This section provides a description of each of SASE’s research networks and links to bios and contact information for SASE’s network organizers. You can also contact the network organizers through this page.
Research networks provide a stable spine of research at the SASE conference. For information on establishing a new network, please consult the guidelines here.
This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies, particularly as they relate to the participatory, collectivist, and democratic aspirations of organizations, markets, and other spaces of collaboration and contestation.
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Katherine Chen
Prof. Katherine K. Chen’s research specialties cover organizational studies and economic sociology. Her award-winning book, Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event, shows how an enabling organization can support members’ efforts without succumbing to either under-organizing’s insufficient structure and coordination or over-organizing’s excessive structure and coercive control. Additional articles on prosumption, storytelling, and communification have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, The Sociological Quarterly, and other journals.
To understand how organizations collectively innovate—or maintain the status quo—through relational work and advocacy, Chen is working on two parallel ethnographic projects. One examines the coordination efforts among organizations that help older adults who prefer to “age in place” in their homes. A 2019 Socio-Economic Review article based on this research shows how markets are supported by “bounded relationality” a process by which intermediary organizations train people to undertake consumer routines. Another project studies how a flagship microschool and its network of affiliates communicate innovative ways of organizing learning to multiple audiences. This research focuses on how this network blends a seemingly unlikely mixture of practices from the democratic free school movement, decolonization and abolition efforts, and software project management to promote lifelong learning in communities.
Besides serving as a mentor to tenure-track faculty in CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP), Chen has focused on developing and supporting interdisciplinary communities that study organizations and markets, with a focus on participatory and liberatory practices that prefigure and expand future possibilities. With Victor Tan Chen, she co-edited a special issue that showcases cutting-edge research on democratic practices by presenters from SASE annual meetings between 2017 and 2019. This Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume, titled “Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy,” will be published in March 2021. In addition, Chen has contributed to methodological discussions regarding research on organizations, including what we can learn from “extreme” cases and how to undertake organizational ethnography in her work as a regular contributor to orgtheory.net, a popular sociology blog, and its 2021 spin-off, the Markets, Power, and Culture blog.
Chen is currently an associate professor of sociology at The City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from Stanford University.
Joyce Rothschild
Joyce Rothschild is professor emerita at Virginia Tech, having served as a professor in the university’s Department of Sociology and School of Public and International Affairs for 27 years. Her research projects have had several empirical foci – from worker cooperatives to whistle blowers – while her writing has returned frequently to the question of how organizations can accomplish their purposes without hierarchical control. Overall, her work develops a collectivist-democratic alternative to bureaucracy – that is, a form of organization that effectively offers voice and agency to all of its members. Her book with J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), won the C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Marc Schneiberg
Marc Schneiberg, the John C. Pock Professor of Sociology at Reed College, is an economic and organizational sociologist who research focuses mainly on the rise, contemporary fates, and economic consequences of organizational diversity and alternatives to giant, shareholder corporations within American capitalism. He has studied the evolution of cooperative and other alternative enterprise systems in the US, including electrical and agricultural cooperatives, insurance mutuals, community banks, and credit unions. He has also addressed how such systems can help reshape markets, subject corporations to countervailing forces, and foster both resilience and shared prosperities in local economies. With National Science Foundation support, he is currently studying organizational variety within American banking and how it combined with state policy to channel flows of loans away from—and in to—small business in poor and minority communities during the pandemic. Schneiberg also has long standing interests in institutions and their relationships with social movements, and in economic governance, including association, regulation and self-regulation in American manufacturing and finance. He has been honored to serve in various capacities in the American Sociological Association, the NSF and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. His work can be accessed on his webpage.
Jason Spicer
Jason Spicer’s research and teaching focus on the relationship between politics and the economy at multiple spatial scales, from the local to the trans-national. He primarily examines: (a) the potential of alternative economic models, such as cooperatives and social and solidarity economy organizational forms, to create a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable economy; and (b) the role policy, planning, and political processes play in conditioning the viability of alternative economic arrangements in different contexts. He also engages in applied policy and advisory work with governments and third sector partner organizations. His academic and applied research have appeared in wide-ranging outlets, from Socio-Economic Review and Economic Development Quarterly to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. For more information, visit his website.
Victor Tan Chen
Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies economic inequality, labor markets, social policy, and alternative organizational forms. He is the author of three books on economic issues: The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (with Katherine S. Newman), which was named one of Library Journal’s best business books of the year; Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy, for which he received the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association; and Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (with Katherine K. Chen), which received the Joyce Rothschild Book Prize from the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations. Chen’s work has been featured in the Atlantic, New York Times, BBC News, Fortune, and NPR. He also edits In The Fray, an award-winning magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues.
This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies, particularly as they relate to the participatory, collectivist, and democratic aspirations of organizations, markets, and other spaces of collaboration and contestation. We examine how communities, enterprises, and societies can be organized around principles of democratic governance or other substantive values that go beyond calculative self-interest and instrumental relations. We welcome studies of activities coordinated through formal organizations, informal groups, decentralized projects, or participatory decision-making. While our network supports research on how such collectivities may reinforce prevailing conventions of hierarchical, bureaucratic, and profit-driven organizational structures and markets, we also seek to cultivate scholarship on groups and initiatives that promote change, including explicitly transformative or prefigurative organizations and various forms of collaborative or shared ownership. For instance, individual and panel submissions could examine: how values-based practices and relations promote more inclusive, liberatory, democratic, equitable, or caring communities; how such forms influence work, family, and community life and shape fundamental understandings and imaginaries regarding how economies and polities are constituted; and how state policies and cultural and market pressures affect these collectivities.
Examples of relevant phenomena include, but are not limited to: affinity groups; anti-oppressive human services; artistic or cultural collectives (including democratic governance and autonomy-respecting practices in creative organizations more broadly); collectively governed commons; community land trusts; community real estate investment cooperatives; community-based economic exchanges; community-run marketplaces; decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs); free schools; giving circles; limited equity housing cooperatives and co-housing; mutual companies and aid networks; open, commons-based, and inclusive innovation and valuation frameworks; participatory budgeting; public-private partnerships; social enterprises; solidarity economies; and worker, producer, or consumer cooperatives, including platform cooperatives.
One of SASE’s original networks, Network A was founded by Amitai Etzioni and was previously named “Communitarian Ideals and Civil Society.” The earlier network focused on the theme of communitarianism: how people, organizations, and institutions exercise social responsibilities based on shared values. In 2021, Network A added a sub-track called “Emergent Organizations: Creating More Participatory, Inclusive, and Caring Civil Societies and Social Economies.” A year later, this sub-track was officially incorporated within the network, which was renamed “Community, Democracy, and Organizations.”
Network A has a moderated email list where you can stay connected with other people who work on these issues and share any news of relevant publications, research in progress, events, and opportunities. You can sign up for the listserv here: http://inthefray.org/list.
For questions about in-person sessions at SASE 2023 in Brazil, please contact:
For questions about virtual sessions that will be held online shortly before SASE 2023 in Brazil, please contact:
Tags
civil society, collectivist-democratic organizations, cooperatives, participatory democracy, participatory organizations
This network considers how domestic, transnational and international institutions and markets influence the contours of developmental opportunities in the global economy.
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Mark Dallas
Mark P. Dallas is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies and Director of Asian Studies at Union College in New York. In 2019, he was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. In 2016-17, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Strategic Management and Public Policy at the School of Business, George Washington University. In 2013-14, he was the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He has also been a visiting scholar at the School of Government at Beijing University and the Shandong Institute of East Asian Studies in Jinan, China. His work has been funded by a Fulbright fellowship, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the National Security Education Program and the Blakemore Foundation, among others.
His research focuses on international and comparative political economy and development, complexity theory and emergence in technology and markets, China and the East Asian region, industrial policy, and the intersection of ‘big data’ and qualitative research methods, including concept formation, categorization and operationalization. His publications primarily engage with issues of governance, power and value creation and capture in global value chains (GVCs) with particular focus on light industries and semiconductors, computing and electronics in China and East Asia. He combines qualitative research with several types of big data, including large-scale firm-level financial and technology datasets and big data, such as hundreds of millions of records of Chinese shipment-level trade data.
