Center for Market Studies
CMS is one of the oldest research centers at SSE and can trace its lineage back to the first marketing professor at SSE, Gerhard Törnqvist. The center has a long history of research on goods distribution, business markets, and business-to-business marketing. Today, however, we also have ongoing projects directly concerned with consumer markets and marketing.
Our research focuses on understanding change in different types of markets and market systems, and how various actors take action within these contexts. Focus, then, is on dynamics at the meso-level of the economy, i.e. we study change in industries, markets, ecosystems, and/or networks. This means that we research how marketing and sales, purchasing and supply chain management contributes to shape the markets within which they are undertaken, how technological development and diffusion triggers both market formation and change, how the need for increased sustainability and resilience may influence markets and their transformation, how institutional changes come about and how they affect markets, how market boundaries are formed and upheld.
Important theoretical inspirations for the researchers at the center include the markets as networks-paradigm, actor-network theory, institutional theory, service dominant logic, and systems thinking. A significant share of our research contributes to the interdisciplinary field of market studies, drawing inspiration from science and technology studies, consumer culture theory, institutional theory, and economic sociology. Our engagement in this field is longstanding and we are very happy to be organizing the 8th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop at SSE in 2025!
Our current focal research areas are:
- The organizing of markets and market emergence
- Service ecosystem design, shaping social structures
- Proactive market strategies and strategic market shaping
- Procurement-driven market shaping for innovation and sustainability
- Internationalization of firms and international marketing
- Transports, supply chains and distribution systems
- Value creation and valuation processes
In terms of empirical areas, our research covers both goods and services, consumer and business markets, established and emerging markets. Current projects attend to a wide range of industries, including transports, retailing, manufacturing, art, agriculture, forestry, health care, med tech, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, airlines, etc.
The Center for Market Studies is a research center at SIR, Stockholm School of Economics Institute for Research. The SIR Foundation is a national research institute for the economic sciences, with a focus on Business Administration in the broadest sense.