Events

Increasing market instability generates political friction, but not all market instability becomes a matter of public debate. Reviewing and building on proliferating research on the cultural landscapes of economic action, I examine what is included in public discussion of “the economy,” the terms in which economic developments are evaluated, and the terms of debate in which critical claimsmaking is formulated. To focus the analysis, I compare and contrast the emergence of discourses of globalization in the late twentieth century with the recent re-emergence of economic nationalism in the public sphere.

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.

Martin Giraudeau is a sociologist and historian of accounting, organizations and capitalism. His work draws on methods from the sociology and history of science and technology, which he applies to the sciences and technologies of business, so as to explain their historical emergence as well as the evolutions of their roles in organizations and the economy since the early-modern period. He has conducted extensive empirical research on the rise of entrepreneurship over the past two and a half centuries, with a specific focus on the evolving forms and uses of business plans.

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.

Christine Musselin is a CNRS research professor at the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO). She leads comparative studies on university governance, higher education policies, and academic labor markets. She has been a DAAD fellow in 1984-1985 and a Fulbright and Harvard fellow in 1998-1999. Between 2007 and 2013, she was the head of the CSO and between 2013 and 2018 she was the Vice-President for Research of Sciences Po.

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).

Bruno Palier is CNRS Research Director at Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée (CEE), and Director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP). Among his publications are numerous articles on welfare reforms and various books. In 2018, he co-edited Welfare Democracies and Party Politics with Philip Manow and Hanna Schwander (OUP).