Douglas Fuller
Douglas B. Fuller is a professor in the Department of Management of Zhejiang University’s School of Management. He previously taught at King’s College London, Chinese University of Hong Kong and American University. His research spans the political economy of development, technology policy and strategy, and comparative capitalism with a geographic focus on East Asia. The focus of his current research is the relationship between the institutions of China’s political economy and its patterns of technological development. Other current research includes comparative industrial and labor regimes in developing countries, governance of China’s state-owned enterprises, and comparative institutional analysis of the developmental trajectories of the Chinese and Indian semiconductor sectors.
Lauren M. MacLean
Lauren M. MacLean is the Arthur F. Bentley Chair and Professor of Political Science at Indiana University – Bloomington. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of development, investigating the politics of state-building and the everyday exercise of democratic citizenship in post-colonial contexts in Africa and the U.S. Currently, she is examining the politics of climate change, energy poverty, and citizen perceptions of accountability when governments fail to provide reliable electricity in Ghana. She is interested in rapid urbanization, rising inequality, and the role of non-state institutions in democratic governance. Her work draws on history, anthropology, geography, and development economics and combines methodologies through immersive fieldwork to understand how citizens experience and participate in politics.
Pon Souvannaseng
Dr. Pon Souvannaseng is Assistant Professor of Comparative & International Policy in the Global Studies Department at Bentley University. Her expertise spans the politics and finance of energy and infrastructure projects and environmental governance in the developing world, with extensive research experience in East & Southeast Asia and Africa. Her research examines the nexus between states, business and the environment, with special attention to development, finance and climate change issues. She is a Wilson China Fellow, Mansfield-Luce Asia Policy Scholar, and APSA Asia Fellow. A political economist by training, she holds a PhD from the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Pon has served as a researcher at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, ASEAN Labour Secretariat and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She is an Affiliate of the Centre for Crisis Studies & Mitigation at the University of Manchester and a Non-Resident Fellow of the East-West Center, Washington DC. Her research has been supported by Fulbright, UKRI, Japan Foundation and US Embassy Tokyo grants.
Caroline Arnold
Caroline E. Arnold is an associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her interdisciplinary research centers on comparative political economy of development, with a focus on India and Turkey; it brings together approaches from the study of global value chains, historical sociology, and economic history. As a Co-Organizer of Network B, “Globalization and Socio-Economic Development” since 2013, she has worked with her network co-organizers to encourage greater participation from scholars working in the area of political economy of development. In her work as a member of the Executive Council, she has worked to increase dialogue between the council and Network Organizers.
Antonio Botelho
The current political and organizational structures of the world economy, combined with the reorganization of production, have been viewed as both a boon and a bane for national prospects for socio-economic development. The aim of this network is twofold: (1) To test the ambiguous effects of globalization on local socio-economic development and (2) To compare dominant and alternative models of country development and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of development policies for developed, developing, and transition countries.
This network considers how transnational and international institutions, often characterized by their fluidity and informality, and acts of cross-border institutional bricolage by state and societal actors influence the contours of developmental opportunities in the global economy. The network welcomes papers on the domestic social and political arrangements that provide better opportunities for socio-economic development; it also solicits research that addresses how the effects of current forms of neoliberal globalization are affecting developing and developed countries alike, and how those effects vary across social classes and domestic political arrangements. The network is also interested in work that considers whether these new forms of transnational organizations, globalized production, and institutional bricolage are creating new forms of dynamic capitalism that mark a significant departure from extant forms of advanced capitalism. The network particularly welcomes papers that engage with these issues from a multi-disciplinary and cross-regional perspective, including political, sociological, geographic, economic and other perspectives, and especially encourages empirically grounded work drawn from any part of the developing world.
This network focuses on exploring the current state, and the changes in institutions concerned with gender and family roles and workplace organization.
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Bernard Fusulier
Bernard Fusulier is a Research Director at the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Louvain, where he works at the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Socialisation, Education and Training (GIRSEF) and at the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Families and Sexualities (CIRFASE). His main research interests include the relationship between gender, work and family; life course; sociology of work; sociology of organisation; and theoretical sociology (social transaction approach in particular). Of his involvement in SASE, he says: “In SASE I found an intellectual space highly complementary to the other sociological meetings I normally attend. SASE provides an opportunity to meet colleagues from a wide variety of disciplines, and to learn more about current research in areas of interest to me.”
Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay
Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay is Director of the Center on Work-Life Articulation over the Lifecourse, and professor of labor economics, innovation, and human resources at the Téluq Université of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. She was also appointed Canada Research Chair on the Knowledge Economy (2002-2016). Her research interests include employment policies, clusters (multimedia, IT, and film sectors) working time and work-life balance, telework, Coworking, self-employment, work organization, teamwork, and communities of practice. Professor Tremblay has been an active member of SASE for over twenty years, participating in all aspects of the organization. In addition to her work as a network organizer, she has also been a member of the Executive Council and the Local Organizing Committee for Montreal in 1997. “What I appreciate in SASE,” says Tremblay, “is the diversity of issues that are discussed, and the interdisciplinary nature of the debates.”
Over the years, she has been an invited professor at Université de Paris I Sorbonne, Université de Lille I, Université d’Angers, Université de Toulouse, Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, HEC, Université de Liège in Belgium, the University of Social Sciences of Hanoi (Vietnam) and at the European School of Management.
Prof. Tremblay has published articles in many global peer-reviewed journals: Cities, Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, Personnel Review, New Technology, Work and Employment, Innovations,
Pedro Jaime
Pedro Jaime has a PhD degree in Social Anthropology (Universidade de São Paulo / Brazil) and in Sociology & Anthropology (Université Lumière Lyon 2 / France). He has been dedicated to teaching and researching since 1997, working within various Brazilian universities. Currently he is an Associate Professor at Centro Universitário FEI (Brazil), where he teaches Organisation Studies (undergraduate program of business administration), Organisational Analyses (master’s program in management studies) and Epistemology of Management Studies (PhD program in management studies). His main research topics include issues of race and gender in organizations, in their connections to broader sociopolitical arenas. Of his involvement in Sase, he says: Sase allows me to meet researchers from different countries around the world and learn from their experiences and research.
This network focuses on exploring the current state, and the changes in institutions concerned with gender and family roles and workplace organization. A particular interest of the network is theory and research on social policies that produce greater compatibility between institutions geared toward production for the market and reproduction in the family. The network also focuses on cultural and social barriers that prevent positive integration of family and work, examines gender inequalities in work and family, and looks at the inter-relationship of gender roles across these institutions. Empirical as well as theoretical contributions are welcome.
Some possible themes for presentations and sessions (you can organize a session with 3-4 papers) include the following: care issues, work-life articulation, parental leave policies, working time and gender, elder care, the role of the State and firms in work-life issues, social policies and care regimes, international comparisons, etc.
Through the Professions and professionals in a globalizing world network we seek to develop critical analysis of contemporary developments.
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Tracey L. Adams
Tracey L. Adams is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her grant-funded research focuses on professional work and professional regulation in Canada and internationally. One primary branch of research examines intersectional inequalities at work. A second focuses on the changing nature and organization of professional work and expertise. A third research area traces changes in professional regulation and state-profession relations across time and place. Tracey’s work has been featured in Work, Employment & Society, Social Science & Medicine and the Journal of Professions and Organization, among other journals. Recent books include the award-winning, Regulating Professions (University of Toronto Press, 2018), and the co-edited Gender, Age and Inequality in the Professions (with Marta Choroszewicz, Routledge, 2019).
James Faulconbridge
James Faulconbridge is Professor of Transnational Management in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His research focuses upon the way processes of globalization and financialization have transformed the professions and professional service firms, as well as the way knowledge and practice move internationally within and between professional organizations. James has published widely in journals including Environment and Planning A, The Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Geography, Organization Studies and Work, Employment and Society. He has co-authored the book The Globalization of Advertising (Routledge) and edited the book International Business Travel in the Global Economy (Ashgate).
