Events

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.

This talk tackles broad questions about why some citizens vehemently resist pro-democratic changes and what fuels right-wing mobilization in South Korea. Drawing from ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and archival data, Yang aims to understand how the right has constructed its political identity and mobilized social support, and how its political practices have contributed to particular political outcomes during the post-authoritarian period (1987-present). The unique geopolitical conditions with which the Korean peninsula has been faced — as the last nation still divided by the Cold War, and still technically at war — have produced exceptional ideological terrain in South Korea. The anti-communist, right-wing South Korean state, backed by the US military, formed extensive coercive apparatuses to repress any oppositional forces and internal “enemies” in the name of “national security” and “liberal democracy.” The authoritarian state and its allies — the dominant conservative ruling party, mainstream conservative media, and government-sponsored civic organizations—dominated South Korean society for more than four decades. Despite the arrival of electoral democracy in 1987 and changing geopolitical conditions, the Korean right has continued to deploy anti-communist rhetoric to condemn liberal progressive groups, accusing them of undermining the Republic of Korea. Exploring how right-wing elites and intellectuals capitalize on Cold War geopolitical contestation and glorify the national modernization projects of authoritarian regimes, this research will demonstrate how the Korean right has constructed ideological and organizational infrastructures and maintained its hegemonic position in the post-authoritarian period. My research will broaden our understanding of the challenges and difficulties associated with the persistence of right-wing authoritarian legacies after democratic transitions.

Myungji Yang is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. Her research interests include the political economy of development, class politics and social inequality, democracy and civil society, globalization, and East Asia. Her work on the urban middle class and democracy in South Korea has appeared in Sociological Inquiry, Critical Asian Studies, and Korea Observer. Her first book, From Miracle to Mirage: The Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960-2015, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Lynette Spillman is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching interests are grounded in cultural sociology and extend to economic sociology, social theory, comparative historical sociology, and political sociology. Her work examines cultural influences on social processes, and she investigates why meanings vary, how meanings influence human action, and the ways meaning-making affects social cohesion and conflict. She is especially interested in understanding economic and political culture in long-term historical processes. Her latest book, Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (University of Chicago Press, 2012), examines meaning-making in business. The book is winner of the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in Cultural Sociology, 2013, and co-winner of the Viviana Zelizer Award for Best Book in Economic Sociology, 2013. Based on a new, comprehensive census of national business associations and a rich archive of twenty-five representative associations, the book tracks the history, activities, and economic and political purposes of voluntary non-profit business groups, and the cultural production and symbolic repertoires making business meaningful.

In his talk, Juan Pardo-Guerra will address the question of how markets come to happen and how they change over time. He argues that markets emerge not only through propensities to "truck, barter, and exchange" but also through the invisible work of sociotechnical agents that make the devices of transactions possible, and will illustrate this with two cases. The first concerns the automation of the London Stock Exchange, characterized by the work of lowly engineers that, with time, sweat, and persistence, transformed the way finance was done in Britain. The second case concerns a market we know all too well: the market for academic labor. By exploring how market-like devices have reshaped the British social scientists, he will highlight how vocational calls contribute to the marketization of knowledge, academia, and our professional souls.

Juan Pardo-Guerra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California San Diego. His research explores the connections between markets, cultures and technologies. Combining theoretical insights from economic sociology and science and technology studies, he has conducted historical research on the automation of stock exchanges, the development of national financial infrastructures, and the emergence of algorithmic and high frequency trading.

Governments have enacted strict budgetary rules to impose retrenchment upon the public sector, with the goal of reducing deficits and ultimately balancing public budgets. The purported justification for these rules is that the public sector is engaged in out of control government spending, and this spending must be restrained by rules that often require automatic fiscal sanctions on recalcitrant, noncompliant governments. My project challenges this logic. I argue that the origins of these rules are far less due to governments behaving badly then they are a response to the growing financialization of the economy. Financialization refers to the increasing scale and profitability of the finance sector at the expense of the rest of the economy, and the shrinking of the government rules that regulate it in order to generate financial rewards. The financial sector’s historically expanding political power resulted in the lax regulation. The consequence of this regulatory regime has produced repeated financial crises, where the burden of these crises has been imposed on the public sector through the activation of these repressive budgetary rules. My project argues that even when some governments attempt to restrain this financial power, as the EU has with the European Banking Union following the Euro Debt Crisis, financialization is left subject to a vicious cycle of regulation, deregulation, and reregulation, which leaves these economies vulnerable to financial crisis. The U.S. is now experiencing a period of deregulation following the reregulation that occurred during the Obama administration in reaction to the Financial Crisis. This cycle remains a ongoing feature of perennial fiscal crisis management and austerity politics.

