ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on social conventions' pressure on the performative process. The performativity of markets in the context of organ trade fails for a simple reason: the organ is considered a non-market good within the conventional categories of the social world. Scarcity has led to the problem of the production and distribution of organs. The chapter considers the rejection of the market solution by considering it from the point of view of incompatibility between the organ market theory and the classification, the social earmarking, that exists in the majority of contemporary societies. The principle of transplantation has required a classification of the organ among legally transferable objects. The organ is labelled as non-market within the framework of historically established social conventions; the economist must therefore set up a system of legitimate, non-market matching.
