Maxpo | Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies

MaxPo Impromptu Seminar The Information Hypothesis
Andrew Perrin, Johns Hopkins University, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, SNF Agora Institute
Discussant: Sergei Guriev, Sciences Po, Department of Economics

"The Information Hypothesis," which would be a critique of the concept of misinformation and "alternative facts" as ways of understanding problems with the public sphere. Essentially: the assumption that people first form (accurate or not) beliefs about facts, and then build arguments and political positions on top of those factual beliefs, is probably wrong, and unsupported by rhetorical and neuroscientific evidence. So the practice of correcting "misinformation" in order to achieve public sphere outcomes is probably ineffective; potentially counterproductive; and politically authoritarian. I would then offer some thoughts on better ways of thinking about information, evidence, and argument in the public sphere.

Andrew J. Perrin is Professor of Sociology at the SNF Agora Institute, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He is a cultural and political sociologist working on issues of democracy, including civic engagement, effects of higher education, and public deliberation. His research explores what people need to know, do, and be to be effective, creative, thoughtful democratic citizens. He is author or co-author of five books, including Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter (Polity, 2014). His research record is broad and includes studies of public opinion and letters to the editor; translations of key Frankfurt School texts related to how Germans thought about World War II in the postwar period; analysis of college education’s effect on civic engagement; and even interdisciplinary research on culture, children’s movies, and obesity.
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MaxPo Impromptu−CEE Seminar, Axe Economie politique
Monday, March 2, 2020 | 12:30−14:30
Perspectives on Corporate Power
Sandra Eckert, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Thomas David, Université de Lausanne, Jan Stuckatz, Institute for Advanced Studies, Toulouse, and Cornelia Woll, MaxPo (moderation)

The influence of business on politics is a pervasive phenomenon in advanced industrial societies, but the mechanisms are notoriously difficult to study. How and when can we study how business power is exercized and to what effect? This roundtable brings together scholars in political science, sociology, and history, using a variety of methods and angles to analyze elite networks, campaign contributions, and public policy. They provide insights into the stakes of business politics, their engagement, and the impact of their activities.

Corporate Power and Regulation in the European Union
Sandra Eckert is Associate Professor for Politics in the European Multilevel System at Goethe University Frankfurt a. M. She currently holds a research fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS). Sandra previously held positions at the Universities of Berlin, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Osnabrück and at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence. She received her PhD in political science from Free University Berlin. In her research, Sandra studies issues related to European integration, comparative public policy and international political economy.
In her presentation, Sandra Eckert draws on her book on corporate power and regulation (published with Palgrave Macmillan 2019). She argues that corporations utilize distinct power resources in the regulatory process in order to prevent, shape, make or revoke regulation. She emphasizes the proactive role of business and revisits policymakers’ capacity to put pressure on, or delegate power to private actors. Empirical insights draw on various areas of European regulation and sectors including the chemical, paper, home appliance, ICT, and electricity industries.

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the Global Power of Business
Thomas David is Professor of International History at the University of Lausanne. He was in Fall 2019 Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and is currently Visiting Scholar at Science Po. A co-founder of the Swiss Elite Observatory at the University of Lausanne, he has been working for the last ten years on (trans) national elite. His latest book project, which he is co-writing with Pierre Eichenberger (New School for Social Research), is on the history of the International Chamber of Commerce.
The ICC was created in 1919 in Atlantic City and since 1920 it has been based in Paris. Having originated with a group of businessmen from five countries, the Chamber’s membership soon increased to include people from 50 countries by the end of the 1920s. Today, ICC’s members are spread over 120 countries. The ICC’s main objective is to promote free trade and the free circulation of capital. This business association attempts to pursue this objective in two ways: political advocacy and lobbying, on the one hand, and practical services to business, on the other. In my presentation, I will focus on two issues concerning business power. First, I will describe the capacity of the ICC to mobilize businessmen from different nations as a collective interest. Second, I will analyse the influence of the ICC on global governance through its interactions with International Organizations. The aim of my presentation is also to emphasize the strengths (but also the difficulties) of combining approaches from history, political science and sociology.

Political Alignment between Firms and Employees
Jan Stuckatz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institutute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) specializing in political economy and political methodology. His research combines political economy of trade an corporate influence in politics, with a special emphasis on firm-level analysis.
When do political preferences of employees align with those of their employers? Despite the importance of employment for individual’s livelihoods, little attention has been given to how the workplace impacts employees’ political contributions. I investigate firm-employee alignment using donations from employees and Political Action Committees (PACs) of 9,921 public companies in the US between 2003 and 2018. Overall, 16.7% of employee donations go to political candidates supported by one’s employer. Leveraging variation of donations within firm-politician connections over time, I find that employees contribute 17.4% more dollars to company-supported candidates. Moreover, employer-employee alignment is driven by both regular employees and executives and exists in almost all industries. Employees align more when companies communicate more on their political activities and tend to align on politicians that are important for one’s industry and more ideologically moderate. The results have implications for representation, individual motivations for political contributions, and the role of firms in politics.
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MaxPo Impromptu
Monday, January 13, 2020 | 12:30−14:30
Beyond the Antitrust Exemption: Recovering US Labor’s Antimonopoly Agenda
Kate Andrias, University of Michigan Law School
Discussant: Dina Waked, Sciences Po Law School, Paris

