Events

Eelke Heemskerk is associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He received his PhD at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research in 2006. Eelke is management consultant at The Galan Group where he works with top management teams and boards of public and private organisations on issues of corporate governance and strategy. He published on corporate governance, corporate elites, social networks and institutional reform in the Netherlands and Europe. Some selected publications are availabe on this site. In his current research Eelke is interested big data related to networks of corporate ownership and control.He directs the ERC funded CORPNET research group. He also works on how social networks influence boardroom decision-making and behavioral corporate governance.

Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations, and relations entangled in this process. The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure, including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits, agricultural seeds, and “natural capital”; and of publics, including such public goods as higher education and “monetizable social ills.” Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism.

Fabian Muniesa is a professor at Mines ParisTech (the Ecole des Mines de Paris). Originally trained as a sociologist, he has developped expertise in fields such as science and technology studies, economic sociology, economic anthropology and organization studies. His current areas of interest and research projects include: the sociology of finance, the anthropology of capitalism, the history of experimental methods in the social sciences, the pragmatics of calculation, and the politics of innovation. He is the direction of the Observatory of Responsible Innovation and the holder of an ERC Starting Grant.

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.