Events

After decades dominated by industrial and commercial logics, financial theory is now the dominant reasoning. This movement towards the financialization of finance is described in this book using the insurance sector as a case study. After a long century during which the power of shareholders faded behind that of managers, finance has returned to the heart of contemporary capitalism. Investors now capture most of the profit and decide on the strategic direction of large companies. And after decades dominated by industrial and commercial logics, financial theory now prevails. Banks and insurance companies have themselves been transformed even in their operations; they are pursuing objectives and deploying instruments that are profoundly different from what they were forty years ago. This movement towards the financialization of finance, described here on the basis of the textbook case of the insurance sector, can be explained by the implementation of new rules of the game by the European Union: like Basel II and III for the banking sector, the Solvency II directive has defined since 2016 a prudential framework that is entirely permeated by contemporary financial theory, designed to equip shareholders much more than to protect the insured.

Pierre François is a sociologist, CNRS research director at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CSO) and head of Sciences Po Doctoral School. His research focuses on the dynamics of the worlds of art – particularly contemporary poetry – and on the sociology of businesses and their leaders.

Women in corporate networks (20th−21st Centuries)
This presentation will introduce the project "Women in corporate networks", which gathers a group of scholars from different regions of the world to analyse women’s inclusion on corporate boards in a historical and comparative perspective. After a general introduction on the theoretical and methodological issues, I will present the empirical results for the Swiss case. The aim is to discuss the effect of the Swiss corporate network on the entry of women into the boardrooms, and the process of board feminisation across the past hundred years. The results show that during the 20th century, a dense corporate network and a strong class cohesion within the male economic elite made it very difficult for women to get on boards. The few female directors were first in family firms. Then, women active in politics and in the feminist movement entered the boardrooms of cooperatives in the distribution and retailing sector. Three main factors contributed then to the progressive increase in female directors. During the 1990’s, gender equality was seen as profitable for the firms because of the shortage of skilled labour. Increasing globalisation of the economy also contributed to weaken the cohesion of Swiss corporate elite, opening a breach for women and foreigners. Finally, the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the rise of a “transnational business feminism” contributed to make the concept of board diversity more popular. As we will see, however, this assertion of a board diversity must be tempered for several reasons.

Stéphanie Ginalski is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne, and a co-founder and member of the Swiss Elites Observatory. Her main research interests focus on business elite and the transformation of capitalism during the twentieth century. She is currently co-leading a research project on local power structures and transnational connections of Swiss elites in a historical perspective (1890–2020), in which she investigates a new field of research on art societies.

Why does globalization-induced economic distress lead to popular support for right-wing populist parties? While it has become widely accepted that the recent wave of right-wing populist parties’ success across Western democracies has much to do with globalization-induced economic distresses, the question why the “losers” of globalization turn to right-wing populist parties, rather than to left-wing ones, remains surprisingly under-researched, both theoretically and empirically. In particular, little attention has been paid to investigate 1) how citizens’ policy-relevant preferences translate into political choices; 2) how different domestic institutional configurations affect such micro-level links between individual attitudes and partisan preferences. The paper aims to fill these gaps by shedding systematic light on how “supply side” institutions such as compensation mechanisms, labor market institutions, and electoral rules affect cross-national variations in how globalization-driven individuals’ preferences for redistribution translate into vote choices. Empirically, the paper relies on European Social Survey (ESS) data covering several EU countries in the 2002-2020 period.

Arlo Poletti Arlo Poletti is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and social research at the University of Trento.

Education system development in Britain and Denmark is rife with paradox. Eighteenth-century Denmark was a poor, backward, rural country with serfs on the periphery of Europe; yet in 1814, it became the first nation in the world (apart from Prussia) to establish a mass, public education system. In sharp contrast, rich industrial Britain developed public primary education only in 1870, although church societies founded earlier private schools for middle-class and some poor children. Late-developing Denmark with its agricultural economy established strong, publicly-funded vocational training programs at the secondary level; whereas, Britain – the leader of the industrial revolution – created a unitary secondary education system that did little to cultivate technical skills. The British unitary, humanistic secondary schools received broad support from leftist intellectuals who feared that a two-tiered, class-based schooling would disadvantage the working class. Yet over the course of the twentieth-century, Denmark with its two-tiered (and initially class-based) education system nevertheless achieved much higher levels of equality than Britain.
Imagine All the People explores why Denmark developed an education system for all while Britain created superb schools for elites but only minimally served the masses. I argue that much of the variation in education system development and the provision of schooling for the working classes had to do with national cultural conceptions of society, class and the balance between the individual and the collective. As early as the eighteenth-century, Danish elites believed that education for all the people was essential to building a strong society, enabling the state-building project and growing the Danish export economy. In contrast, many British writers feared that widespread literacy would instigate social uprising and even radical reformers fretted that investments in the poor would only accelerate overpopulation.

