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Performative structures, American exceptionalism, and the legitimation of free trade

In this article, we explore how free trade is performed and maintained as a dominant market institution. Drawing from the notion of performativity in sociology of economics and rhetorical analysis in institutional research, we explore the maintenance of free trade as a state-mediated legitimation process. Our analysis of the US presidents’ speeches over the last 30 years reveal that American presidents recurrently adopted three broad rhetorical strategies to enable free trade. Through ontological strategies, they emphasized how the properties of free trade should be; through cosmological strategies, they conveyed the inevitability of globalization and integration with the global markets, and finally through value-based strategies, they linked free trade to the cultural template of American exceptionalism. Our findings extend the previous marketing literature on market creation by illustrating the rhetorical strategies to perform markets and the role of a powerful political actor in enabling and maintaining a market institution.