Using Breach Experiments to Explore Price Setting in Everyday Economic Locations

This paper draws inspiration from the breach experiments of Garfinkel as a basis for exploring the naturally occurring order of price setting in locations without an institutionalised single price rule. We organised two experiments (at a flea market in Copenhagen and boot sale in Oxford) to study price setting. The findings suggest that members of price setting interactions accountably, demonstrably and reflexively accomplish a regularly repeated order to price setting through constitutive expectancies and the congruence of relevances that are made available within interactions. In conclusion we suggest that our experiments proved to have analytic utility in bringing gently structured comparisons to the fore. The experiments provided us with the opportunity to engage with the basis for price setting in different everyday economic locations and we felt that this was the opening to a mode of research that has future potential.