Events

Globalization is underpinned by international organizations — intergovernmental, non-governmental, or private — that develop norms to diffuse around the world. In their talk, Alexander Kentikelenis and Leonard Seabrooke present an integrative model for understanding how boardroom dynamics within international organizations impact the content of global norms. They argue that these processes are determined, initially, by board members’ education and careers — both a function of the dominant norm apparatus of globalization — and, subsequently, by boardroom interactions between these individuals. They document these processes by tracing the education and career trajectories of all 727 board members between 1980 and 2009 of the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (i.e., state representatives), a body that decides on economic policy issues impacting the lives of billions. They find that they are homogeneous in terms of academic training, but heterogeneous in terms of professional backgrounds. They further document how the aforementioned attributes of board members impact the way they behave in the boardroom, and — by extension — organizational output. The findings reveal that global norm-making is driven by professionalization and elite socialization dynamics in apex communities, even in formal intergovernmental contexts where the primacy of state interests is commonly assumed to dominate.

Alexander Kentikelenis is a social scientist interested in political economy, international affairs, and global health and development. He is assistant professor of political economy and sociology at Bocconi University. His research focuses on the links between global processes, national responses, and local- or individual-level outcomes. His work has appeared in leading academic journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, The Lancet, and World Development. Part of his research formed the basis of parliamentary questions in the UK House of Lords and the European Parliament.

Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology at the Department of Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School. His work is known for its interdisciplinarity – drawing on political science, economic sociology, organization studies, and management studies. Seabrooke’s current research concentrates of transnational professionals across a range of cases, from financial reform experts, to tax justice activists and private sector tax experts, to diplomatic consultants, to sustainability experts, and professionals dealing with demographic issues, among others.

Florian Überbacher’s talk is based on a paper coauthored with Emmanuelle Reuter (University of Neuchatel) and Andreas Georg Scherer (University of Zurich). For decades, the entire population of Swiss private wealth management organizations (PWMOs) engaged in “transnational organizational misconduct” in that they transgressed US law by helping US clients evade US tax liabilities. The authors use a qualitative case study to explore whether, and, if so, under which conditions, the enforcement of US national law against some Swiss PWMOs led to a general deterrence of transnational organizational misconduct in the Swiss PWMO population, such that it deterred not only the targeted PWMOs from violating US law but also the other Swiss PWMOs that were not targeted by US enforcement acts (henceforth referred to as “non-targets”). Based on the authors’ findings, they develop a constructivist theory about the general deterrence of transnational organizational misconduct. In contrast to the widely held Westphalian view of nation states, this theory conceptualizes nation states’ territory, i.e., the scope of the geographic space over which national governments have legitimate authority and within which their national institutional rules are thus valid and binding, not as ontologically fixed but rather as an outcome of social construction. Specifically, the theory points to the role of non-targets’ territory beliefs as a critical factor for explaining whether national governments can achieve general deterrence of organizational misconduct committed in the transnational space (or not). The authors argue that non-targets’ territory beliefs shape whether they perceive their conduct to be within (or outside) the reach of national government and thus also whether they become compliant with national institutional rules (or not). They also suggest that non-targets’ territory beliefs are influenced by characteristics of the enforcement acts of national governments as well as by the territory claims that other national governments may make over a given geographic space. The study makes significant contributions to institutional, regulatory, and territoriality scholarship.

Florian Überbacher is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Management at the University of Zurich. He received a PhD in Management from the University of St. Gallen. His research focuses on the role of power and influence in institutional environments with current projects focusing in particular on how multinational companies and other international organizations can be governed. His research has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, and other outlets.

Discussant Oliver Levingston is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre d'études européennes et de politique comparée (CEE), Sciences Po, working on a project on "Who is leading the charge? Innovation and influence in the epistemic community for macroprudential regulation between central banks, IMF and academia."

