Legal infrastructures: How laws matter in the organization of new markets
通过分析后社会主义匈牙利抵押贷款市场的建立过程，揭示了现有法律的技术特征如何作为非人类行动者影响市场构建，以及法律守护者何时成为市场工程师。
Research into the creation of markets highlights the importance of law-making, seen to express relations between stakeholders in emerging organizational fields. Less understood is the role of existing regulation, despite related work on path-dependency. We unpack the role of extant laws by analysing consecutive attempts to establish the mortgage market in post-socialist Hungary, mobilizing the anthropology of law and actor-network methods. Based on interviews and archival documents, we find, first, that existing laws exert agency in the market-building process not only through abstract legal ‘traditions’ but through technical features which may resist the market arrangements proposed by political-economic coalitions. Second, the resistance of law can vary based on whether its spokespersons (guardians of legal consistency) become ‘market engineers’ under specific organizational configurations. We theorize this agency with the concept of ‘legal infrastructure’, and show how it acts as a non-human organizer of markets, ensuring compatibility across the economy.