Events

Adam Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs. His current research examines the social consequences of financial capitalism in the contemporary United States. He is interested in how institutional changes associated with "financialization" have reshaped various socio-economic domains, and how organizations, communities and households respond to these changes.

As wages have stagnated in many advanced economies, market transformations have opened new pathways by which members of the upper-middle classes can make entrepreneurial investments in assets. This manifests in increasing rates of borrowing, investing, and various so-called “side hustles,” which are intended to supplement if not replace labor income. Such practices include everything from trading stocks to renting a spare bedroom through platforms such as Airbnb. In his lecture, Adam Goldstein refers to a study jointly conducted with Ziyao Tian. It considers the consequences for household income factors and social class structure across twenty-one countries from 2001–2016. Is financialization producing a growing class configuration of petit rentiers in capitalist economies, as Piketty suggests? The results highlight a striking paradox: During the twenty-first century, most advanced countries have seen a decline in the share of households who accrue more than 5 percent, 10 percent, or 20 percent of income from assets. With a few exceptions, similar patterns hold among under- and over-65 households, and across income quartiles. By assessing the degree to which between-country differences are driven by differential rates of asset ownership, or by differential opportunities to monetize those assets, Goldstein discusses several explanations for these surprising trends and considers time-varying factors to explain over-time declines in the petit rentier class.

Horacio Ortiz is CNRS Researcher at IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine, and Associate Professor at The East China Normal University in Shanghai. His main research fields are anthropology of money; anthropology of finance; anthropology of global processes; philosophy of social sciences.

Digital payment systems Alipay and Wechat Pay, created only a few years ago, are now used daily by hundreds of millions of people. They are connected to credit systems providing loans for consumption and for small and medium enterprises, which did not exist on this scale in the banking system before. And they are also central in the redefinition of state and citizenship as economic policy is officially oriented towards increasing consumption and as systems such as “social credit” develop. Based on preliminary research of everyday practices and institutional settings, Horacio Ortiz proposes to approach these transformations from the point of view of a pragmatist anthropology of money. In his presentation, he focuses on the co-constitutive multiple meanings and practices that make money, and sees the following processes as happening together: the transformation of daily practices of money, the development of new financial relations of power through credit systems, and the re-definition of citizenship, state and nation in the particular Chinese institutional setting. A political anthropology of money is proposed to encompass the diversity of these processes putting the issue of monetary distribution and its meanings at the center of the analysis.

Workshop in honor of the launch of the "Dictionnaire d'économie politique: Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoir," edited by Colin Hay and Andy Smith (Presses de Sciences Po, 2018).

Political Economy as an approach focuses on the link between politics and economics, refusing to think one without the other. In a time of disciplinary specialization, it is particularly challenging to maintain such a focus of research. So what is the value added of such an enterprise, given these adverse conditions? This workshop is devoted to answer this question, using the contributions and contributors of the “Dictionnaire d'économie politique: Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoir," to prime the discussion.

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Johannes Lindvall is Professor of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. His academic work is concerned with political institutions, public policy, the role of interest organizations in political decision-making, and, more generally, the relationship between states and markets.

In his talk based on a joint work with Frida Boräng and Sara Kalm, Johannes Lindvall discusses the nature of the relationship between immigration controls and the welfare state. He argues that a major problem with previous empirical research on this topic is that it starts at a point in time when different welfare state models already existed, and clearly defined types of migration were already taken for granted. He presents the results of the analyses of the co-evolution of national immigration controls and national welfare states in a large sample of countries between 1930 and 2010. Legislation is examined concerning the admission of two types of migrants: on the one hand labor migrants, on the other hand refugees and the family members of resident migrants. He shows how the relationship between admission policies and the welfare state has developed between the inter-war period and the present day. This allows important historical developments not only within the area of social policy, but also within the area of international migration, being taken into account.

Julian Brown is an Associate Professor in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His research revolves around a set of interconnected themes: the emergence of new forms of popular protest outside of institutional and organisational frameworks in South Africa; the relationship between courts, the law, and legal discourses (on the one hand) and political struggles (on the other). He is currently working on the customary courts of the segregation era, and attempting to understand the ways in which a semi-invented tradition of customary dispute resolution may have shaped the emergence of a modern social and political African identity in the small towns of the northern Free State.

By many measures, South Africa is the world’s most unequal society. It is also a site of intense protest against social and economic inequality – so much so that some scholars have dubbed it “the protest capital of the world.” These protests may bear a family resemblance to many other movements confronting inequality, such as the “occupy” gatherings, anti-austerity movements, and perhaps even the current “Gilets Jaunes” protests. The context in South Africa is different, however, because these protests use the conceptual framework provided by the entrenchment of socio-economic rights in South Africa’s post-Apartheid constitution. In his lecture, Julian Brown considers recent political challenges to the neoliberal norms of South Africa’s current state, focusing on struggles around the rights to land, housing, secure tenure, and access to employment opportunities. He argues that the use of this rights-based framework by communities of the poor and their allies in civil society has permitted activists to combine disruptive street protests with courtroom challenges to state policies. In doing so, they translate local grievances into national policy developments and programs. The consequences of this are not clear – but they may suggest new alliances and new ways of conceiving of struggles against widening inequality.