Recent work at the boundary of culture and the economy focuses on relations between meaningful subjectivity and macro-level structure. This special issue features new directions in the study of culture and classification in markets, including research on vocabularies of organizing, cross-national comparisons of market identities, development of metrics and theory for assessing the recognition of market rivals by one another, and relational techniques for the identification of meaningful action in complex corporate fields. Classical concerns with these broad areas provide a means of situating the contemporary work. The new work also has some implications for unifying the study of power, politics, and culture in institutional analysis.