Kate Andrias examines a largely forgotten antimonopoly tradition in the United States, advanced by organized labor in the first half of the twentieth century. Historical scholarship on labor and antitrust has tended to focus on the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) efforts to prevent courts from applying antitrust law to organized labor—a struggle that lasted from the enactment of the Sherman Act in 1890 until the US Supreme Court’s decisions in Apex Hosiery Co. v. Leade and United States v. Hutcheson (1941). But labor’s fight for an antitrust exemption was only a part of its agenda regarding monopoly power. During the first half of the twentieth century, the industrial unions sought not only to free workers’ collective activity from courts’ sanction; they also sought transform the workplace and the state in an effort to diffuse concentrations of private power and to achieve greater economic and political democracy. Notably, their primary focus was not necessarily on making business smaller but rather on building up countervailing organization and democratic powers to deal with big business. On some occasions, they even demanded nationalization of industry as part of their broader antimonopoly vision. By broadening the lens beyond the AFL’s struggle for a labor exemption, this Essay reveals a richer and more complicated picture of the American antimonopoly tradition—one with relevance for today’s problems of concentrated economic power and the contemporary labor market.

Kate Andrias is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. She teaches and writes about constitutional law, labor and employment law, and administrative law, with a focus on problems of economic and political inequality. Recent work focuses on how labor law can be reformed to serve the needs of low-wage workers and to help remediate problems of poverty and inequality. Her articles have been published in numerous books and journals, including the Supreme Court Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and the Texas Law Review.

Dina Waked is Professor at Sciences Po Law School. Her research and publications explore issues linked to competition, development, critical law and economics, and economic growth and distribution in the Global South. Specifically, her work focuses on the intersection between antitrust enforcement and economic development. Her work utilizes econometric tools to evaluate the effectiveness of competition policy and its relationship with growth theory in the Global South. She also works on the history of law and economics to outline the dialectic relationship between these disciplines through the 19th century onwards.
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MaxPo Impromptu
Monday, December 2, 2019 | 13:30−15:30
Territory Beliefs and the General Deterrence of Transnational Organizational Misconduct: How Swiss Private Wealth Management Organizations Responded to US Law Enforcement Against Their Peers
Florian Überbacher, University of Zurich
Discussant: Oliver Levingston, CEE/Sciences Po

Florian Überbacher’s talk is based on a paper coauthored with Emmanuelle Reuter (University of Neuchatel) and Andreas Georg Scherer (University of Zurich). For decades, the entire population of Swiss private wealth management organizations (PWMOs) engaged in “transnational organizational misconduct” in that they transgressed US law by helping US clients evade US tax liabilities. The authors use a qualitative case study to explore whether, and, if so, under which conditions, the enforcement of US national law against some Swiss PWMOs led to a general deterrence of transnational organizational misconduct in the Swiss PWMO population, such that it deterred not only the targeted PWMOs from violating US law but also the other Swiss PWMOs that were not targeted by US enforcement acts (henceforth referred to as “non-targets”). Based on the authors’ findings, they develop a constructivist theory about the general deterrence of transnational organizational misconduct. In contrast to the widely held Westphalian view of nation states, this theory conceptualizes nation states’ territory, i.e., the scope of the geographic space over which national governments have legitimate authority and within which their national institutional rules are thus valid and binding, not as ontologically fixed but rather as an outcome of social construction. Specifically, the theory points to the role of non-targets’ territory beliefs as a critical factor for explaining whether national governments can achieve general deterrence of organizational misconduct committed in the transnational space (or not). The authors argue that non-targets’ territory beliefs shape whether they perceive their conduct to be within (or outside) the reach of national government and thus also whether they become compliant with national institutional rules (or not). They also suggest that non-targets’ territory beliefs are influenced by characteristics of the enforcement acts of national governments as well as by the territory claims that other national governments may make over a given geographic space. The study makes significant contributions to institutional, regulatory, and territoriality scholarship.

Florian Überbacher is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Management at the University of Zurich. He received a PhD in Management from the University of St. Gallen. His research focuses on the role of power and influence in institutional environments with current projects focusing in particular on how multinational companies and other international organizations can be governed. His research has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, and other outlets.

Discussant Oliver Levingston is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée (CEE), Sciences Po, working on a project on "Who is leading the charge? Innovation and influence in the epistemic community for macroprudential regulation between central banks, IMF and academia."
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MaxPo Impromptu − joint seminar with PSIA, Sciences Po
Thursday, September 19, 2019 | 12:30−2:00 p.m.
China’s Financial System on the Brink: A Discussion with Walden Bello
Walden Bello, State University of New York and Kyoto University
Discussants: Cornelia Woll, MaxPo; Victor Mallet, Financial Times, Paris

Headline news of the on-going trade war between the United States and China shift our attention away from the fragility of another pillar of China’s rise to economic dominance: financial markets. With a highly volatile stock market, a growing real estate bubble and a substantial shadow-banking sector, China’s financial system may well turn out to be the Achille’s heel of its economy. How likely is it that current fissures lead to an explosion that will spread far beyond the economic superpower? A renown scholar on the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the dynamics of globalization, Walden Bello provides a gloomy outlook for China’s stability and stinging criticism of our financialized global economy in his new book Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash. He will discuss his analysis with Cornelia Woll, co-director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, and Victor Mallet, journalist with extensive experience in Asia and current head of the Paris Bureau of the Financial Times.

