Conferences

Instructors:
Lucio Baccaro (MPIfG), Olivier Godechot (MaxPo/Sciences Po), Silja Häusermann (University of Zurich), Jonas Pontusson (University of Geneva), Nathan Wilmers (MIT)

Although economic sociology and political economy are two disciplinary areas that have for long been engaged in a fruitful dialogue, this exchange has regularly stumbled over the disconnections of the levels that they were empirically addressing. To put it succinctly, economic sociology was mostly studying micro-actors such as persons and how persons engage in economic exchange. Political economy was mostly focusing on macro-actors such as states and the way they interact with their economies. Two intermediate objects, firms in economic sociology on the one hand (and their economic interactions) and sectors (in relation with social blocks) in political economy on the other hand, provide intermediary levels between micro-actors and macro-actors. They help to explore more in depth the contemporary structure of inequality, the variety of growth models tied to these inequalities, and the political outcomes.
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Instructors:
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/Sciences Po; Jens Beckert, MPIfG; Marcin Serafin, Max Planck Partner Group Warsaw

This seminar explores the recent interest in the future in the social sciences. Recent work in economic sociology has brought out the importance of actors’ expectations, showing the influence of narratives and fictions on future developments as ways of embedding economic activity in stories and images of envisioned future capitalist development. Other strands of literature in economic geography, anthropology, and history have pinpointed the origins and use of tools of future crafting, such as forecasts and scenarios, as instruments of market making and as contributors to the crafting of economic interests over time. The seminar aims to familiarize PhD students with this emerging research agenda.
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Faculty and Speakers:
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/Sciences Po; Ariane Leendertz, MPIfG; David Priestland, University of Oxford; Philipp Ther, Institute for East European History, Unviversity of Vienna

This seminar aims to familiarize students with the literature on neoliberalism in a range of fields from political science and political sociology to economic and social history. It also aims to shift bounda-ries of thinking around neoliberalism from a Western problem to a wider governmental and global project. In the seminar, students will gain an understanding of the cultural expressions of forms of marketization, the use of market devices as forms of both social mobility and social control, and the shifting relationship between political and economic elites in different contexts since 1970.
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Faculty and Speakers:
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/Sciences Po; Ariane Leendertz, MPIfG; David Priestland, University of Oxford; Philipp Ther, Institute for East European History, Unviversity of Vienna

This seminar aims to familiarize students with the literature on neoliberalism in a range of fields from political science and political sociology to economic and social history. It also aims to shift bounda-ries of thinking around neoliberalism from a Western problem to a wider governmental and global project. In the seminar, students will gain an understanding of the cultural expressions of forms of marketization, the use of market devices as forms of both social mobility and social control, and the shifting relationship between political and economic elites in different contexts since 1970.
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Conference Hosts:
Lucio Baccaro, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo, Sciences Po
Olivier Godechot, MaxPo, Sciences Po

Through the long postwar period, crisis was a conjectural phenomenon, exceptional in a normalcy of growth and social progress. Many key concepts of the social sciences – indeed, our understanding of democracy, of embedded markets, of enlightened electorates, benevolent political elites, and problem-solving progressive alliances – seem inapt for understanding the current societal upheaval.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, we have witnessed majority alliances breaking down, populism returning on a grand scale both in the Western world and globally, and the new patterns of social mobilization erupting into chaotic and sometimes violent protest. The forces that underpinned the framework of welfare capitalism seem obsolete in the face of financial and political elites that are paradoxically both disconnected from national territory and sometimes in direct alliance with nationalist and populist movements. Politics of resentment, politics of place, and new politics of class interact in ways that we do not yet understand. Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that neoliberalism has spawned authoritarianism. At the same time, these processes are not at all new, but must be put in the context of the socioeconomic and cultural cleavages produced by the shift to neoliberalism since the 1970s.

The conference addresses the different facets of social destabilization that we observe today. It marks the fifth anniversary of the founding of MaxPo, the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies. Presentations will analyze different aspects of the overarching phenomenon of social destabilization trying to identify common threats in the diverse developments currently to be observed.

Conference program and participant list

Organizers:
Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Tod Van Gunten, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Olivier Godechot, MaxPo

Program

Organizers:
Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute of the Study of Societies
Olivier Godechot, MaxPo

In April 2015, Sciences Po and the MPIfG held a joint workshop in Cologne as part of the "States and Markets" series. The workshop on "Politics and Society in the Age of Financialization" was attended by some twenty political and social scientists from Germany and France. Financial markets, their regulation, and the effects of finance on households have become major research fields in economic sociology and political economy. Financialization has been identified as a major trend in socioeconomic development. The financial crisis of 2007 and its repercussions on the economy, the state, and households have sparked interest in political science and sociology to understand the operation of financial markets and possibilities for their regulation. At the workshop in Cologne, scholars from both disciplines presented their findings on the effects of the financial crisis on the economy, state, and society as well as the possibilities for regulating financial markets.

Conference website

Organizers:
Cornelia Woll, MaxPo
Marion Fourcade, MaxPo

If economies may be generated and transformed through moral struggle, moralities may also be constituted through economic means. This conference brought together advanced students and postdocs from UC Berkeley, Sciences Po (CSO and MaxPo), and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies to consider intersections between morality and economy in a series of topical areas, including contested markets, finance, nature, and culture.

