MaxPo Lectures

Greta Krippner is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in economic sociology, political sociology, the sociology of law, and social theory. Her work explores how the rise of the market intersects broader social, cultural, and political transformations in the “long” twentieth century. Her first book, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2012), examines the financialization of the US economy in the period since the 1970s.

This lecture will revisit Joseph Schumpeter's ideas about "creative destruction" to ask whether the nature of innovation in the sphere of digital technology constitutes an example of success or failure for contemporary capitalism. By looking at the role of designers, investors and consumers in the era of digital products and services, Appadurai intends to show how technological innovation has now turned disruption into the primary entrepreneurial ideology.

Arjun Appadurai is Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and is currently a Visiting Professor at Humboldt University and Senior Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. His most recent book is Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2016). He is the author of numerous books and articles on globalization, commodification, urbanization and violence. He is currently working on a short book on failure.

• Video of Arjun Appadurai's lecture

Michael Power is Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a Fellow of the British Academy, and Academic Governor of the LSE. Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Girton College Cambridge, and LSE. He is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), an Associate member of the UK Chartered Institute of Taxation, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Risk Management (IRM). He hold an Honorary Doctorate in Economics, University of St Gallen, Switzerland, 2009, an Honorary Doctorate in Social Science, University of Uppsala, Sweden, 2013, and an Honorary Doctor of Economics, Turku University, 2016. Michael is a former Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at LSE and holder of a number of advisory and external non-executive roles in the financial services sector.

Read more about Michael Power here.

Erik Olin Wright is an American analytical Marxist sociologist, specializing in social stratification, and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He is noted for his divergence from classical Marxists in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright has introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.

Read more about Erik Olin Wright here.

• Video of Erik Olin Wright's lecture

Luc Boltanski ranks among the most renown sociologists of his time. With Laurent Thévenot he coined a new sociological theory of judgment, establishing the grammatical structures of modern moral judgments (De la justification, 1991 / On justification, 2006), which he extended with Ève Chiapello to the analysis of the new capitalist ethos in the ear of networks (Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, 1999 / The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005). Futhermore, he conceptualized the State as an actor instituting reality (De la critique, 2009; Énigmes et complots, 2012). He currently works with Arnaud Esquerre on the sociology of value.

Arnaud Esquerre is a sociologist (CNRS – LESC, Nanterre), who received his PhD in sociology from the EHESS. His main areas of expertise are the sociological studies of cults (La manipulation mentale. Sociologie des sectes en France, 2009), death (Les os, les cendres et l’Etat, 2011), and apocalyptic and astrological predictions (Prédire. L’astrologie en France au 21e siècle, 2013). He currently works with Luc Boltanski on the sociology of value.

• Video of Luc Boltanski's and Arnaud Esquerre's lecture

Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics
The lecture will be followed by a discussion with:
Claire Lemercier, Centre de sociologie des organisations, Sciences Po/CNRS
Etienne Wasmer, Departement of Economics, Sciences Po, LIEPP (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research in Public Policy Evaluation
Olivier Godechot, MaxPo, Observatoire sociologique du changemanet, Sciences Po/CNRS

Thomas Piketty is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and research director at the EHESS. Distinguished by numerous prestigious awards, his work focuses on the relationship between economic development and income inequality, in particular the role of institutions and fiscal policy in affecting the proportion of high income salaries.

• Video of Thomas Piketty's lecture

Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, joining Harvard in 2004 after previous appointments as Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985 [new ed. 2011]; with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1994), The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996; now translated into 16 languages), Wetenschap is cultuur (Science is Culture) (Amsterdam: Balans, 2005; with Simon Schaffer), The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and several edited books.

Read Shapin's full CV here.