Walden Bello is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and senior research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University in Japan. He served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines from 2009 to 2015. His resignation from the House in 2015 in protest at the policies of the Aquino administration is the only instance of a resignation on principle in the history of the Congress of the Philippines. He is the author or co-author of 20 books, including Food Wars (2009), Capitalism’s Last Stand? (2013), Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis (1990), and Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines (1982).
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MaxPo Impromptu − joint seminar with CEE
Thursday, March 21, 2019 | 12:30−2:30 p.m.
Financialization and Income Generation in the Ownership Society: Rise of the Petit Rentier?
Adam Goldstein, Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs
Discussant: Matthias Thiemann, CEE/Sciences Po

Adam Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs. His current research examines the social consequences of financial capitalism in the contemporary United States. He is interested in how institutional changes associated with "financialization" have reshaped various socio-economic domains, and how organizations, communities and households respond to these changes.

As wages have stagnated in many advanced economies, market transformations have opened new pathways by which members of the upper-middle classes can make entrepreneurial investments in assets. This manifests in increasing rates of borrowing, investing, and various so-called “side hustles,” which are intended to supplement if not replace labor income. Such practices include everything from trading stocks to renting a spare bedroom through platforms such as Airbnb. In his lecture, Adam Goldstein refers to a study jointly conducted with Ziyao Tian. It considers the consequences for household income factors and social class structure across twenty-one countries from 2001–2016. Is financialization producing a growing class configuration of petit rentiers in capitalist economies, as Piketty suggests? The results highlight a striking paradox: During the twenty-first century, most advanced countries have seen a decline in the share of households who accrue more than 5 percent, 10 percent, or 20 percent of income from assets. With a few exceptions, similar patterns hold among under- and over-65 households, and across income quartiles. By assessing the degree to which between-country differences are driven by differential rates of asset ownership, or by differential opportunities to monetize those assets, Goldstein discusses several explanations for these surprising trends and considers time-varying factors to explain over-time declines in the petit rentier class.

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MaxPo Impromptu
Monday, March 25, 2019 | 12:30−2:30 p.m.
An Anthropology of Chinese Digital Payment Systems, "Wechat Pay" and "Alipay"
Horacio Ortiz, IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris; Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Discussant: Jeanne Lazarus, CSO−Sciences Po

Horacio Ortiz is CNRS Researcher at IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine, and Associate Professor at The East China Normal University in Shanghai. His main research fields are anthropology of money; anthropology of finance; anthropology of global processes; philosophy of social sciences.

Digital payment systems Alipay and Wechat Pay, created only a few years ago, are now used daily by hundreds of millions of people. They are connected to credit systems providing loans for consumption and for small and medium enterprises, which did not exist on this scale in the banking system before. And they are also central in the redefinition of state and citizenship as economic policy is officially oriented towards increasing consumption and as systems such as “social credit” develop. Based on preliminary research of everyday practices and institutional settings, Horacio Ortiz proposes to approach these transformations from the point of view of a pragmatist anthropology of money. In his presentation, he focuses on the co-constitutive multiple meanings and practices that make money, and sees the following processes as happening together: the transformation of daily practices of money, the development of new financial relations of power through credit systems, and the re-definition of citizenship, state and nation in the particular Chinese institutional setting. A political anthropology of money is proposed to encompass the diversity of these processes putting the issue of monetary distribution and its meanings at the center of the analysis.

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MaxPo Impromptu, jointly organized with CEE and CEVIPOF
Thursday, January 24, 2019 | 5−7 p.m.
Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict
Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics
Discussants: Martial Foucault (CEVIPOF), Nonna Mayer (CEE), Jan Rovny (CEE/LIEPP)
Watch the video

Thomas Piketty is Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of numerous articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and of a dozen books. He has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development and the distribution of income and wealth. In particular, he is the initiator of the recent literature on the long run evolution of top income shares in national income. These works have led to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets, and to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution. He is also the author of the international bestseller Capital in the 21st century.

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MaxPo Impromptu
Thursday, November 8, 2018
Panel on new book: The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/Sciences Po
Discussants: Marco Cremaschi, Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po; Martin Giraudeau, Center for the Sociology of Organizations, Sciences Po; Paul-André Rosental, Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics and Center for History, Sciences Po
Jenny Andersson is an economic historian and CNRS Research Professor at the Center for European Studies (CEE), Paris. She is co-director at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo), Paris, and an ERC Principal Investigator of FUTUREPOL, a Sciences Po project on the political history of the future, knowledge production, and future governance in the post-war period. At MaxPo, she directs a research group on the issue of elite and mass politics between 1970 and the present.
- More information about the book
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MaxPo Impromptu, jointly organized with CEE
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Independence and Its Discontents: Toward a Relational Sociology of the ECB
Stephanie Lee Mudge, University of California, Davis

Stephanie Lee Mudge is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is a historical, political, and economic sociologist specialized in the theoretically-driven analysis of Western politics, economies, and expertise. Her new book, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (May 2018, Harvard University Press), develops a century-long comparative, historical, and biographically-sensitive analysis of the American Democrats, the German and Swedish Social Democrats, and the British Labour Party.

