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From the emergence of Starbuck’s and the coffee movement in Seattle to the role of Hollywood in Los Angeles’ fashion and design markets (Molotch 2002; 2003), there is something “in the air”(Marshall 1890, 332) that explains why companies and industries tend to aggregate in certain places over others. Such localized industries benefit not only from a common talent pool and knowledge spillovers (Marshall 1890), but also from the specific culture associated with these spaces (Molotch 2002, 2003). Space shapes the creation, disruption, and evolution of markets. For instance, prior market-level research has explored how the territory claimed by industries facilitates their legitimation (Humphreys 2010b), how a network of locales such as coffee shops serves as spaces for the performance and diffusion of consumption practices (Karababa and Ger 2010), and how the creation of a consumption infrastructure not only brings a community together, but also catalyzes market emergence (Martin and Schouten 2014). However, marketing researchers’ general bias in assigning agency mostly to consumers and producers might have influenced the observed paucity of research where space would otherwise take a central and agentic role (recent exceptions include Canniford and Shankar 2013; Epp and Price 2010; Giesler 2012; Martin and Schouten 2014). To address this theoretical oversight this paper positions space as an active category in market processes.

The growing interest in joining the study of markets and space in cultural, human, and economic geography (see Boeckler and Berndt 2012), as well as in the sociology of markets (Fligstein and …