Events

Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought
In the seventeenth century, English economic theory suddenly lost interest in the moral status of exchange and became increasingly concerned with the economic roots of national prosperity. This book uses historical, comparative, and new computational methods to shed light on why this seismic shift occurred. All methods point to two factors: the marginal political power of English merchants coupled with the rise of the company form. The increasing influence and power of the companies amplified the arguments and controversies of the merchants, while their distance from the halls of government led them to shout those arguments out to the public. Unlike in the Dutch Republic, merchants could not directly implement trade and fiscal policy. Instead they had to persuade the Crown, Parliament, and Privy Council. As a result, they published arguments based in logical arguments, empirical fact, and the scientific method demonstrating how their preferred policies would contribute to the greater benefit of the state and commonwealth. This new moral framework of growth, prosperity, and the wealth of nations evolved over time into the roots of classical economic theory. The talk provides an institutional answer to why the science of economics developed as it did. It also provides a model for applying new methods of network analysis and topic modeling to important and enduring historical problems.

Emily Erikson is Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship and Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. She works on the emergence and development of global networks, organizations, and the institutions of capitalism and democracy. In her award-winning book, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company (PUP 2014), she shows how the autonomy of agents in the East India Company fostered informal information sharing and organizational flexibility and illuminates the processes underpinning the emergence of early multi-national firms and the structure of early modern global trade. Her forthcoming book, The End of Equity: Companies and Politics in the Development of a New Science of Economics (CUP), identifies a crucial transformation in economic thinking in the early modern era, when moral issues took a backseat to growth imperatives.

Translating Expertise across Work Contexts: US Puppeteers Move from Stage to Screen
Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across work contexts, how expertise translates across contexts remains less understood. Here, we examine how a shift in work context — which reorders the relative attention experts pay to distinct types of audiences — redefines what it means to be an expert. Our study’s setting is an established expertise in the creative industry: puppet manipulation. Through an examination of US puppeteers’ move from stage to screen (that is, film and television), we show that, while the two settings call on mostly similar repertoires of skills, puppeteers in stage ground their claims to expertise in a dialogue with spectators and consequently view expertise as achieving believability; by contrast, puppeteers in screen invoke the need to deliver on cue when dealing with producers, directors, and coworkers and view expertise as achieving task mastery. When moving between stage and screen, puppeteers therefore prioritize the needs of certain types of audiences over others’ and gradually reshape their own views of expertise. Our findings embed the nature of expertise in experts’ ordering of types of audience to attend to and provide insights for explaining how expertise can shift and become coopted by workplaces.

Michel Anteby is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Boston University's Questrom School of Business and (by courtesy) Sociology at Boston University's College of Arts and Sciences. His research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations, and the organizations they belong to. He examines more specifically the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. Empirical foci for these inquiries have included airport security officers, business school professors, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, ghostwriters, and subway drivers.

Turning Inequality “Inside Out”: Accounting for Cases and Causal Complexity Via Multiple Regression

Multiple forms of inequality intersect to shape important outcomes, from individuals’ life chances to rates of political participation. Explanations of these outcomes typically follow one of two models, emphasizing either net effects or the unique features of the cases that constitute those effects. This difference in focus is driven in no small part by methodology, with the former approach relying on multiple regression and the latter on case-based or comparative methods. This methodological divide poses challenges for research that aims to identify aggregate trends while accounting for substantive differences among observations, and allowing for the kinds of causal complexity associated with the intersection of multiple forms of inequality. Thus, unpacking the relationship between aggregate trends and the cases that constitute those trends stands as a critical challenge. In this talk, I discuss how a novel approach to statistical analysis, which brings cases and causal complexity to the fore by turning regression “inside out”, can account for the forms of causal complexity privileged by case-oriented methods. Using two empirical examples, I illustrate how this approach can be used to account for equifinality, multifinality, and asymmetric causality.

Eric Schoon is an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University. His research is motivated by intersecting theoretical, substantive, and methodological interests. His theoretical interests center on the assignment and consequences of cultural classifications. This is reflected in his research on legitimacy, which examines how legitimacy and illegitimacy are evaluated, established, and invoked, and how these classifications affect socially significant outcomes. He explores these questions in the context of contentious politics. His published research in this area combines international comparison with a particular focus on the Middle East broadly, and Turkey in particular. As a comparative historical sociologist, Eric Schoon uses a variety of methods including historical research, comparative methods, quantitative network analysis, and statistical analysis, and he is interested in multi- and mixed-methods approaches to social research. These interests also motivate research on new methodologies for comparative and relational analysis.

Women on Corporate Boards: The Swiss Case in a Historical and Comparative Perspective
The subject of women’s inclusion on corporate boards has attracted extensive attention in recent decades in academic literature as well as in the public sphere. However, most of the studies focus on the very recent times. Based on an empirical analysis of the largest Swiss firms’ board members across the past hundred years, this presentation will discuss the historical and political factors that have contributed to the enduring exclusion of women, and to their recent integration. It will show that until the beginning of the 1970s, the very few women sitting in the corporate boards belonged to the families owning the firms. Two main factors contributed then to the progressive opening of the corporate elites to women. First, the extending in 1971 of “universal suffrage” to women led to a feminisation of the political elites, and women with a political profile entered the boardrooms of firms in the distribution and retailing sector. Second, the increasing globalisation of the economy at the end of the 20th century contributed to weaken the cohesion of the very male and Swiss corporate elite, and to a concomitant decline in interlocking directorates among Swiss firms – a development that has also been observed in other non-liberal economies. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, the presence of women in Swiss firms remained low in international comparison, and they were still hitting the “glass ceiling” regarding the access to top positions. This research is part of a largest project entitled “Women in Corporate Networks,” which includes different emerging and developed economies (Argentina, Chile, Italy, Switzerland, India, and Australia). The project aims to identify the influence of external as well as internal factors on the way women’s participation in corporate networks has evolved over the longer term, and will allow to put the Swiss case in a comparative perspective.

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.