Conference Program

The last thirty years have seen profound shifts in the social organization of Western societies. Today individuals are increasingly exposed to market forces in a growing number of life spheres. Cultural shifts that accompanied this "marketization" have led to a more individualized culture and the destabilization of traditional social structures, for instance in the family. Creating a growing sense of uncertainty, these developments have led to pressures on individuals, organizations, and politics to cope with increasingly instable economic, social, and political environments.

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The international conference "Pricing Practices, Ranking Practices: Evaluation in Economic Life" explored a variety of subjects related to the question of evaluation, from compensation practices to cultural algorithms. If American, French, and other European scholars working on evaluation come together, what can be learned about the construction, implementation, and consequences of pricing and ranking practices in the modern world? The conference was organized in cooperation with EHESS, ENS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CNRS, Paris School of Economics, Collège de France, MaxPo, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, and Centre pour la Recherche Économique et ses Applications.

Conference website

Key Speakers
Frank Dobbin, Harvard University
Olivier Godechot, Sciences Po Paris
Karen Ho, University of Minnesota
Donald McKenzie, University of Edinburg
Sabine Montagne, Univeristé Paris Dauphine

This symposium brought together several studies focusing mainly on financial work and encompassing various actors in the field of finance. One focus was on the financiers themselves, such as financial directors, financial analysts, auditors, consultants, traders, and asset managers, in a range of organisations such as banks, audit firms, consultancy firms, private/public limited companies, and rating agencies. Another was on professionals whose work is connected to that of the financiers.

Read more about the conference here.

Organizer:
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo

This workshop, co-organized by MaxPo and the Futurepol project within the framework of Jenny Andersson’s MaxPo research group, brings together intellectual and economic historians, historians of science, anthropologists, and sociologists around the problem of prediction. It aims to understand what prediction is, the modes of anticipation that it enacts, and the forms of scienticity and non-scienticity it deploys. It also aims to understand prediction as a particular technology of world ordering, market making, and society crafting.

Organizers:
Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Richard Bronk, London School of Economics and Political Science

Modern economies are oriented towards the future, and in many circumstances the future is inherently uncertain. This raises questions about how economic actors form expectations or strategies, assess the likely outcome of their decisions, and learn to exploit the indeterminate future to their advantage. How do economic actors make decisions when the future is indeterminate because it has yet to be created by the innovations they and others will make, or because it is so complex that it cannot be anticipated?

Conference website

Further information

Organizer:
Patrick Le Galès (Sciences Po)
Co-hosts:
Sciences Po, Paris, and IMPRS-SPCE

Some thirty researchers met at the tenth Max Planck Summer Conference on Economy and Society in Reims to discuss "Territories of the Economy." Presentations addressed the political economy of international adoption, the relationship between prosperity and public debt, the effects of natural disasters on election results, labor policies in the era of liberalization, and the growth of major cities. As keynote speaker, Michael Storper (UCLA and LSE) presented his new book comparing the transformation of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Lazslo Bruzst of the European University Institute in Florence closed the conference with his talk on single market integration in Europe and on economic change at Europe's periphery.

Since 2006, a rotating summer school brings together senior scholars and doctoral students from Sciences Po, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Northwestern University and other partner institutions in certain years such as Harvard University, Columbia and the European University Institute in Florence. Mixing keynote speeches and PhD presentations, the conference focuses on questions at the intersection of economic sociology and political economy.

Organizers:
Joshua Whitford and David Stark (both Columbia University))
Co-hosts:
Columbia University, New York, and IMPRS-SPCE

In the current era, information and interactive technologies are not exogenous to organization. In fact, organizational design - and consequently state structure and the design of social and industrial policy - has become inseparable from the design of the digital interface. The workshop addressed the interactions of technology and economy and how these disruptions give rise to new challenges and new opportunities for democracy. During the three-day conference, 14 young researchers from the participating institutions presented their ongoing research projects.

Conference website

Since 2006, a rotating summer school brings together senior scholars and doctoral students from Sciences Po, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Northwestern University and other partner institutions in certain years such as Harvard University, Columbia and the European University Institute in Florence. Mixing keynote speeches and PhD presentations, the conference focuses on questions at the intersection of economic sociology and political economy.

Organizers:
Pepper Culpepper, Johan Christensen, Charlotte Haberstroh, and Martina Selmi (all EUI)
Co-hosts:
European University Institute, Florence, and IMPRS-SPCE/MPIfG

Do democratic politics and economics remain compatible, now that financial, economic, and debt crises have grown out of the liberalization of the 1970s? At the 2013 Summer Conference, the doctoral students' presentations shed light on such issues as second-generation immigrants' lives in Western Europe, neoliberal reforms in Russia's higher education, land dispossession in Mexico, and the governing of slums in Paris and Madrid. Marie-Laure Djelic of ESSEC Business School in Paris contrasted "doux commerce" and "ineluctable alienation" in her keynote address on "democratization and neoliberal governance," and Mark Blyth of Brown University in Providence, USA, discussed lessons from the eurozone crisis.

Since 2006, a rotating summer school brings together senior scholars and doctoral students from Sciences Po, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Northwestern University and other partner institutions in certain years such as Harvard University, Columbia and the European University Institute in Florence. Mixing keynote speeches and PhD presentations, the conference focuses on questions at the intersection of economic sociology and political economy.