James Savage is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. His research and teaching focus on comparative budgetary, fiscal, and macroeconomic policy, with an emphasis on the United States, the European Union, Iraq and Japan. He is particularly interested in the development of macrobudgetary rules, procedures, and institutions in these countries, and how they influence fiscal outcomes. His research on the EU includes a study of the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact.

Major disruptions in the path of technological and institutional change offer an opportunity for taking a fresh look at what came before and speculate about what might follow. In her talk, Katharina Pistor will take the Libra, a new global currency that the social media company Facebook plans to launch, as the starting point for re-examining money’s legal foundations and for exploring the possibility that law might be replaced by digital technology as money’s foundation. She will analyze the changing landscape for the governance of money and the realignment of private and public power in the digital age. She will also discuss the possibilities of harnessing the digital technology for alternative forms of money, for money that serves the poor, not just the rich.

Katharina Pistor is the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School. Her research, teaching, and numerous publications span corporate law, corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. In 2012 she was co-recipient (with Martin Hellwig) of the Max Planck Research Award on International Financial Regulation.

The appeal of fascism is often explained with mass propaganda, ideology, violence or charismatic leadership. However, the success of fascist movements was also related to a combination of antidemocratic populism and a technocratic political order. Fascist leaders effectively accused democracy and partisan politics of being unable to resolve the economic and social problems of the post-war period. Rising public debt, unemployment and inflation undermined the legitimacy of democratic governments. Increasing social conflicts and upheavals were attributed to weak institutions, unable of coming to terms with class antagonism and labor disputes. I analyze at three specific policy fields where technocratic concepts had a major impact: The first policy field relates to the economic and financial problems that all countries faced in the aftermath of World War I. The enormous financial burden of the War had a destabilizing effect on almost all European countries, creating huge foreign payment deficits, internal public debts and inflation. The second empirical field analyses projects of generating infrastructures and settlement in rural areas. The third field addresses labor conflicts as a new form of technocratic regulation.

Alexander Nützenadel is Professor of Social and Economic History at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. His areas of research include European fascism, economic knowledge and experts, urban real estate markets around 1900, banking and financial regulation in the 20th century, and historical experiences and economic expectations.

Changing patterns of working time figure prominently in wider patterns of social and economic change. New digital technologies, including those that have facilitated the emergence of the platform economy, have contributed to transformations in the organization of working time, including by increasing the capacities for time flexibility for both employers and workers, as well as by creating new mechanisms to regulate and monitor working time. This presentation will explore the ways in which new digital technologies are contributing to the reorganization of working time, as well as the ways in which the social organization of working time constitutes a key site of contention in the digital economy. Drawing from interview data with workers engaged in forms of work involving digital technologies in Toronto, Canada, and with attention to patterns of both change - through new forms of work and new work practices - and continuity - through the presence of longstanding, underlying social relations of work that persist through this context of change, the presentation will examine the socio-economic dynamics of technologically mediated working time change. The presentation will also consider the implications for both working time regulation and collective organizing amongst workers, with the aim of contributing to the development of new strategies to counter the strains and uncertainties of contemporary working time pressures in the digital economy.

Mark P. Thomas is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto. He is former Director of the Global Labour Research Centre at York, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University, and a Visiting Researcher at the Institut de Recherches Sociologiques, Université de Genève. His current areas of research include: working time and new technologies; labor, austerity, and populism in urban North America; and the enforcement of employment standards legislation in Canada. Thomas is the author of Regulating Flexibility: The Political Economy of Employment Standards and co-author of Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues and Closing the Employment Standards Enforcement Gap: Improving Protections for People in Precarious Jobs (forthcoming).