Kate Andrias examines a largely forgotten antimonopoly tradition in the United States, advanced by organized labor in the first half of the twentieth century. Historical scholarship on labor and antitrust has tended to focus on the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) efforts to prevent courts from applying antitrust law to organized labor—a struggle that lasted from the enactment of the Sherman Act in 1890 until the US Supreme Court’s decisions in Apex Hosiery Co. v. Leade and United States v. Hutcheson (1941). But labor’s fight for an antitrust exemption was only a part of its agenda regarding monopoly power. During the first half of the twentieth century, the industrial unions sought not only to free workers’ collective activity from courts’ sanction; they also sought transform the workplace and the state in an effort to diffuse concentrations of private power and to achieve greater economic and political democracy. Notably, their primary focus was not necessarily on making business smaller but rather on building up countervailing organization and democratic powers to deal with big business. On some occasions, they even demanded nationalization of industry as part of their broader antimonopoly vision. By broadening the lens beyond the AFL’s struggle for a labor exemption, this Essay reveals a richer and more complicated picture of the American antimonopoly tradition—one with relevance for today’s problems of concentrated economic power and the contemporary labor market.

Kate Andrias is Professor of Law at the Uninversity of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. She teaches and writes about constitutional law, labor and employment law, and administrative law, with a focus on problems of economic and political inequality. Recent work focuses on how labor law can be reformed to serve the needs of low-wage workers and to help remediate problems of poverty and inequality. Her articles have been published in numerous books and journals, including the Supreme Court Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and the Texas Law Review.

This talk tackles broad questions about why some citizens vehemently resist pro-democratic changes and what fuels right-wing mobilization in South Korea. Drawing from ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and archival data, Yang aims to understand how the right has constructed its political identity and mobilized social support, and how its political practices have contributed to particular political outcomes during the post-authoritarian period (1987-present). The unique geopolitical conditions with which the Korean peninsula has been faced — as the last nation still divided by the Cold War, and still technically at war — have produced exceptional ideological terrain in South Korea. The anti-communist, right-wing South Korean state, backed by the US military, formed extensive coercive apparatuses to repress any oppositional forces and internal “enemies” in the name of “national security” and “liberal democracy.” The authoritarian state and its allies — the dominant conservative ruling party, mainstream conservative media, and government-sponsored civic organizations—dominated South Korean society for more than four decades. Despite the arrival of electoral democracy in 1987 and changing geopolitical conditions, the Korean right has continued to deploy anti-communist rhetoric to condemn liberal progressive groups, accusing them of undermining the Republic of Korea. Exploring how right-wing elites and intellectuals capitalize on Cold War geopolitical contestation and glorify the national modernization projects of authoritarian regimes, this research will demonstrate how the Korean right has constructed ideological and organizational infrastructures and maintained its hegemonic position in the post-authoritarian period. My research will broaden our understanding of the challenges and difficulties associated with the persistence of right-wing authoritarian legacies after democratic transitions.

Myungji Yang is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. Her research interests include the political economy of development, class politics and social inequality, democracy and civil society, globalization, and East Asia. Her work on the urban middle class and democracy in South Korea has appeared in Sociological Inquiry, Critical Asian Studies, and Korea Observer. Her first book, From Miracle to Mirage: The Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960-2015, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

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.

Monica Prasad's talk is based on her new book Starving the Beast. She asks why Republican politicians have focused so relentlessly on cutting taxes over the last several decades − whether the economy is booming or in recession, whether the federal budget is in surplus or deficit, and even though total taxes in the U.S. are already lower than in other developed countries. Drawing on archival documents that have never before been seen, Prasad traces the history of the famous 1981 "supply side" tax cut which became the cornerstore for the next several decades of Republican domestic economic policy. She argues that the main forces behind tax cuts are not business group pressure, racial animus, or a belief that tax cuts will pay for themselves. Rather, the tax cut movement arose because in America − unlike in the rest of the advanced industrial world − progressive policies are not embedded within a larger political economy that is favorable to business, a situation whose origins she explored in a prior book, The Land of Too Much).

Monica Prasad is Professor of Sociology and Director of Graduate Studies at Northwestern University. Monica Prasad's areas of interest are political sociology, economic sociology, and comparative historical sociology. Prasad's scholarship has won several grants and awards, including the Fulbright award, the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Grant, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

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).