ABSTRACT
In the political-economic literature, the recent phase of market expansion is usually viewed as a top-down process – the result of liberalization and deregulation policies pursued at the supranational and national levels. In this volume we have argued, however, that marketization is not exclusively the domain of policymakers. Forced to act according to a short-term market logic, self-interested market participants have an incentive to circumvent or ‘bend’ existing social regulations, viewing them as barriers to profit maximization. In so doing, they set in motion a bottom-up marketization process and expand the sphere governed exclusively by market forces. It is this practice of undermining or evading social norms and regulations, undertaken with the aim of gaining a competitive advantage, that we have conceptualized as social dumping.