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MaxPo Impromptu, co-sponsored by the LIEPP and CEE
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Discussion of new book: Pourquoi détestons-nous autant nos politiques?
Emiliano Grossman, Sciences Po, CEE / CNRS
Nicolas Sauger, Sciences Po, LIEPP

More information about the book.

Emiliano Grossman is Associate Professor at Sciences Po, working at the Centre d'études européennes. He has written widely on interest groups, political institutions and agenda-setting in France and elsewhere. He recently published The French Fifth Republic at 50 (with N. Sauger, London, Routledge). His current research deals with the role of media in political agenda-setting.

Read more about Emiliano Grossman here.

Nicolas Sauger est co-directeur de l'axe "Evaluation de la démocratie" du LIEPP, professeur associé à Sciences Po depuis 2004. Il a été Vincent Wright Fellow au Centre Robert Schuman de l'Institut Universitaire Européen de Florence. Ses recherches s'articulent autour de l'analyse de la transformation des structures de la compétition politique en France et en Europe.

Read more about Nicolas Sauger here.
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MaxPo Impromptu
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Primal Capital: Radical Uncertainty and the Propensity to Hoard in Keynes's General Theory
Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago

Jonathan Levy is a historian of economic life in the United States, with interests in the relationships between business and economic history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas. His research and teaching span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are increasingly preoccupied with global and comparative questions.

Read more about Jonathan Levy here.
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MaxPo Impromptu | Roundtable Seminar
Friday, October 7, 2016
Brexit
Florence Faucher-King, Centre d'études européennes, Sciences Po
Ben Jackson, University College Oxford
Jonathan Hopkin, Department of Government, London School of Economics
Patrick Le Galès, Centre d'études européennes, Sciences Po
Ed Miliband, House of Commons, Member of Parliament, Labour Party
Martin O'Neill, Politics Department, University of York
Chair: Jenny Andersson, Co-director of MaxPo

On June 23, the British public voted to exit the European Union. In the months following Brexit, economic and political uncertainties run high in both British and European politics. Moreover, Brexit has triggered a debate on the shifting rationalities of politics, from the rise of populist and authoritarian sentiment, shifting social geographies of voters, to post-truth politics and the irrelevance of fact in constituting electoral majorities. Does Brexit change the rules of democratic politics? What future does it spell out for the UK, and for Europe?

Florence Faucher-King is Professor at the Centre d'études européennes at Sciences Po in Paris.
Read more about Florence Faucher-King here.

Ben Jackson is historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in political thought, labour history, and the history of social and economic policy.
Read more about Ben Jackson here.

Jonathan Hopkin is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics.
Read more about Jonathan Hopkin here.

Patrick Le Galès is CNRS Research professor at the Centre d'études européennes at Sciences Po in Paris.
Read more about Patrick Le Galès here.

Ed Miliband is a British politician who was Leader of the Labour Party as well as Leader of the Opposition between 2010 and 2015. He has been the Member of Parliament since 2005.
Read more about Ed Miliband here.

Martin O'Neill is senior lecturer at the University of York and works on a number of topics in moral and political philosophy. He is especially interested in equality, inequality and social justice.
Read more about Martin O'Neill here.

Jenny Andersson is CNRS Research professor and Co-director of MaxPo.
Read more about Jenny Andersson here.
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MaxPo Impromptu
Friday, October 7, 2016
Labour Politics after Brexit
Ed Miliband, House of Commons, Member of Parliament, former Labour Party Leader
On June 23, the British public voted to exit the European Union. In the months following Brexit, economic and political uncertainties run high in both British and European politics. Moreover, Brexit has triggered a debate on the shifting rationalities of politics, from the rise of populist and authoritarian sentiment, shifting social geographies of voters, to post-truth politics and the irrelevance of fact in constituting electoral majorities. Does Brexit change the rules of democratic politics? What future does it spell out for the UK, and for Europe? MaxPo organizes a reflection day on the decision of the UK, acted by referendum on June 23, 2016, to leave the European Union.
Ed Miliband is a British politician who was Leader of the Labour Party as well as Leader of the Opposition between 2010 and 2015. He has been the Member of Parliament since 2005.

Read more about Ed Miliband here.
- Write-up on "Brexit"
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MaxPo Impromptu
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
La richesse cachée des nations dévoilée par les Panama Papers [Panama Papers reveal the hidden wealth of nations]
Gabriel Zucman, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Maxime Vaudano, journaliste du Monde

Gabriel Zucman est assistant professor d'économie à l'Université California Berkeley depuis 2015. Après avoir soutenu sa thèse à l'École d'Économie de Paris en 2013, il a enseigné à la London School of Economics (LSE). Il est l'auteur de La Richesse cachée des nations - Enquête sur les paradis fiscaux, publié aux éditions du Seuil/République des idées en 2013. Ses recherches portent sur la richesse mondiale, les inégalités et les paradis fiscaux. Il co-dirige la World Wealth and Income Database.

Read more about Gabriel Zucman here.

