1990; see also White, 1993). These conceptual slides are a feature of both lay and academic/scientific usages of the term, and are found in both liberal and radical economic theory. In everyday usages the shifts are often innocuous. Polysemy is not necessarily a problem and the scope and subtleties of everyday usages are worth treating with respect. By comparison, attempts to analyse and codify the tacit understandings involved are bound to seem lumbering and unsubtle. Nevertheless, the ideological i!
             nfluence of the discourse of markets in the shape of 'neoliberal fatalism' is too important for the conceptual slides to be ignored. While the variety of different uses of 'market' and 'markets' is confusing, many of the uses have contexts in which they identify something significant. The problems come when authors apply them outside these contexts, particularly where explanatory weight is transferred unknowingly from one referent of 'market' to another. On occasion, the conceptual confusion can have disastrous effects; Mackintosh found a World Bank report offering diagnoses and prescriptions for poor countries to have "at least three different meanings floating in the text"(Mackintosh,1990).2 I shall attempt to take further her strategy of distinguishing different senses.
             One of the few theorists to problematise the definition of markets is Geoffrey Hodgson (1988). For him, a market is
             "a set of social institutions in which a large number of commodity exchanges of a specific type regularly take place, and to some extent are facilitated by those institutions." (p.174)
             A market therefore includes not only commodity exchanges themselves and the associated transfers of money and property rights, but the practices and setting which enable such exchanges to be made in a regular and organised fashion. We might add that markets are also normally competitive to some degree. I shall take this as a core definition of a market, while noting ...