Elizabeth Gorman
Elizabeth Gorman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on work, gender, organizations, and sociology of law. Her research interests focus on gender- and race-based workplace inequality and on professional and expert work. Her research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and a number of other journals. Dr. Gorman’s current project examines the increasing role of the state in the regulation of professional misconduct in the legal and accounting professions. She holds a JD from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Harvard University. She is currently one of the co-organizers of SASE’s Network D: Professions and Professionals in a Globalizing World, and a Council member for the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Law.
Sigrid Quack
Sigrid Quack is Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research and Professor of Comparative Sociology at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Previously, she was Leader of the Research Group on Institution Building across Borders at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and for many years a Senior Researcher at the WZB Social Science Center Berlin. She has been a visiting fellow at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (SCORE); the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Providence; the École Normal Supérieure Cachan; and St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge.
Sigrid has written widely on globalization and institutional change, transnational governance, professions and expertise, as well as previously on the comparative analysis of capitalism, gender relations, labour markets and employment systems. Among other publications, Sigrid has co-edited two volumes with Marie-Laure Djelic on Transnational Communities (Cambridge University Press) and Globalization and Institutions (Edward Elgar). She has published articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society;Annual Review of Sociology; Cambridge Journal of Economics; Global Policy; Organization Studies; Revista de Administração de Empresas; Review of International Political Economy; Socio-Economic Review and Theory and Society. Her most recent German book (co-edited with Schulz-Schaeffer, Shire and Weiß) explores forms and regulations of transnational work and labour markets (Transnationale Arbeit, VS Springer). Sheis currently working on two major projects: organized creativity and intellectual property rights in pharma and music; and imagined pathways to global cooperation in transnational governance.
Sigrid Quack has been a member of SASE since 2006. She is a co-organizer of Network D: Professions and Professionals in a Globalizing World, has served on the Executive Council since 2014, on the SER Best Prize Committee in 2016 and 2018 and on the Diversity Committee in 2019.
Photo by Georg Lukas / KHK/GCR21
Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology in the Department of Organization (IOA) at the Copenhagen Business School. Len’s research focuses mainly on transnational professionals, international organizations, NGOs, activist movements, and consultancy communities, especially in how they treat tax, financial, and demographic change issues. Seabrooke’s work has featured in top journals, including American Sociological Review, Governance, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of European Public Policy, Public Administration, Review of International Political Economy, and others. His most recent book is Professional Networks in Transnational Governance (co-edited with Lasse Folke Henriksen, Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Professions and professionals have long had a central role in economy and society, and in the current era they remain as central as ever. In particular, professions and professionals play a central role in addressing some of the key socio-economic concerns of our time, from climate change to corporate governance, ageing populations to trade regulation. There are, however, some distinctive features of the contemporary role of professions and professionals compared to earlier eras. The meaning of the term profession and professional has evolved. Alongside the ‘traditional’ professions such as accountancy, architecture, law and medicine, a series of ‘new’ professions and professionals have emerged, such as management consultancy and project management, that rely on discourses of expertise, ethics and client service to carve out a role in markets and legitimise claims to a role in issues ‘old’ professions also claim jurisdiction over. Professionals frequently work in large, often multinational organizations that they shape with discourses and identities while being at the same time inserted in new forms of division of labour with other occupational groups. Professions and professionals increasingly operate in and form transnational regimes, and practice in and exert influence through large and global professional service firms but also non-professional organizations as diverse as charities, lobby groups and non-governmental organizations. They also form compacts with corporations, states, and inter-governmental organizations to advance one-another’s interests. Hence, change, re-scaling, redefinition, and re-organization are core themes at the heart of work on professions and professionals.
Through the Professions and professionals in a globalizing world network we seek to develop critical analysis of contemporary developments. In particularly, we are interested in the way changes place professions and professionals at the centre of topics that are at the heart of the SASE agenda, such as transnational governance, varieties of capitalism in a global world, and global economic development. Thus papers might address, but are certainly not limited to, topics such as professions and professionals:
The network invites contributions from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, including sociology, political science, economics, geography, anthropology and management studies.
The aim of this network is to advance research on changing labor markets, industrial relations, and systems of social protection within the study of contemporary capitalisms.
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Alexandre Afonso
Alexandre Afonso is Assistant Professor at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. He works on welfare state and labour market reforms, and the political economy of labour migration. His work has been published in the Socio-Economic Review, Journal of European Public Policy, European Political Science Review, Governance, Comparative European Politics and other outlets. His book “Social Concertation in Times of Austerity” was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2013. He has written for the Washington Post, CNN and Jacobin Magazine.
Sabina Avdagic
Sabina Avdagic is a UK Research Councils (RCUK) academic fellow in the Department of Politics and Sussex European Institute at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Her research interests include comparative labor relations and welfare states, theories of institutional change and economic adjustment, and causes and consequences of social concertation. Most recently, her research has focused on the causes and effects of national variation in the strictness of employment protection in Europe. Avdagic has been actively involved in SASE activities since her graduate studies. In addition to her work as network organizer, she is also a member of the Executive Council and was Program Co-Chair of the 2007 conference in Copenhagen. “I am enthusiastic about SASE”, she says, “because this is one of the rare academic associations that truly embraces interdisplinarity and methodological pluralism in the study of pertinent socio-economic problems facing contemporary societies.”
Chiara Benassi
Chiara Benassi is a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at King’s College London. I completed my PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science and I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.
I am an industrial relations scholar working at the intersection between political economy and sociology of work and employment, with a focus on the effect of the institutional context on union strategies, employer strategies and workers’ outcomes at national, sectoral and workplace level. I apply a multi-level approach to the study of work, linking (changes in) policies and institutions at the national level to workplace outcomes.
My research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the Hans Boeckler Foundation. My work has been published in international academic journals such as the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Socio-Economic Review and Industrial and Labor Relations Review.
I have been coming to SASE since the first year of my PhD, and it still is the conference where I feel most “at home”. I serve as convener of Network E “The Political Economy of Industrial Relations and Welfare States” and I have been a member of the Executive Council since 2020. I am also one of the founding members of the SASE Women and Gender Forum.
Aidan Regan
Aidan Regan is a lecturer in European political economy at the School of Politics and International Relations and Director of the Dublin European Institite (DEI) at UCD Dublin. Prior to UCD, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Germany, and a Max Weber Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Science in the European University Institute (EUI), Italy. He has also worked at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS), in the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Broadly speaking, Aidan’s teaching and research interests are focused on the study of comparative capitalisms, European integration and global political economy.
The general aim of this network is to advance rigorous qualitative and quantitative analyses in comparative and international political economy. The specific aim is to better integrate research on changing labor markets, industrial relations, and systems of social protection within the study of contemporary capitalisms. Of particular interest to this network is the analysis of the interactions between labor markets, industrial relations institutions (collective bargaining, wage setting, employment protection) and welfare policy, and their theoretical and conceptual contributions to the debate on institutional change in contemporary political economies. The network encourages interdisciplinary dialogue among sociologists, economists, and political scientists whose research draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives. Among more specific topics of interest are: responses of trade unions, employers, political parties and states to globalisation and economic crises; the new politics of dualisation and social risks; conditions, mechanics, and results of social concertation; interest representation and collective action in the formal and informal economy; and the determinants of change and resilience in coordinated forms of labour market governance. The network also encourages contributions on international migration; drivers of social policy preferences; and the link between party system realignment and distributive politics.
This network focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as its underlying technologies and knowledge sources. On these topics, we particularly welcome, but do not require an institutional perspective.
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Matthew Allen
Matthew Allen is Professor of International Business and Strategy, and Head of the Strategy, Operations, and Entrepreneurship Group within Essex Business School. His research compares and analyses business and employment systems and their effects on innovation, technology and work designs. His work has been published in leading comparative and international business journals, such as the British Journal of Management, Socio-Economic Review and the International Journal of Human Resource Management. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Human Resource Management. He has gained funding for his research from the German Academic Exchange Service, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. In 2020, he gained funding from the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy for a prestigious Management Knowledge Transfer Partnership.