Maxime Vaudano journaliste aux Décodeurs du Monde depuis 2014, ayant fait partie de la cellule d'enquête sur les Panama Papers entre septembre 2015 et mai 2016. Formé dans la spécialité web à l'École supérieure de journalisme de Lille et promoteur du fact-checking politique, il a co-fondé le site LuiPrésident.fr qui passe au crible les promesses de François Hollande, désormais présent sur Le Monde.fr en blog invité. En 2015, il a écrit un livre Docteur TTIP et Mister Tafta, publié aux éditions Les Petits Matins, sur le traité transatlantique.

Read more about Maxime Vaudano here.
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MaxPo Impromptu
Monday, June 13, 2016
The Rise of the Welfare Industrial Complex: Explaining Neoliberalism in Sweden
John Lapidus, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Discussant: Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/CEE, Sciences Po

John Lapidus is a researcher at the Department of Economy and Society at University of Gothenburg. He holds a PhD in Economic History from the same university (2015). He has specialized in the contemporary history of the Swedish welfare model, especially privatization of delivery and funding of major welfare services such as health, elderly care and education. Currently, he is responsible for a research project entitled New Ways of Funding Central Welfare Services in Sweden.

Read more about John Lapidus here.

Jenny Andersson is CNRS fellow researcher at the Centre d’études européennes at Sciences Po (CEE) and co-director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo). She holds a PhD in Economic History from Uppsala University (2003). Before joining the CNRS and Sciences Po in October 2009, she was a post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at the European University Institute, Florence, and at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. She was also a research fellow of the Swedish National Scientific Council and an associated professor at the Swedish Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm from 2007–2009.

Read more about Jenny Andersson here.
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MaxPo Impromptu (formerly COOPS), jointly organized with CSO
Monday, May 10, 2016
Coup d'Etat au Brésil?
Roberto Rocha Coelho Pires, Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), Brasilia, Brazil
Discussants: Olivier Dabène, CERI; Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, CERI

Roberto Rocha Coelho Pires is a researcher at the Institute for Applied Economic Research, Brasilia, and visiting researcher at the CSO.

Read more about the IPEA here.

Olivier Dabène is professor at Sciences Po and affiliated with CERI.

Read more about Olivier Dabène here.

Gilles Favarel-Garrigues is research fellow at CNRS and affiliated with CERI.

Read more about Gilles Favarel-Garrigues here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Infrastructures of American Empire: State Politics and the Expansion of Global Trade Networks
Boris Vormann, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Free University of Berlin
Discussant: Sukriti Issar, Sciences Po/OSC

Boris Vormann is a visiting professor of urban political economy and political science at Freie Universität Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies and a research associate at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center in the winter term 2015/2016. His research foci include the relationship between urbanization and globalization, urban and state theory, and changes in state–market relations in infrastructure provision. Boris Vormann has recently published his monograph Global Port Cities in North America: Urbanization Processes and Global Production Networks (Routledge, 2015) and a co-edited handbook Handbuch Politik USA (Springer VS, 2015).

Read more about Boris Vormann here.

Sukriti Issar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at OSC, Sciences Po, Paris, specialized in urban governance, political economy, policy and institutional change, and research methods.

Read more about Sukriti Issar here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, March 7, 2016
Counting Clicks: Quantification and Commensuration in Web Journalism in the United States and France
Angèle Christin, Data & Society and New School, New York
Discussant: Heather A. Haveman, University of California–Berkeley

Angèle Christin is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York, the Data & Society Research Institute, and the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme. She is interested in sectors and organizations where the rise of "big data" and individualized metrics challenge professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her current research project explores these questions by focusing on the role of web metrics ("clicks") in an occupation that is currently undergoing dramatic transformations: journalism, with a specific focus on news websites in the United States and France. She recently conducted a year-long ethnography of a courthouse in the outskirts of Paris, published as Comparutions Immédiates: Enquête sur une Pratique Judiciaire (La Découverte, 2008), in which she examined the standardization of criminal sentencing when judges and prosecutors operate under strong time constraints. She obtained her PhD in Sociology at Princeton University and the EHESS in 2014

Read more about Angèle Christin here.

Heather A. Havemann is Professor of Sociology and Business at the University of California–Berkeley. She studies how organizations, industries, and employees’ careers evolve. Her publications, which cover various periods from the 18th to the 21st century, have appeared in several major business and sociological journals. The organizations she has investigated include the thrift industry, telephone companies, hotels, hospitals, and power plants in the United States as well as large firms in China. Her book Magazines and the Making of America was just published by Princeton University Press. After getting a BA in history and an MBA in management and finance from the University of Toronto, Haveman obtained her PhD in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations from UC Berkeley. She has taught at (1990-94), Cornell (1994-99), and Columbia (1998-2007). Her current research examines wineries, the emerging marijuana market, law professors, and Chinese listed firms. When she is not moving around the country, she studies how organizations, industries, and employees’ careers evolve. Her published studies have investigated California thrifts (1872-1928 and 1960s-1990s), Iowa telephone companies (1900-1917), Manhattan hotels (1898-1990), California hospitals (1978-1991), U.S. electric power plants (1980-1992), American magazines (1741-1860), and large Chinese firms (1992-2007). These studies have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Business Venturing, Management and Organization Review, Organization Science, Poetics, and Sociological Science. A book on magazines is being published by Princeton University Press in August. Her current research involves antebellum American magazines, post-Prohibition U.S. wineries, and 21st-century Chinese firms.

