Center for Market Studies

The research conducted at the Center for Market Studies (CMS) primarily concerns change and development of markets and industries, including how various actors take action to influence the direction of such developments.

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 changes 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 our research covers marketing and sales, purchasing and supply chain management, technology development and diffusion, technology enabled business transformations, institutional changes in markets, international marketing, retailing and distribution, sustainability, etc.

One important theoretical heritage uniting a majority of the researchers at the center is the "markets as networks"-paradigm. More recently, a significant share of our research output is linked to the market studies field, drawing inspiration from science and technology studies, consumer culture theory, institutional theory, and economic sociology.

Currently, there are five major areas in which our researchers actively contribute:

Business strategy and business networks
Internationalization of firms and international marketing
The organizing of markets
Transports, supply chains and distribution systems
Value creation and valuation processes

In terms of empirical markets, industries and businesses, our projects cover both goods and services, consumer and business markets, established and emerging markets. Current research projects consequently attend to a diverse set of industries, including ICT, transports, retailing, manufacturing, social media, art, agriculture, 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.