As the Head of the SOE Group, Matt is the line manager for over 20 colleagues and is responsible for providing leadership, oversight, mentoring and monitoring of all academic staff in the Group in the delivery of excellence in education and research. He reports to the Dean. As a member of the EBS Senior Management Team, he contributes to the overall strategic and operational delivery of School activities ensuring effective leadership of the School as a whole. Before joining EBS in 2019, he worked at Alliance Manchester Business School, where he directed MSc programmes, including the FT-ranked MSc in Business Analysis and Strategic Management. He was the DBA Director between 2015 and 2019, successfully managing the programme and its partnership with the prestigious Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. The joint DBA programme with SJTU was the only DBA programme approved by the Ministry of Education, China. During his Directorship, completion rates, publications from DBA research and the number of graduates going on to university careers increased.
Matt regularly attends, and presents papers at, the annual conferences of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and the Academy of International Business (UK and Ireland Chapter). He is one of the co-ordinators of Network F within SASE on Knowledge, Technology and Innovation. Between 2012 and 2015, he was the Communications Officer for the AIB (UK and Ireland Chapter). A paper he co-authored with Florian Becker-Ritterspach and Knut Lange was nominated for the Florida International University/Academy of International Business Best Theory Paper Award in 2020.
Andrea M. Herrmann
Andrea M. Herrmann received a double BSc in European Business and Management Studies from the European School of Business in Reutlingen and the École Supérieure de Commerce in Reims. In 2002 she received her MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Herrmann got her PhD in Political Economy in 2006, at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy; her thesis was titled ‘Alternative Pathways to Competitiveness within Developed Capitalism: A Comparative Study of the Pharmaceutical Sector in Germany, Italy and the UK.’
Since then, she has also been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, and a Marie Curie research fellow at Columbia University. Herrmann started as an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University in 2008, and she has been an Associate Professor there since 2018. She has obtained several renowned research funds, including a Marie Curie fellowship in collaboration with Columbia University, an H2020 consortium grant (as a work package leader) and an NWO Vidi grant.
Matthew Keller
Matthew R. Keller is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research focuses on the dynamics of technological innovation, innovation policy and the role of government in the economy. He is the co-editor, with Fred Block, of State of Innovation: The U.S. Government’s Role in Technology Development; his recent and ongoing research investigates the organization of innovation and the role of government policies and programs in fostering or inhibiting scientific and technical collaborations.
Cornelia Storz
Cornelia Storz is Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Frankfurt. Her research focuses on political economy, comparative institutional analysis,
institutional change, innovation systems and industry emergence with specific attention to Japan and other Asian regimes. She is reviewer for Research Policy, Journal of Small Business Economics, Asian Business and Management and others and co-author of Institutional Diversity and Innovation. Continuing and Emerging Patterns in Japan and China (Routledge, 2011).
Janet Vertesi
Janet Vertesi specializes in the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. She has spent the past 7 years studying several NASA spacecraft teams as an ethnographer. Her book, Seeing like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (Chicago, 2014) draws on over two years of ethnographic immersion with the Mars Exploration Rover mission to show how scientists and engineers use digital images to conduct scientific research on another planet. She is currently working on followup study of the NASA-ESA Cassini mission to Saturn focusing on the role of sociotechnical organization in research, data-sharing, and decision-making on robotic spacecraft teams. Vertesi is also interested in the digital sociology: whether studying computational systems in social life, shifting sociological methods online, or applying sociological insights to build new technologies. She holds a Master’s degree from Cambridge and a PhD from Cornell, has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, and was awarded the Hacker-Mullins prize for best graduate student paper from the American Sociological Association, Science, Knowledge and Technology section in 2007.
This network focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as its underlying technologies and knowledge sources. On these topics, we particularly welcome, but do not require an institutional perspective. We are a vibrant research network whose members come from all continents; we share and advance ideas on innovation and the dynamics of socio-economic change. We are interested in new methods advancing our research such as artificial intelligence, including machine and deep learning, automated text analyses, big data analysis, and ethnographic analyses. Our network members are scholars at different stages of their careers undertaking research on different types of innovation and entrepreneurship as well as the various forms of technology and knowledge that develop, from a variety of perspectives, including institutional, strategic, managerial, ethnographic and behavioral approaches.
We are, therefore, particularly interested in contributions covering:
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The following interview with Network F organizers Matthew Allen and Matthew Keller was conducted by Emma Greeson, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego.
When was your Network founded?
Matt Allen: Good question and we are not entirely sure. I think that it has been around since at least 2001, when I first went to a SASE conference.
Were you among the founders? Briefly, what was the genesis of the Network?
Matt Allen: I think that Sigurt Vitols was the founder of the Network—or at least he was the organizer of it when I started going to SASE conferences. Presumably, the rationale for the Network is to provide a more micro- or firm-level approach to the study of capitalism. Knowledge, technology, and innovation all add to the dynamism of capitalism; moreover, there is important variation in the types of knowledge, technology, and innovation that firms help to generate. Understanding how the institutions of various types of capitalism both shape and are shaped by that diversity are important to explaining developments in, for example, worker rights, (in)equality, political views, and firms’ location decisions. Dr. Knut Lange, Prof. Florian Becker-Ritterspach, and Dr. Geny Piotti took over from Sig in 2008. Geny left as a Network co-ordinator in 2011 when I joined. Knut and Florian left as co-ordinators in 2013 (I believe), when Matt Keller joined.
What academic disciplines are most represented in your Network?
Matt Allen: Just like the fields of innovation and technology studies, we have a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds represented. But the three most common are probably sociologists, political scientists, and economists, with a strong representation of scholars based in business schools.
How has the focus of the Network changed over time?
Matt Allen: The Network has become more policy focused and many of the contributions to it address issues relating to inequality and policymaking. The focus of the Network has therefore shifted away from narrow technology issues towards the implications of innovation for workers, voters, and policymakers. This shift, I think, marks out Network F from other academic meetings on technology and innovation. We still welcome papers with a tighter focus on technology and innovation as understanding the processes and institutions that structure those developments is important to explanations of macro-level change.
Matt Keller: I’ve only been a Network organizer for a few years, but even over that time, policy-centered issues seem to me to have become more central to the kinds of papers we have received. To be sure, that may also be related to conference themes – like 2016’s emphasis on moral economies and 2015’s emphasis on inequalities – but it seems to me that since the financial crisis, there has perhaps been more of a political opportunity, and a greater interest in engaging with new strategic and policy paradigms in issues related to innovation, economic growth, and their effects. That manifests itself in papers that explore governance issues related to innovation and the knowledge economy at both the national and regional levels, as well as within firm strategies. It’s certainly not the only or even the main focus of the Network, but it seems to be a stronger strain than when I started.
What are some of the most important issues or themes that have guided your Network in recent years? What do you think will be central in the next few years?
Matt Allen: I think that assessing how innovation feeds through into bigger, broader political outcomes will be important. At the moment, there is a challenge to relate micro-level decisions and outcomes to broader economic, social, and political outcomes. In a sense, we are all aware of the impact of technological developments on our lives, but our ability to explain how institutions help to structure and link decisions within (groups of) individual firms to national and international developments is limited.
What do you get from SASE and this Network in particular that you do not get at other conferences that you attend?
Matt Allen: It’s probably cliché to say, but I really value the ability to get to know people working in the field in a more engaged and ongoing way – and I think that’s easier to do that at SASE conferences where there is a cluster of people working on similar topics, and where you cross paths with many of the same people from year to year. Second, because we have many more topically-related sessions, we can often develop a cross-session dialogue that continues outside of sessions – at least with a core group of regular attendees, which I’d like to see continue to grow. Third, it’s a really great way, for me, to see the work of up and coming scholars developing new ideas and approaches. There are several cases where I’ve been made aware of an intriguing line of work several years before it becomes more widely recognized. So the Network helps me keep up with multiple research streams, and in many cases makes me aware of new trends. Fourth, because SASE has such an international membership and a diversity of scholars, we really do get to more routinely engage in more cross-national, comparative discussions than I usually find at the more domestically-oriented conferences I attend.