Read more about Heather A. Haveman here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, May 4, 2015
The Price of Purity: Brokerage as Consecration in the
Market for Modern Art
Fabien Accominotti, London School of Economics and Political Science
Discussant: Catherine Comet, Université de Lille

Fabien Accominotti is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which he joined after graduating from Columbia University. His work spans the areas of economic, cultural, and historical sociology. Using art worlds as an empirical backdrop, his research explores issues of valuation, inequality formation, and innovation. His first book, to be published by Princeton University Press, studies the role of the market in the development of modern art in Paris between the 1870s and the 1930s. Other current projects include an experimental study of winner-take-all inequality in cultural markets, and a quantitative analysis of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic in the Gilded Age.

Read more about Fabien Accominotti here.

Read more about Catherine Comet here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, March 2, 2015
The Great Opportunity: Hope at "La Salada," One of the Largest Illegal Marketplaces in the World
Matías Dewey, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Discussant: Roberto Galbiati, Département d’économie, Sciences Po, OSC-CNRS

Matías Dewey is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His research focuses on illegal markets, informal institutions, social theory, qualitative social research and Latin American studies.

Read more about Matías Dewey here.

Read more about Roberto Galbiati here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, January 12, 2015
Liberalizing the Academy: The Transformation of Higher Education in the United States and Germany
Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Rutgers University
Discussant: Christine Musselin, Sciences Po, CSO/CNRS

Tobias Schulze-Cleven is a political scientist focused on comparative employment relations across the wealthy democracies with an emphasis on Europe. He is particularly interested in the challenges to and strategies for collective action in contemporary capitalism.

Read more about Tobias Schulze-Cleven here.

Christine Musselin is a sociologist and CNRS research professor. She has been the director of the Center for the Sociology of Organization since 2007, where she heads a comparative research program on higher education systems.

Read more about Christine Musselin here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Budapest in Warsaw: Central European Business Elites and the Rise of Economic Patriotism since the Crisis
Marek Naczyk, University of Oxford, Sciences Po/CEE
Discussant: Isabela Mares, Columbia University
Marek Naczyk is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and will start a postdoc at the Centre d'Etudes Européennes de Sciences Po in October 2014. His research interests are in the politics of welfare state change, of labour market transformations and of corporate governance reform. He is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris and received his DPhil in politics from the University of Oxford. His current research projects focus on the role of the financial industry in the privatization of pensions and on the links between pension privatization and corporate governance reform.

Read more about Marek Naczyk here.
- Paper: Budapest in Warsaw: Central European Business Elites and the Rise of Economic Patriotism since the Crisis
Isabela Mares is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University in New York City. Her research has covered a wide range of topics in comparative social policy and comparative political economy, including the development of social insurance institutions, the effects of wage bargaining institutions on economic outcomes and social policy reform in developing countries. Isabela Mares is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003) which has won the Gregory Luebbert Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in Comparative Politics.

Read more about Isabela Mares here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, May 5, 2014
Where do Electronic Markets Come From? Regulation and The Transformation of Financial Exchanges
Yuval Millo, University of Leicester
Discussant: Angelo Riva, European Business School, Paris

Yuval Millo is Professor of Social Studies of Finance and Management Accounting at the University of Leicester’s School of Management. Prior to this he held positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Essex, and has obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Yuval is a leading contributor to the emerging field of Social Studies of Finance (SSF), which develops a unified analytical framework that includes elements from accounting, financial economics and sociology and analyses the dynamics of financial markets. Yuval recently published in Harvard Business Review, Environment and Planning, Journal of Cultural Economy and Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, his current research includes the emergence of electronic trading in financial exchanges, the evolution of accounting standards for testing the impairment of assets and the rise of the Social Return On Investment methodology.

Read more about Yuval Millo here.

Angelo Riva teaches finance at the European Business School where he is director of the research department of finance. He is associate researcher at the Paris School of Economics. His research interests include the organization of the stock exchange industry and the interactions between markets and (central) banks over the long run. He published several papers on the topic and he has recently published L’Histoire de la Bourse (La Découverte, 2012) with Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, and The Paris Financial Market in the XIXth Century: Complementarities and Competition in Microstructures (Economic History Review, 2012) with Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur. He is the scientific manager of the Equipment of Excellence Data for Financial History.

Read more about Angelo Riva here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, January 30, 2014
Pluralité monétaire et monnaies "de crise" en Argentine, 2001-2003
Mariana Luzzi, National University of General Samiento, Argentina
Discussant: Quentin Ravelli, CNRS, Centre Maurice Halbwachs
Mariana Luzzi is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de General Samiento. She holds a master’s degree and a PhD in Sociology from EHESS. Her dissertation investigated monetary practices and controversies over money during the Argentinean crisis of 2001. Her research focuses on exploring different social groups’ money uses and social representations of money, and the ways in which they were challenged and transformed by the crisis. She teaches undergraduate classes and graduate courses on sociology, social theory and contemporary social problems of Argentina. She is currently doing research on the conflicts over economic reparations to the victims of State Terrorism in Argentina.

