Risks and disputes are prevalent in the illegal online erotic fiction market due to the absence of state protection and enforcement, the lack of accepted criteria for evaluating product quality, the customisation of services, and widespread plagiarism. Drawing on insights from the sociological literature on signalling theory and Varese’s production–trade–governance framework, this article empirically investigates the strategies developed by author-sellers in this market to signal their trustworthiness to customers and resolve disputes. Agents and author-sellers send multiple signals to persuade potential buyers of their trustworthiness and ability, including by sharing writing samples created for previous clients, sharing their collective writing projects, disclosing past transaction records, and being selective about which orders to accept. Agents and author-sellers also offer multiple options for dispute resolution during the sales process, leverage information asymmetry to resolve disputes caused by delivery delays, and utilise neutralisation techniques to address disputes stemming from plagiarism. This research expands the literature on signalling theory, and its findings will hopefully inspire future studies of other illegal online markets.

How do digital platforms affect coordination in the restaurant market? In particular, how do they reshape firms’ positions in the quality space and their dependence on both consumers’ valuations and competitors’ choices? Focusing on the case of a widely used platform for restaurant booking and reviewing, we analyze the dine-in services market in the city of Lille, France. In line with economic sociology’s definition of markets as concrete social spaces, we frame these restaurants as a producer market in which multiple quality conventions coexist. We use sequential mixed methods and data (observations and interviews, web-scraping and business data) to show that platforms rationalize firms’ practice of observing one another as a basis for making decisions on volume and quality. The rise of digital platforms provides producers with devices that amplify their view of competitors, standardize their offerings and support the stability of their business choices over time, conditional on spatial constraints and quality choices.

Marseille is a city that has long been sensationalistically associated in the public imagination with crime and drug dealing. This article begins by tracing the history of drug dealing and gang violence in the city, from its 19th century origins to the rise of what has been called the “French Connection” in the 1960s and 1970s, when Marseille played a central role in the global heroin trade. The city’s criminality subsequently became more local in scope in the 1980s and 1990s, and the second part of the article draws on recent research carried out in the Marseille cité of Félix-Pyat, a poor neighbourhood widely associated with gang violence and drug dealing, to explore the consequences of the changing nature of crime in the city for process of “criminal governance”. When considered historically and in relation to our previous research on gangs in Nicaragua and South Africa, we suggest that it might be appropriate to talk about there being “varieties” of criminal governance that come together as “assemblages” than can be constituted in fundamentally different ways.

Classical social science viewed economic elites as the primary drivers of rapid economic change in Western Europe. Studies of late industrialization, however, tend to argue that the state, rather than economic elites, acts as the principal agent of development; in many late-developing contexts, economic elites may constitute an obstacle to rather than a catalyst of development. These analyses yield two questions that have yet to be thoroughly answered in the existing literature: 1) under what conditions are states able to act as the necessary agents of late development? And 2) who actually controls the state under these circumstances? This article addresses these questions through a case study of Francoist Spain. It articulates a path to state-led development in which, following class conflicts that diminish the power of economic elites, an educated “cultural” bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum) takes over the state and uses it as an agent of industrialization.

Empires and nation states tend to be understood as two distinct types of political organization. The former are primarily associated with the premodern world, while the latter have come to be seen as political forms paradigmatic of the modern. While colonialism is a process associated with empires, it is more usually practised by modern nation states in their establishment of overseas empires. These empires are marked by a particular form of political economy—a colonial political economy—which determines the specificity of their political form as distinct from earlier empires. In this article, I examine the Mughal Empire of the premodern period in relation to the subsequent establishment of British colonial rule in India, and discuss the particularities of each in terms of the modes of political economy—moral and colonial—which were characteristic of their administration. In particular, I address the mobilization of the precepts of classical liberalism by the British, as demonstrated in the response of colonial administrators to incidences of dearth and famine, and contrast this with the modes of governance of the preceding Mughal Empire. The differences between them, I suggest, demonstrate that British colonial rule was a structurally distinct, modern type of empire.