Is there anything about this Network and its dynamics, frameworks, orientations, or central issues that make it different from other Networks?
Matt Allen: I just think this is a really exciting time to be engaged in research and debates about innovation, knowledge, and technology development. It’s clear from the scholarly literature that the dynamics of generating innovative technologies have changed, particularly since around the early 1980s – which has given rise to intriguing new questions and answers about various aspects of those dynamics. And as new technologies continue to both emerge and be adapted for new purposes, both the mechanics of those processes and their socio-economic implications seem to me to be increasingly central to a range of academic and policy debates – whether it’s the effects of advanced robots and artificial intelligence, or on how technologies are shaping things like consumption, politics, firm strategies, and patterns in inequalities.
What would you want people to know about your Network?
Matt Allen: We are an interdisciplinary Network and we seek to synthesize the contributions from a range of fields, including innovation, economic sociology, business and management, politics, and economics. We offer a supportive and collegiate environment to help contributors hone their papers and, hopefully, increase their chances of seeing their papers in good journals.
What is your most recent book?
Matt Allen: I am based in a UK business school. Business schools here do not, in general, encourage book publishing – institutions and knowledge generation and all that. My latest theoretical piece on the socio-economics of innovations is: Allen, M. M. C. (2013) ‘Comparative Capitalisms and the Institutional Embeddedness of Innovative Capabilities’, Socio-Economic Review, 11, 771-794.
Matt Keller: State of Innovation: the U.S. Government’s Role in Technology Development (edited with Fred Block). Fred Block, Marian Negoita, and I are also working on a new book, tentatively titled Innovation in the Post-Industrial Era, that is focused on the developmental network approach the U.S. government has taken toward energy innovation. Well, at least until the Trump administration. At this point it’s very difficult to tell precisely what the direction of U.S. policy will be – and I hope we’ll start to see some papers trickling into the Network on that subject.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Just a warm invitation to colleagues to submit papers or consider organizing a relevant session through our Network – which we’re more than happy to discuss or supplement, if need be.
The network welcomes contributions on the general issues of labor market segmentation, unemployment, and the link between training, skills and jobs.
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David Marsden (1950-2021)
David Marsden was a professor of industrial relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests included comparative employment systems; international and comparative human resource management; incentives, rewards, and economic performance; and public management.
We will remember David as an inspirational colleague, mentor and friend. His contribution to SASE is immeasurable. He served as SASE President in 2002-2003. He was the organizer for Network G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources over several decades, where he personally welcomed generations of young scholars into SASE. David helped SASE to host its annual conference twice at the LSE, in 2000 and most recently in 2015. Together with Alex Hicks, David was the founding editor of Socio-Economic Review (SER) and held this position from 2001-2006.
David Marsden was an excellent scholar, whose exemplary vision of academic dialogue went beyond both disciplinary and national borders. In their inaugural SER editorial, Alex Hicks and David wrote, “With the Review, we launch an enterprise that we hope will address and create dialogue among a wide and inclusive range of the various communities interested in the economy.” David practiced this in his own research, his mentorship of generations of faculty and students at LSE, as well as his contributions to numerous journals and academic associations. He was a founding editor of Industrielle Beziehungen (the German Journal of Industrial Relations), an editor of Travail et Emploi (a research journal published by the French ministry of labour), and general editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations. His scholarly work on labor markets, industrial relations, and human resource management was always informed by insights from cross-national comparison and his guiding concern with understanding the role of politics and institutions in shaping the economy. These themes were reflected in numerous articles, as well as his major work A Theory of Employment Systems: Micro-Foundations of Societal Diversity (1999, Oxford University Press). Starting from the economics of the employment relationship, David developed a novel interdisciplinary theory of managerial authority in organizing work that took account of how institutions shaped and limit such authority in very different ways across countries.
Through his service, David contributed to both the organizational development and international visibility of SASE. He was quite simply also one of the nicest persons in the profession: energetic, engaging, and supportive, especially for younger and emerging scholars.
David Marsden died on August 10, 2021 after a sudden and short illness. We have lost a truly extraordinary colleague and miss him very dearly. Our sympathy goes to his family and loved ones.
You can share your memories of David in a digital condolence book created by his LSE colleagues: here.
Martin Schneider
Martin Schneider is Professor for Personnel Economics at Paderborn University, Germany, where he acted as Dean as well as Dean for Study Affairs of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. He is an Editor of the journal Industrielle Beziehungen and an Editor-in-Chief of the German Journal of Human Resource Management. His socio-economic approach to personnel is chrystallized in Personalökonomie und Personalpolitik, a textbook published in 2020 of which Martin Schneider is the first author. His current research interests include the digitalization of work, the configurational analysis of (leadership) competencies, cross-country comparisons from a configurational perspective, gender pay gaps on executive boards, and the depiction of aspects of work in fictional films.
Martin Schneider is an economist who studied in Trier and Birmingham (Aston University). He finished his PhD (1998) and his habilitation (2003) at the University of Trier, Germany, was a visisting scholar at the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001, where he conducted a project which was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and compared the US and the German jurisdictions of employment and labor law. His published research covers a range of topics and approaches such as the economic analysis of labor law, the varieties-of-capitalism approach, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and competency-based approaches. He published, for example, in Socio-Economic Review, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Studies, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, German Journal of Human Resource Management, and Industrielle Beziehungen.
Karen Shire
Karen Shire holds the Chair in Comparative Sociology and Japanese Society at the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany where she is also a member of the Institute of East Asian Studies and directs the Essener College for Gender Research. She is a member of the faculty of the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Construction of the Economy, and in the past few years has held guest appointments in the research group In Search of Global Labor Markets, at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bielefeld University, at the Institute for Global Leadership, Ochanomizu Women’s University in Tokyo, and at the Violence and Society Centre, City, University of London. Currently she is Vice-President of RC02 Economy & Society in the International Sociological Association. Her research has contributed to developing inter-regional and historical comparisons of the transformation of work and employment, social institutional changes in the nexus between work and welfare, and changes in class and gender-based social inequalities in Europe and East Asia. Recently her interest has turned to studying the transnationalization of labor markets in the context of migration and global production networks. This research has received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft(DFG) and the European Commission Anti-Trafficking Coordinator.
A selection of Shire’s latest publications include Transnationalisierung der Arbeit (2018, co-edited with Sigrid Quack, Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer and Anja Weiß, VS Springer), Labour Subcontracting in Cross-Border Labour Markets (2019, with Ines Wagner, in N. Lillie and J. Arnholz Posted Work in the European Union, Routledge), The Social Order of Transnational Migration Markets (2020, in Global Networks) and the forthcoming volume The Dynamics of Welfare Markets: Private Pensions and Domestic/Care Services in Europe (co-edited with Clémence Ledoux and Franca van Hooren, Palgrave). She is a corresponding editor of the International Review of Social History, a member of the editorial boards of Work, Employment and Society, the European Journal of East Asian Studies, and Contemporary Japan, and a member of the Jury for the International Research Prize of Max Weber Foundation.
Shire began presenting her work and organizing panels at SASE Meetings in the 1990s. At the annual meetings in Kyoto she organized the Mini-Conference, The Making of Transnational Labor Markets: Reordering of Actors, Institutions, and Policies? (with Ursula Mense- Petermann), she has served as a reviewer for the SASE Early Career Workshop, and is a rank-and-file member of the SASE Gender Forum. Together with David Marsden, she coordinates the SASE Network G: Labor Markets, Education and Human Resources.
Social institutions and social structures exert a huge influence on the workings of labor markets, the links between jobs and vocational education and training, and the way firms manage their human resources. The network welcomes contributions on the general issues of labor market segmentation, unemployment, and the link between training, skills and jobs, as well as on the implications of the new human resource management practices of firms for the future of skills and employment, and on the new incentive and reward structures that support these. It also welcomes theoretical work on the interaction between ‘competitive’ and ‘institutional’ forces in labor markets.
