Commodities

A commodity is an object with both use and value that is typically bought, sold, or exchanged. Commodities are ubiquitous in everyday life. At the same time, and perhaps because of their ubiquity, the commodity is one of the more widely debated, widely contested, and widely studied concepts within the social sciences and humanities. This has led to a robust and sustained effort among researchers to continually (re)define, examine, interrogate, and otherwise explore commodities and their associated practices and processes. Defining commodity has long been the project of researchers, and one of the difficulties in its definition is that the term and the concept it encompasses have different meanings and, importantly, different connotations, depending on discipline.