My research is broadly rooted in the sociology of economics, markets and innovation. One of my research interests is market-based approaches to public utilities. My work explores the interaction by which market politics, organizational arrangements and mundane practices are constantly recombined in market life, with particular attention to the role of market instruments and socio-technical infrastructure in market organization. Much of my research has been based on an ethnographic approach to market exchanges.
In 2000 I started an in-depth study of the funeral industry, exploring through history various forms of market configuration in relation to political institutions and social values.
My current projects concern the reconfiguration of markets at the interface between top-down and bottom-up globalization in the context of access to energy in developing countries (with Celine Cholez). In investigating the new market of rural electrification (solar technologies), we have analysed how branded products, supported by international institutions, coexist and/or compete with similar low-cost products and makeshift solutions already well established in the grassroots economy. We have also analysed how the various market segments can be mapped symmetrically as long chains of trading networks articulating transnational routes and local economic circuits, with central nodes at the entrance to African countries.