Critics of the market worry that as it expands the communal sphere declines. They also worry that the market encourages vice and has little or no scope for virtue. As I argue, however, the critics fail to realize that the market is a social space where commercial as well as social bonds are formed and nurtured. That it is also a moral space where virtues are learned and developed.

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An entrepreneur’s prior knowledge and experience play a critical role in his ability to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. Although entrepreneurship research has acknowledged the role that prior information and prior knowledge play in opportunity recognition, few studies have explored their role in entrepreneurial discovery. We test the role of a particular prior knowledge in entrepreneurial discovery within a laboratory setting. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups. Those in the propitious treatment were given prior knowledge that oriented them toward the arbitrage opportunity within the experiment, and those in the unpropitious treatment were given prior knowledge that oriented them away. As hypothesized, those in the propitious treatment were significantly more likely to discover the arbitrage opportunity.

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In order to understand real world markets, economists must pay attention to how culture shapes economic activity. If culture does indeed color economic life, economists cannot really avoid culture. Instead, the choice that they face is not whether or not to incorporate culture into their analysis but whether to employ culture implicitly or explicitly. Ignoring culture may be possible but avoiding culture is impossible.

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His first book, Enterprising Slaves & Master Pirates, is an interdisciplinary account of economic life in the Bahamas. The Bahamas’ economic story is an interesting tale, full of vibrant color—a story of short-lived booms followed by protracted busts, where discussions of economic success force us to mention fanciful figures such as the pirates Blackbeard and Calico Jack, and where accounts of economic woe, such as the collapse of the cotton market, are punctuated by descriptions of the clamor of Sunday markets or the unique practice of selfhire.

See also his “All We’ve Learnt: Colonial Teachings and Caribbean Underdevelopment” (Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines), “Post Classical Political Economy: Polity, Society and Economy in Weber, Mises and Hayek” with Peter J. Boettke (American Journal of Economics and Sociology), “Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism and the Bahamas’ Junkanoo Ethic” (Review of Austrian Economics), “Subalternity and Entrepreneurship: Tales of marginalized but enterprising characters, oppressive settings and haunting plots” with Bridget Butkevich (International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation) and “Schutz on meaning and culture” (Review of Austrian Economics).

Dr. Storr’s Understanding the Culture of Markets will published by Routledge this fall.

With frequent co-author Nona Martin, Dr. Storr has explored the social, politic al and economic significance of Bay Street and investigated a number of the key historical events that have occurred on and helped to shape Bay Street.

In “Whose Bay Street? Competing Narratives of Nassau’s City Centre” published in Island Studies Journal (2009), for instance, Martin and Storr argue that Bay Street has increasingly become a tourist space over the last half of the twentieth century. As a result of this transformation, they suggest, tensions arise “between maintaining Bay Street as an ‘authentic’ Bahamian experience and growing Bay Street as a critical port of call.”

Similarly, in “Bay Street as a contested space” which is forthcoming in Space and Culture, Martin and Storr argue that “Nassau’s Bay Street is and has always been … a place where different groups vied for recognition, redress and control.” As the explain, “racial groups in The Bahamas, for instance, “negotiated” this place since the earliest days of the colonies. Whites used the law and their socio-economic power to limit where and when blacks could be on the street. Similarly, blacks worked within and around those laws and sometimes in direct resistance to the socio-economic hegemony of white elites to carve out a place for themselves on the street.”

In “I’se a Man: Political Awakening and the 1942 Riot in the Bahamas” (Journal of Caribbean History, 2007) and “Demystifying Bay Street: Black Tuesday and the Radicalization of Bahamian Politics in the 1960s” (Journal of Caribbean History, 2009) Martin and Storr explore the two key socio-political events that occurred on Bay Street and that bookended the turbulent 25 year march from minority to majority rule in the archipelago. “[T]he 1942 riot,” they write, “demonstrated to both Bahamian blacks and the oligarchs – who were known collectively as the ‘Bay Street Boys’ – that Bay Street was vulnerable.” Similarly, Black Tuesday “was definitive proof that blacks in the Bahamas were prepared and able to stand up to the white ruling minority.”