Find Mariana Luzzi's CV here.
- Paper: Pluralité monétaire et monnaies "de crise" en Argentine, 2001-2003
Quentin Ravelli is a social scientist and a CNRS researcher at Centre Maurice Halbwachs (EHESS/ENS), where he is working on sociology of dangerous commodities. His PhD was devoted to the study of pharmaceutical industry and is forthcoming in 2014 at Le Seuil under the title La stratégie de la bactérie. Biographie sociale d’une marchandise médicale, (The strategy of the bacteria. Social biography of a medical commodity). He is now focusing on subprime credits in Spain, at the origins of the financial crisis.

Read more about Quentin Ravelli here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar, jointly organized with CSO
Friday, December 6, 2013
The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics
Gabriel Abend, New York University and Institut d'études avancées de Paris
Discussant: Jeanne Lazarus, CSO

Gabriel Abend is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University, and a 2013-2014 fellow of the Institut d’études avancées de Paris. Recent articles include: “Thick Concepts and the Moral Brain” (in Archives Européennes de Sociologie); “The Meaning of ‘Theory’” (in Sociological Theory); “Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality” (in Theory and Society); “The Origins of Business Ethics in American Universities” (in Business Ethics Quarterly); and “What the Science of Morality Doesn’t Say about Morality” (in Philosophy of the Social Sciences). His book, The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Read more about Gabriel Abend here.
Read more about The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics here.

Jeanne Lazarus is a tenured CNRS research fellow at the CSO in Sciences Po. Her research has focused on relationships between bankers and customers in French retail banks. She published L’Épreuve de l’argent in 2012. She has also conducted research on the sociology of money and the consumption and monetary practices of the impoverished. She is currently studying the making of a “responsible” financial market for individuals, in particular via education programs aimed at improving financial literacy, directives, and regulations regarding the commercialization of financial products and credit.

Read more about Jeanne Lazarus here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Economic Policy-Making in France after the Crisis
Ben Clift, Warwick University
Discussant: Emiliano Grossman, Sciences Po, CEE/CNRS
Ben Clift is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His research interests lie in comparative and international political economy. He is author of French Socialism in a Global Era (Continuum 2003), and co-editor of Where Are National Capitalisms Now? (Palgrave 2004). He has published widely on French and comparative capitalisms, the politics of economic ideas, capital mobility and economic policy autonomy, the political economy of social democracy, and French and British politics. He is co-editor of Economic Patriotism in Open Economies (Routledge, 2012, with Cornelia Woll). His new book Comparative Political Economy: States, Markets and Global Capitalism is forthcoming with Palgrave (2014).

Read more about Ben Clift here.
- Paper: Economic Policy-Making in France After the Crisis
Emiliano Grossman is Associate Professor at Sciences Po, working at the Centre d'études européennes. He has written widely on interest groups, political institutions and agenda-setting in France and elsewhere. He recently published The French Fifth Republic at 50 (with N. Sauger, London, Routledge). His current research deals with the role of media in political agenda-setting.

Read more about Emiliano Grossman here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Governmental Accounting and Austerity Policies: Accounting Representations of Public Debt and Deficit in Europe and Abroad
Yuri Biondi, ESCP Europe and CNRS, Paris
Discussant: Benjamin Lemoine, Université Paris Dauphine, IRISSO/CNRS
Yuri Biondi is a tenured CNRS research fellow, appointed as research professor at ESCP Europe. A graduate of Bocconi University of Milan, Lyon University, Brescia University and Paris Sorbonne University, he is the editor in chief of the journal Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium. He has edited The Firm as an Entity: Implications for Economics, Accounting and Law (Routledge, 2007), a special issue on "The Socio-Economics of Accounting" (Socio-Economic Review, October 2007), as well as Accounting and Business Economics: Insights from National Traditions (Routledge, 2012). He also convenes the SASE Research Network devoted to accounting, economics and law. His research interests include economic theory, accounting and financial regulation, as well as the relationships between the economy, accounting, and finance in public and private entities.

Read more about Yuri Biondi here.
- Paper: Governmental Accounting and Austerity Policies: Accounting representations of public debt and deficit in Europe and abroad
Benjamin Lemoine is a tenured CNRS research fellow at the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales (Université Paris Dauphine). Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the CSO (Sciences Po), where he worked on rating agencies, after defending a dissertation on the history of sovereign debt instruments and evaluation in France (The Values of Debt: The State Struggling with Public Debt), at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (École des Mines de Paris) in 2011. By combining science and technology studies and political sociology of risk methodologies, he aims at describing how capital market devices and technical instruments perform a social, political and economic order. He has recently analyzed the settlement of the future generations as a new social category leading to the reorganization of public accounting (Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 2012).

Read more about Benjamin Lemoine here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Explaining and Quantifying the Extractive Success of Financial Systems: Microfinance and the Financialisation of Poverty
Philip Mader, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Discussant: Marion Fourcade, MaxPo

Philip Mader is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His work studies the political economy of finance, focusing on the causes and effects of the global expansion of microfinance. For his doctorate, which is being published as a book with Palgrave, he performed fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh, India, on the impacts of microfinance projects for water and sanitation. He has written extensively on the Indian microfinance crisis in blogs and newspapers. He previously studied economics and development studies in Sussex, Cambridge and Harvard.

Read more about Philip Mader here.

Marion Fourcade is director at the Maxpo and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009). Her current work is examining the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call “national classificatory styles” across a wide range of empirical domains, including environmental valuation, the digitization of books and the classification of wines. Other ongoing research focuses on the role of the credit market in social stratification (with Kieran Healy); the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); and the role of business schools in the neoliberal turn (with Rakesh Khurana).