This network focuses on the interrelationships between markets, firms, and institutions.
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Melike Arslan
Melike Arslan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She mainly studies the legal and regulatory infrastructure of liberal market economies from a comparative and international perspective. Her previous works on corporate bankruptcy laws, transnational legal indicators, and the legal foundations of money were published in the International Journal of Law in Context and Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Her new project delves into the drivers and consequences of consumers’ moral denouncement of price hikes as “price gouging” during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is also involved in several collaborative projects on business elite networks, state aid (subsidy) policies, and long-term planning for global climate change.
Tristan Auvray
Tristan Auvray is an associate professor in economics at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord. His research interests include corporate governance and corporate financialization. He focuses on corporate elites and the structural power of shareholders, whether they are family owners or institutional investors. His research also deals with the long history of the relationships between finance and non-financial corporations. Influenced by the institutionalist approach of industrial economics, Tristan is more generally interested in the structure of markets and industries, including the financial sector, its regulation, and the dominant players in banking and asset management. He published a number of books in French on these topics, as well as several articles in journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics or the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy.
Olivier Butzbach
Olivier Butzbach is a Senior Researcher in Political Economy at the Department of Political Science of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (Italy). He holds a PhD from the European University Institute. Olivier’s main research interests are in the fields of comparative capitalism, comparative financial systems, institutional and organization theory. In particular, Olivier studies the impact of institutional and non-institutional factors on the evolution of not-for-profit banking systems throughout the XIXth and XXth century, in countries such as France, Italy and the United Kingdom. He is also interested in theoretical discussions about the interrelationships between organizational fields, populations, and institutional logics. He is the author of multiple publications on these themes, notably in journals such as Organization Studies, Business History, Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium,Politics and Society, the Brazilian Review of Political Economy and Schmollers Jahrbuch. Together with Kurt von Mettenheim, he has edited a volume on Alternative Banking and Financial Crisisfor Routledge in 2014.
Olivier has been a member of SASE since 2003, has participated in over 12 SASE annual conferences since then, and is the co-organizer of Network H (Markets, Firms, Institutions) since 2017.
Matt Vidal
Matt Vidal is Reader in Sociology and Political Economy in the Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London. He is author of Management Divided (OUP) and Organizing Prosperity (with David Kusnet; EPI) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (with Paul Prew, Tomás Rotta and Tony Smith; OUP) and Comparative Political Economy of Work (with Marco Hauptmeier; Palgrave). Matt has published over 20 journal articles or book chapters, over 20 short academic articles, and over 45 popular opinion or new analysis pieces on work/human resource management/employment relations, labor markets, comparative political economy of growth/crisis/institutional change, and social theory.
This network focuses on the interrelationships between markets, firms, and institutions. New approaches to the study of markets are needed to understand better how different markets (e.g. capital markets, product markets, etc.) and market processes (e.g. competition, cooperation, speculation, risk) are related to the changing strategies, structures and governance of business firms. Moreover, both markets and firms are themselves embedded within various institutional contexts at the sectoral, regional, national and international levels. Institutional diversity impact the capacities of firms and patterns of cooperation and competition in markets, while markets and business interests themselves are important factors in the politics of institutional change. We welcome a wide range of theoretical perspectives (e.g. political economy, economic sociology, management studies, neo-institutionalism, and comparative institutional analysis). Recent topics have included financial systems, corporate governance, inter-firm networks, strategy, national business systems, varieties of capitalism, internationalization and regional integration, business interest associations, and processes of institutional change.
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The following interview with former Network H organizers Gerhard Schnyder and Christina Ahmadjian was conducted by Emma Greeson, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego.
When was your Network founded?
We aren’t quite sure!
Were you among the founders? Briefly, what was the genesis of the Network?
The “Markets, Firms and Institutions” network was founded by Gregory Jackson as a merger of the “Markets and Institutions” and “Organizations and Professions” networks. “Organizations and Professions” had been run by Richard Whitley, but was left without a successor after Richard stepped down as organizer, while Gregory had taken over the “Markets and Institutions” network together with Wolfgang Streeck and then ran it alone for some time. The “Markets and Institutions” network was purposefully designed as a broad network that focused on theory development. However, Gregory’s name being associated with the field of corporate governance, this theme became a key focus of this network under his leadership.
What academic disciplines are most represented in your Network?
One of the strengths of our network – and thus reflecting SASE’s strength as a whole – is its very interdisciplinary nature. We get submissions from a very broad range of disciplines, which makes it difficult to single out any one in particular. Most papers are written by scholars in economic sociology, management studies, comparative and international political economy, and political science.
How has the focus of the Network changed over time?
Network H is by its very nature a broad network that appeals to many different fields of studies. The submissions to the network have changed somewhat in the past four years since we took over the network from Gregory Jackson. Thanks to SASE’s very successful development and the increasing differentiation of the organization into more specific networks, our network has also become more focused. While the number of submissions continues to rise every year, the breadth of contributions to our network has some what decreased, presumably because authors have now a larger choice of thematic networks to submit to. Contrary to more specialized networks, which focus on one specific aspect of national economies, Network H often provides a home for papers that compare national business systems across several dimensions or ‘institutional spheres’. As a result, papers in the broad area of comparative capitalism have become a particular specialty of Network H, including papers on post-socialist countries and developing countries such as Brazil. In recent years, the corporate governance aspect has become less dominant, also because new networks have emerged that also attract corporate governance scholarship (in particular L and P). We have thus seen a relative shift in focus towards other topics and areas, such as economic sociology, the sociology of markets, CSR, and ethical consumption, which have become relatively stronger. More broadly, Network H has extended its strength in the area of institutional theory and institutionalist approaches to economic issues. A particular feature of the network is that every year it attracts a number of studies on the role of ideas and ideologies – such as neoliberalism – in economic change.
What are some of the most important issues or themes that have guided your Network in recent years? What do you think will be central in the next few years?
Network H has always been strong in the area of studies on liberalization of national business systems. While liberalization was initially often studied under the lens of ‘convergence,’ increasingly ‘financialization’ has become the key concept instead. This trend is likely to continue in coming years. Another theme, which has become increasingly prominent in our network is ethical consumption and the creation of markets related to CSR issues. These topics will certainly remain important in the next years. Furthermore, in recent years we have witnessed an increasing number of contributions focusing on the role of the state in the economy and on the political side of business. This trend is certainly the result of current changes in certain developing countries, but also a more general new debate about the ‘proper’ role of the state in the economy. We expect that the increased interest in the state as an actor in the economy will continue over the next years.
What do you get from SASE and this Network in particular that you do not get at other conferences that you attend?
As an organization that is built around the meta-discipline of ‘socio-economics’, SASE’s key appeal is its genuinely inter-disciplinary nature. Few – if any – other conferences manage to bring together for fruitful exchange and discussions scholars from all areas of the social sciences. The focus is on themes, topics, research interests rather than disciplines, which makes discussions and debates particularly enjoyable. SASE is also the place where one can meet the leading scholars in the area of socio-economics and where once can learn about the latest books, papers, and ideas by such leading scholars.
Is there anything about this Network and its dynamics, frameworks, orientations, or central issues that make it different from other Networks?
Network H is different from other networks in its breadth. As the Network name ‘Markets, Firms and Institutions’ suggests, the Network does not focus on any specific area of socio-economics, but rather it focuses on fundamental key elements of any market economy. It is thereby a good home for a great variety of approaches, disciplines, and themes. To be sure, that sometimes makes it difficult for us to guarantee the coherence of our sessions. However, as the number of submissions tends to increase each year, we are increasingly able to choose from a large pool of papers and organize them – hopefully – in a meaningful and interesting way for Network H participants.
What would you want people to know about your Network?
One of the more recent changes we have introduced to the network is the discussant system during the annual meeting. Like other conferences, we now ask participants to send their papers to the session participants before the meeting and we ask some attendees to act as session chair and discussant for the papers that are being presented. While this makes participation in Network H somewhat more onerous for discussants, we do get very positive feedback about this system, because presenters get valuable comments from respected scholars in their field and more in-depth discussions take place during the sessions.
