Events

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).