Read more about Marion Fourcade here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Friday, March 15, 2013
The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth, and Equality
Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University
Discussant: Pierre François, CSO

Cathie Jo Martin is professor of Political Science at Boston University and former chair of the Council for European Studies. Her most recent book, The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth and Equality (co-authored with Duane Swank, Cambridge University Press 2012) investigates the origins of coordinated capitalism and the circumstances under which employers are persuaded to endorse social policies promoting economic productivity and social solidarity. She is also author of Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Shifting the Burden: the Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (University of Chicago Press, 1991). She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the University of Copenhagen and received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.

Read more about Cathie Jo Martin here.

Pierre François is senior researcher at the CNRS (Centre de sociologie des organisations) and professor at the Ecole Polytechnique. For the last decade, he is currently conducting research on contemporary poetry since the 1960s in collaboration with Sébastien Dubois. He is also working on a historical sociology of firms and their managing directors since the beginning of the 19th century, as part of a study he is conducting with Claire Lemercier. His publications include Le monde de la musique ancienne (2005), Sociologie des marchés (2008) and Vie et mort des institutions marchandes (2011).

Read more about Pierre François here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, February 25, 2013
Banking Crises and Lender of Last Resort in Theory and Practice in Swedish History, 1850-2010
Anders Ögren, Upsalla University
Discussant: Eric Monnet, Paris School of Economics and EHESS

Anders Ögren, holds a PhD in Economic History from the Stockholm School of Economics. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Economic History, Lund University and an associate researcher to the Uppsala Center for Business History (UCBH) at Uppsala University (Sweden). He has been a visitor at the Stern School of Business (NYU), EconomiX-Histoire et Théorie Economique at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre and at Barnard College (Columbia U.). His research focuses on monetary and financial history, a field in which he has published several articles, e.g. Free or Central Banking? Liquidity and Financial Deepening in Sweden, 1834-1913, Explorations in Economic History (2006), and Multiple Paper Monies in Sweden, 1789-1903: Substitution or Complementarity, Financial History Review (with Torbjörn Engdahl, 2008).

Read more about Anders Ögren here.

Eric Monnet holds a PhD in economics from the Paris School of Economics and EHESS (2012) and is currently a post-doc researcher in monetary economics at Ghent University. His research in economic history deals with monetary policy, banking supervision and credit policies in Western Europe from WWII to the 1980s. He is an editor of Tracés, a French multidisciplinary journal in social sciences.

Read more about Eric Monnet here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Monday, January 28, 2013
Limited Liability and Moral Hazard Implications: An Alternative Reading of the Financial Crisis
Marie-Laure Djelic, ESSEC Business School
Discussant: Claire Lemercier, Sciences Po/CSO

The principle of limited liability is one of the defining characteristics of modern corporate capitalism. It is also, we argue in this paper, a powerful structural source of moral hazard. Engaging in a double conceptual genealogy, we investigate how the concepts of moral hazard and limited liability were created and diffused over time. We highlight two very similar but parallel paths of emergence, moral contestation and eventual institutionalization, and outline how the two notions have become connected through time, showing clear elective affinities between both concepts and their respective evolution. Going one step further, we suggest that both concepts have come to be connected through time. In the context of contemporary capitalism, limited liability has to be understood, we argue, as a powerful structural source of moral hazard. In conclusion, we propose that this structural link between limited liability and moral hazard is an important explanatory factor of the recent financial crisis and a seemingly intractable characteristic of modern corporate capitalism.

Marie-Laure Djelic is Professor in the Management Department where she teaches Organization Theory, Business History and Comparative Capitalism. From 2003 till september 2007, she was Dean of the Faculty at ESSEC. Her research interests range from the role of professions and social networks in the transnational diffusion of rules and practices to the historical transformation of capitalism and national institutions. She is the author of Exporting the American Model (Oxford University Press 1998), which obtained the 2000 Max Weber Award for the "Best Book in Organizational Sociology" from the American Sociological Association.

Read more about Marie-Laure Djelic here.

Claire Lemercier became a CNRS research fellow in 2003 with the Institute for Early Modern and Modern History and she then joined the CSO in 2010. Her research looks at the institutions on the public/private border which participate in regulating the economy. She is specifically working on defining a French model of regulation based on the unique relationship between the public and private sectors.

Read more about Claire Lemercier here.
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MaxPo COOPS Seminar
Thursday, October 11, 2012
The Performativity of Networks
Kieran Healy, Duke University
Discussant: Sean Safford

Kieran Healy is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Duke University and the Kenan Institute for Ethics. He is the author of Last Best Gifts: Atruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs (Princeton University Press 2006). His research is mostly about exchange in human blood and organs, cultural goods, software, and ideas. He is interested in the moral order of market society, the effect of quantification on social classification, and the link between those two things.

Read more about Kieran Healy here.

Sean Safford is a research scholar at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations and the Director of Sciences Po’s MPA program. He is the author of Why the Garden Club couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rustbelt (Harvard University Press 2009). His research is on social, economic and technological change, particularly in mature industrial economies, as well as historical social network analysis.

Read more about Sean Safford here.
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MaxPo Impromptu

Past Impromptu Seminars