What is your most recent book?
Thomas David, André Mach, Martin Lüpold, and Gerhard Schnyder, From the ‘Fortress in the Alps’ to Shareholder Value: The History of Swiss Corporate Governance (1880-2010) [in French], Zurich: Seismo.
The broad aim of this research network is to advance the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of alternatives to capitalism.
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Torsten Geelan
I am an interdisciplinary sociologist of work and labour movements, with interests in power, the just transition to a low carbon economy and alternatives to capitalism.
I’m currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. My EU-funded project (2021-2024) is titled Transitioning to a Low Carbon Economy: Trade Unions and the ‘Jobs Versus Environment’ Dilemma. Before moving to Denmark, I worked for two and a half years as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Centre for Sustainable Work and Employment Futures, University of Leicester.
I hold a BA in Economic and Social Studies from the University of Manchester, and an MPhil and PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. My doctorate thesis, under the supervision of the late William Brown (Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Master of Darwin College), examined the role of media and communication in Danish and British trade union responses to the 2007/2008 North Atlantic financial crisis.
The primary strand of my research is concerned with the relationship between trade union power and the media (newspapers, the internet & social media) – especially during industrial and political conflicts. This small but growing body of work has been published in New Technology, Work and Employment, Industrial Relations Journal, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, as well as in edited collections. I was also awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant for a collaborative project examining the role of Twitter in the 2018-2020 UK higher education strike, but I handed this over to my Co-PI Professor Athina Karatzogianni after moving to Copenhagen in 2021.
Alongside this, I have been exploring alternative ways of organising the economy and society around the world as co-founder and co-chair of the Alternatives to Capitalism Research Network at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). My earliest foray into this field was as the co-editor of a book published by Palgrave MacMillan (2018; 2020 paperback) titled From Financial Crisis to Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons. I am now the co-editor of a new Bristol University Press book series titled Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century.
As a public speaker, I’m regularly invited to give lectures to student societies, research centres and the Danish and British trade union movement.
Lara Monticelli
Lara Monticelli is Assistant Professor and Marie Curie fellow at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. Prior to this, Lara worked for two years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy). The research she conducted during her post-doc was focusing on the study of political engagement among young precarious workers, combining perspectives from the sociology of work, social movement, and political participation studies.
Her ongoing Marie Skłodowska-Curie project (2018-2021), titled ‘EcoLabSS – Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change’, focuses on the emergence of community-based, prefigurative social movements (e.g. sustainable communities, eco-villages, transition towns, solidarity networks, autonomous zones) as living laboratories experimenting with practices of resilience and resistance to environmental, economic and societal challenges. Lara is especially interested in how these movements re-politicize and re-configure everyday life, thus representing radical attempts to embody a critique to contemporary capitalism and prefigure alternative and sustainable futures. More in general, Lara´s current research agenda aims at crossing perspectives from social movement studies, critical social theory and political ecology to come forth with an original contribution for the study of contemporary capitalism and its alternatives. Lara is also involved in a number of parallel research projects in collaboration with non-governmental organizations like the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and ECOLISE – the European Network for Community Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability.
Since 2017, she is the co-founder and co-chair of the SASE research network I: ‘Alternatives to Capitalism’. She is also affiliated researcher at the CoresNet research network for the study of consumption networks and practices of sustainable economies and a member of the researcher collective “Women on the Verge” that gathers female scholar-activists from Australia, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, the UK and the USA.
The recent and yet unresolved Great Recession has revealed just how unjust, inefficient and unsustainable contemporary capitalism has become. This has revitalized public and academic debate about the future of capitalism and the urgent need to envision and enact alternatives that can help tackle the multiple crises that societies are currently facing: high and rising inequality of income and power, eroding democracy, human-induced climate change and environmental destruction.
As income and wealth inequality have intensified within capitalist societies, people’s sense of voice or control over longstanding societal institutions has also diminished. In response, many people across the globe have joined together to create new futures through alternative systems, institutions, organizations and other collectives, and relationships. Our network encourages research and scholarship on such collective efforts to create more transformative, egalitarian, horizontal or non-hierarchical practices, relations, social movements, groups, organizations, and societies. Moreover, our network provides an engaging forum for discussing and envisioning alternatives.
The broad aim of this research network is to advance the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of alternatives to capitalism and its associated institutions. More specifically, the research network has three goals:
1) to bridge the disparate interpretative frameworks that exist by engaging in a theoretical systematization of the literature;
2) to map existing alternatives embedded within various socio-economic and geographic contexts;
3) to encourage the use of innovative research methods that can provide new insights and reach broader audiences.
Contributors are invited to investigate and analyse the practices, strategies and discourses being used by different social groups to enhance and exercise social power rooted in the voluntary association of people and based on the capacity to engage in collective action of various sorts.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: cooperatives (worker/producer/consumer) and cooperativism; political and ethical consumerism; eco-villages and sustainable communities; community and practice-based initiatives; the future of work; radical lifestyles; utopias and alternative futures; direct democracy and municipalism; commons and commoning; alternative forms of organisation and governance; anti-capitalist trade unions and political parties; transformative social innovation; alternative media and other forms of alternative social reproduction. We are particularly interested in the ways in which the State and the market interact with these alternatives through mechanisms of facilitation, co-optation, or repression.
Digital technologies are contributing to radical, growing and unpredictable transformations of economic life, raising a broad range of new issues for scholars of the economy. This research network is dedicated to the study of these issues.
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Thomas Beauvisage
Thomas Beauvisage is a sociologist and web scientist at the Social Sciences Department of Orange Labs (Sense). His early works and PhD focused on web usage mining and browsing behavior characterization. Today, his activities involve both internet research and market studies; his current research topics cover online participatory market devices, advertising and e-reputation, and uses of online media. He is also involved in methodological investigations on the use of quantitative behavioral material for social science.
Jean-Samuel Beuscart
Jean-Samuel Beuscart is a researcher at the Social Sciences Department of Orange Labs (Sense) and associate researcher at LISIS (University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée). His research builds on economic sociology to study the digitization of markets and consumption, with a focus on valuation devices and recommendation systems. He is the author (with Kevin Mellet) of Promouvoir les oeuvres culturelles (La Documentation Française, 2012) and Sociologie d’internet (with Eric Dagiral and Sylvain Parasie, 2016). Current areas of interest include digitally enhanced sustainable behaviors and collaborative consumption.
Timur Ergen
Timur Ergen is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. He works at the intersection of economic sociology and political economy with a special focus on state intervention in the economy. His research investigates antitrust policy, energy transitions, industrial and technology policy, and the history of the postindustrial society. Timur is currently working on a book project on the question of how deindustrialization changed the politics of state intervention in Germany and the United States. He is a co-organizer of SASE research network J: Digital Economy.
Anne Jourdain
Anne Jourdain is associate professor at the University Paris-Dauphine and researcher at IRISSO (Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences). She co-chairs the “Economic sociology” section of the French Sociological Association (AFS). Her research fields are economic sociology and art sociology, with a specific focus on arts and crafts. She recently published “Analysing the Symbolic Economy with Pierre Bourdieu: The World of Crafts” (Forum for Social Economics, 2015) and Du Coeur à l’ouvrage. Les artisans d’art en France (Belin, Paris, 2014).
Vili Lehdonvirta
Vili Lehdonvirta is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is an economic sociologist with a background in computer science. His research deals with topics such as digital marketplaces, online labour markets, online collective action, cryptocurrencies, and video game economies, especially from institutional and organizational perspectives, and using both conventional social research methods and novel data science approaches. His research is published in journals such as Sociology, Journal of Management, and New Media & Society. He is a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Online Platform Economy.
Kevin Mellet
Kevin Mellet is an assistant professor in sociology at Sciences Po. His research unit is the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO). Originally trained as an economist, he has developed expertise in economic sociology and science and technology studies. His research explores the construction of digital markets. Kevin’s current research focuses on the emerging data marketing landscape and the formation and regulation of the personal data economy.