As the FEE Prize committee outlined: “In ‘The Market as a Social Space,’ Virgil Storr explores the noneconomic sociality that occurs in markets.  Drawing on Richard Swedberg’s insight that the market is a “specific type of social structure” that it is not just an abstract price-making mechanism, Storr develops a theory of how markets facilitate social activity and encourage noneconomic relationships.  The contribution of this paper is threefold.  First, he presents a more complete picture of real-world markets.  Second, by developing our understanding of markets as a social space, Storr provides a means for economists to engage in the ongoing debate taking place within sociology and anthropology.  This debate focuses on the relationship between economic activity and community, as well as the impact of economic interaction on social relationships.  Third, Storr extends Murray Rothbard’s insight that “in explaining the origins of society, there is no need to conjure up any mystic communion or ‘sense of belonging’ among individuals … In fact, it is far more likely that feelings of friendship and communion are the effects of a regime of (contractual) social cooperation rather than the cause.”

This article along with Dr. Storr’s “Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism and the Bahamas’ Junkanoo Ethic” (also published in The Review of Austrian Economics) will form the core of his book The Culture of Markets which is under contract with Routledge and should be finished this fall.

Israel Kirzner has made important contributions to our understanding of the critical role that entrepreneurship plays in markets and has considerable influence in economics, public policy and entrepreneurship studies. For Kirzner, understanding the role of the entrepreneur is essential to understanding how errors get corrected in the market and understanding the role of alertness is essential to understanding how it is that entrepreneurs come to identify these errors. As he explains, alert individuals discover profit opportunities and, thus, driving the market process toward equilibrium. Although Kirzner’s work on entrepreneurship has been widely celebrated, it has been criticized on several fronts. Specifically, he has been criticized for abstracting from the psychological characteristics of real world entrepreneurs and the determinants of alertness. These criticisms, we contend, are unfair and misunderstand Kirzner’s project. Moreover, we argue, rather than closing off inquiry, his theory of entrepreneurship makes a fruitful analysis of the psychological characteristics of entrepreneurs and the determinants of alertness possible.

Download “The Determinants of Entrepreneurial Alertness …” from SSRN.

Their edited volume The Political Economy of Hurricane Katrina and Community Rebound (Edward Elgar, 2010) was published in the fall 2010. And, their other efforts include “Social capital as collective narratives and post-disaster community recovery”  (The Sociological Review),  “Expectations of Government Response to Disaster” (Public Choice), “‘There’s No Place Like New Orleans’: Sense of Place and Community Recovery in the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina” (Journal of Urban Affairs) and “Club Goods and Post-Disaster Community Return” (Rationality and Society).

Dr. Storr has also given talks on post-disaster recovery at American University, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Universidad Francisco Marroquín, SUNY-Albany, Loyola University New Orleans, Rhodes College and James Madison College (Michigan State University).

Dr. Storr has written extensively within economic sociology. His “Post-Classical Political Economy: Polity, Society and Economy in Weber, Mises and Hayek” (co-authored with Peter J. Boettke) published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (2002), argues that the Austrian School of Economics, especially the work of Mises and Hayek, complements and extends Weber’s “social economics.”

Similarly, Dr. Virgil Storr’s article “The Market as Social Space: On the Meaningful Extraeconomic Conversations that Can Occur in Markets” published in The Review of Austrian Economics (2008) draws on Swedberg’s insight that the market is a “specific type of social structure” and develops a theory of how markets facilitate social activity and encourage noneconomic relationships.

His “Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism and the Bahamas’ Junkanoo Ethic” (2006) and “Schutz on Meaning and Culture” (2010), both published in The Review of Austrian Economics, as well as “The Social Construction of the Market” published in Society (2010) are theoretical contributions to the sociology of the market.

Contributors include: E.M. Agemy, J. Bleckley, E. Chamlee-Wright, D. D’Amico, J. Hall, S. Horwitz, A. Kashdan, L. Krasnozhon, P.T. Leeson, A. Martin, E. Norcross, D. Rothschild, P. Runst, E. Schaeffer, D. Skarbek, A. Skriba, R.S. Sobel, V.H. Storr

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