Cathie Jo Martin is Professor of Political Science at Boston University. Her current work explores the cultural origins of diverse education systems and the impacts of these systems on the social inclusion and low-skill youth. Martin’s last book, The Political Construction of Business Interests: Coordination, Growth and Equality (co-authored with Duane Swank, Cambridge University Press 2012) won the David Greenstone book prize from the Politics and History section of APSA. The book investigates the origins of coordinated capitalism and the circumstances under which employers 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), Shifting the Burden: the Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (University of Chicago Press, 1991) and the co-edited (with Jane Mansbridge) Political Negotiation (Brookings 2015).

The heterogenous literature on the so-called ‘new state capitalism’ has provoked considerable academic and popular interest in recent years, but also critique regarding how to analytically bolster the concept and improve empirical understanding. As the largest exporter of financial services in the world, the City plays a crucial yet controversial role in the reproduction of money. Understanding the institutional remaking of this global financial hub has been a preoccupation of scholars within political economy and geography. Among prominent enquiries, authors have examined the City’s transnational role in financial capitalism and its domestic influence on the British economy, often in tension with manufacturing industry. In particular, theorists have pointed to a ‘core institutional nexus’ in rulemaking and elite social ties between private financial companies, the Bank of England, and the Treasury. However, one major deficiency in this literature concerns how it accounts for the role of sub-state institutions in the configuration of financial power. Remarkably, we know comparatively little about the main municipal authority with significant capacity to shape financial governance: the City of London Corporation. The Corporation is a strange hybrid: ancient, yet modern; public, yet private; domestic, yet international; visible, yet secret. As a local governing body, it conducts all the ordinary work of a public authority. But the Corporation also has many peculiar features which distinguish it from other public institutions, including vigorous support of financial services through planning law, lobbying, and other promotional efforts.
In his lecture, Mathew Eagleton-Pierce argues that the new state capitalism framework offers a vehicle for dissecting how the Corporation operates in the service of global finance. Three themes are examined. First, he explores the role of the Corporation in planning and ‘placemaking’ urban design within its jurisdiction, but also how it makes extraterritorial claims of authority in London, the UK, and elsewhere. A particular spotlight is on how the organisation evolved from a strongly English, male, elite social milieu, rooted around heritage concerns for the build environment, to one that is more international, socially diverse, and keen to meet the precise commercial demands of finance. Second, he tackles the difficult question of periodisation raised by debates on the new state capitalism, suggesting that the organisation resists neat temporal divisions. He claims that the Corporation justifies itself via multiple temporalities: from ancient liberties and ceremonies to recasting itself as a modern outfit collaborating with state and private entities. Third, he discusses the limits of the Corporation’s power, particularly in light of the radical project of Brexit and the right-wing, populist reshifting of the Conversative Party which has challenged the Corporation and the position of the City in international capitalism. In sum, the paper reveals how a powerful municipal agency works within the financial system, in the process problematising how we understand the diverse forms of the new state capitalism.

Matthew Eagleton-Pierce is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at SOAS University of London. All his research has been preoccupied with understanding the forms of power in capitalism, with a particular interest around the nexus between material and symbolic power. Empirical work which investigates these larger tendencies is focused on three areas of global political economy: (1) trade (WTO; NGOs and trade policy); (2) finance (City of London institutional politics); and (3) ideology (neoliberalism, the politics of managerialism). His disciplinary location is within international political economy and international political sociology. He is the author of Symbolic Power in the World Trade Organization (Oxford, 2013) and Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2016).

State enterprises, sovereign funds and other state-capital hybrids have become major engines of global capitalism. How can we explain their global rise and organizational transformation into increasingly sophisticated and globally competitive forms? Why do they increasingly emulate the practices and organizational goals of comparable private-sector entities, adopt the techniques of modern finance, resort to mixed-ownership, and extend their operations across geographic space? After critically engaging with arguments which emphasize the role of firm strategies, developmentalist logics, financialized norms, and Polanyian double movements, we develop an explanatory model of organizational change grounded in historical-geographical materialism and economic geographies of the firm. We locate the expansion of state ownership (the role of states as owners) in the historical development and geographical remaking of global capitalism, and in particular, the emergence of a new constellation of international divisions of labor. This created the conditions for a massive round of centralization of capital as state property (the mass of capital controlled by states) since the early 2000s. The modern, marketized, globally-spread state-capital hybrid emerged as an ‘organizational fix’ to mediate the geographical contradictions and imperatives associated with this process. Purposive organizational adaption consisted in developing new skills, operational capabilities, and mixed-ownership structures in order to leverage the financial system, allow for the development of liquid forms of state property, and facilitate the expansion of the latter into global circuits of capital. As such, the article contributes to debates on the role of the state in global value chains, the firm-state nexus, and state capitalism.

Ilias Alami is a political economist and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Uppsala University. Prior to joining Uppsala University, he held a postdoctoral research position at Maastricht University (where he worked on the ERC-funded SWFsEUROPE project) and a lectureship in International Politics at the University of Manchester. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo and the University of Johannesburg. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of global political economy, money and finance, state capitalism, North-South relations, theories of the state, and the articulations between race/class/coloniality. He is the author of Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets (Routledge, 2019), which was shortlisted for the British International Studies Association 2019 best book in international political economy award, and The Specter of State Capitalism (forthcoming with OUP, co-authored with Adam Dixon).