The “Vertigo of Lists” in Market Dynamics: Materiality, Visual Texts, and Classification in the Early Modern Book World

Introducing a perspective of institutional dynamics in markets, this work investigates the birth of publishing during the Renaissance through the emergence of the modern form of the book (Marketing Theory 2017). The invention of printing is considered part of a process of “institutional learning” investigated by combining two empirical dimensions: the materiality of the list (Eco 2009) as a “visual artifact” (Meyer et al. 2013) and classifications and standards (Bowker, Star 1999) as social practices (Monteiro, Nicolini 2014). Sharing forms of institutional work (Lawrence, Suddaby 2006), antique inventories of stock, commercial catalogs of first publishers, rare sales reports, and modern research archives with human-actors allows us to observe the emergence of practices that collectively legitimize the modern form taken from the books-as-artifacts (McKenzie 1986). The consequent birth of publishing is a market change phenomenon that allows us to understand (Giesler, Fischer 2017): (i) “how market are constituted as complex social systems”, (ii) the heterogeneous nature of the processes of change, (iii) as well as the need for a “practice oriented” approach to investigating the relationship between “consumption, materiality, and markets”.