Cannabis-Infused Dreams: A Market at the Crossroads of Criminal and Conventional

Abstract

Moral legitimacy of market activities is important in determining how commodities are traded and market success (Anteby 2010; Fourcade and Healy 2007; Zelizer 1979). Economic sociologists studying morally contested markets document how market actors actively work to construct new moral meanings of their activities and align their practices with these narratives (Chan 2009; Quinn 2008a; Turco 2012). However, much of this work treats the organizational spaces where these exchanges take place abstractly, overlooking how these narratives operate in real time by employees who are classed, gendered, and racialized individuals. As such, we undertheorize how power and status manifest in moralizing labor through interactions in these spaces that ultimately matter for market development and inequality. In this dissertation, I use the emerging recreational cannabis market as a case of a morally contested market to present three empirical chapters that together, begin to address this gap by highlighting the central role employees play in the moral and social construction of markets. Specifically, I draw on sixty semi-structured interviews with cannabis retail staff, managers, and owners across twenty-six state licensed cannabis stores in Seattle and 107 hours of ethnographic observation within three of these stores to understanding how staff engaged in moral meaning making around how products were sold and how this shaped inequality in these market organizations. In doing so, I make important empirical and theoretical contributions to the study of markets by showing how the market moralization process is carried out at the level of the employee through interactions with consumers and other market actors in these organizational spaces.