens, focusing on the "impact investing" market. It investigates how institutional ordering and isomorphic pressures develop among diverse actors, using the Australian government's efforts to construct a national social finance market as an empirical setting. The findings underscore the critical role of materiality—beyond categories and social skills—in shaping shared meaning, collective identities, and boundaries within nascent markets. Materials are shown to be essential for coordinating and structuring fields, and thus markets.