Sidonie Naulin
Sidonie Naulin is associate professor in sociology at Sciences Po Grenoble and research fellow at Pacte (Public policies, political Action, Territories). Her research interest lies at the intersection of labor, professions, media and food studies. She recently co-edited The Social Meaning of Extra Money. Capitalism and the Commodification of Domestic and Leisure Activities with A. Jourdain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Elke Schüßler
Elke Schüßler is Professor of Business Administration and Head of the Institute of Organization Theory at Johannes Kepler University. Her research interests revolve around processes of organizational and institutional change, creativity, and innovation. One stream of her research investigates the impact of digital technologies on the creative industries and on creative work. She is a Principal Investigator in the Research Unit “Organized Creativity”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is currently also leading an international research project on the regulation of labor standards in global production networks funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. She is particularly interested in regulatory dynamics unfolding in the interplay between national and transnational arenas. Her work is published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Industrial and Corporate Change or Creativity and Innovation Management.
Digital technologies are contributing to radical, growing and unpredictable transformations of economic life, raising a broad range of new issues for scholars of the economy. This research network is dedicated to the study of these issues. We are particularly interested in the impact of these developments on market processes and actors, on goods themselves, on non-market forms of economy, and on wider social outcomes.
In the area of market processes we encourage discussion, for example, of intermediaries and business models such as the platform economy, coordination instruments such as participatory evaluation systems, digital reputations, the massive collection of consumer data, virtual and alternative currencies, bots, algorithms, new kinds of digital objects and forms of qualification and calculation.
Digital technology can also provide a platform for non-market forms of economy, and we welcome contributions on digital forms of gift and participative economy as well as the use of digital platforms for governmental initiatives and services.
Ultimately we are interested in the impact of such developments on wider social outcomes, including inequality, inclusion and exclusion on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity and geopolitical region, governance capacities, systemic risk, environmental change, and political engagement with economic issues.
This network focuses on making work better through actor experimentation with institutions to regulate work.
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Phil Almond
Phil Almond is Professor of International Management at Loughborough University London. He is also a lead researcher at the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT), and organiser of the Comparative Employment Research Collaborative Network (CERCnet). His research interests concern the theoretical and practical challenges of the governance of work and employment in contemporary capitalism. He is the editor, with Anthony Ferner, of American Multinationals in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006), and more recently has worked on the relations between foreign multinationals and actors in regional business systems across Canada, Ireland, Spain and the UK. He is currently working on ESRC-funded research on the resources mobilized by actors in the creation, diffusion, interpretation and negotiation of norms concerning the global coordination of human resources within multinationals.
Peter Fairbrother
Peter Fairbrother is a professor of International Employment Relations at RMIT University. He is also a core researcher at the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT). He has researched and published widely on trade union renewal, industrial restructuring and regeneration and the privatisation and reorganisation of public services and utilities. His recent work focuses on the mobilisation of labour in relation to the social and political transition towards low carbon economies. He has published ten books and numerous articles and book chapters.
Isabelle Ferreras
Isabelle Ferreras is a tenured fellow (Checheur qualifié) of the Belgian National Science Foundation (F.N.R.S., Brussels). She is a professor of sociology at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) where she teaches at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, at the Institut des sciences du travail and at the Economics School of Louvain. Isabelle is involved as a permanent researcher of the CriDIS (Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires Democracy, Institutions, Subjectivity). Since 2004, she has been an associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School (Cambridge, MA) where she is now a Senior Research Associate.
María González
María C. González Menéndez is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Her active research interests include workers’ participation, gender and employment, labour management, and the role of sub-national socioeconomic governance systems in the attraction and retention of multinational firms. These interests are united by a strong internationally comparative focus on the role of social and political institutions in shaping the quality of work and employment. Recent publications include the book Women on Corporate Boards and in Top Management. European Trends and Policy (Palgrave, 2012), co-edited with Colette Fagan and Silvia Gómez, and the handbook on HRM in Spain Gestión de Recursos Humanos: Contexto y Políticas (Thomson-Civitas, 2011), co-edited with Rodolfo Gutiérrez and Miguel Martínez Lucio. She is currently co-leader of the work package on Policy Transfer and Comparative Frameworks within the large scale FP7 project Strategic Transitions for Youth Labour in Europe.
Christian Lévesque
Christian Lévesque is a professor of Employment Relations at HEC Montréal, Co-director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT) and has a professorship in employment relations and institutional innovation. His research focus concerns the impact of globalisation on trade unions, employment practices in multinational corporations and union-management relations. He has done extensive fieldwork in various parts of the world, including México, various countries in Europe, Ghana and China. He has published on trade union renewal, comparative employment practices in multinational corporations and transnational union action. He has co-edited two books and seven special journal issues and published numerous articles and book chapters.
Gregor Murray
Gregor Murray holds the Canada Research Chair on Globalization and Work in the School of Industrial Relations at the University of Montreal (ERIUM). He is also director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT), which is an interdisciplinary centre linking researchers in a variety of universities and research institutes to a research program on the theoretical and practical challenges of actor and institutional renewal for the regulation of work and employment. Gregor’s particular research interests include international comparisons of employment relations, human resource practices, labour law and subsidiary embeddedness in multinational companies. He also works on union capacity and innovation, with a particular focus on the comparative analysis of workplace unions.
Nicolas Roby
Nicolas Roby is a scientific coordinator for the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT). Since 2003, he has participated in the development of the Centre’s scientific programming and activities, as well as establishing and growing its research and dissemination portfolio by coordinating more than thirty international conferences, seminars and publication projects, including two special issues of IR/RI on union renewal and the digitization and regulation of work and employment. His current research interests include the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitization on work futures, worker wellbeing, social protection systems and institutional legacies. Nicolas holds an MA in industrial relations from Laval University and was enrolled in the University of Warwick’s PhD program from 1996 to 2000. He has taught organizational sociology and labour relations at the Université de Montréal, Université Laval and HEC Montréal, and consulted for government agencies, sectoral labour committees, trade unions and other research centres.
This network focuses on making work better through actor experimentation with institutions to regulate work. Major fault lines of change are affecting how people experience work, participate in their communities and live their lives. Digital transformations, changes in the role of the state, the unbundling of firms, the growth of global production networks, transitions to sustainable development, and shifts in identity, solidarity and values are all transforming work. Institutions for the regulation of work seem out of synch with people’s experience. Whereas there is an aspiration for productive, innovative, healthy and inclusive work, in which individuals live free from excessive insecurity, exercise control over their working lives, and contribute to their workplace and society – what can be labelled better work in the broadest sense – a different picture of fragmented work and disjointed communities emerges from current changes. Yet, these changes also open up space for experimentation. At many levels, in different national, institutional and organizational contexts, and in conditions of uncertainty, collective actors (firms, governments, trade unions, NGOs, community organizations) seek to engage in institutional experimentation to shape their work, economies and communities. This network welcomes research that contributes to our understanding of these processes.
This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels.
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Tim Bartley
Tim Bartley is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis.
His research has focused largely on transnational governance, private regulation, social movements, and corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives. He has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, and other journals. His first book, Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer (Indiana University Press, 2015), examined consumer behavior and the practical influence of standards for sustainable and/or fair production of food, forest products, apparel, and electronics. His second book, Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the implementation of fair labor and sustainable forestry standards in Indonesia and China.
He is a former editor of the journal Regulation & Governance and has been a visiting scholar at Princeton, MIT, Sun Yat-sen University, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
John W. Cioffi
John W. Cioffi is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Cioffi received his J.D. with High Honors from Rutgers University School of Law-Newark and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his academic career, Professor Cioffi clerked for United States District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise (D.N.J.) and practiced law as a litigation associate with the New York law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.
Professor Cioffi is the author of the book, Public Law and Private Power: The Comparative Political Economy of Corporate Governance Reform in the Age of Finance Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2010), part of the Cornell Studies in Political Economy series edited by Peter J. Katzenstein. This work focuses on the comparative law and political economy of national corporate governance regimes and their reform in the United States and Western Europe up to and including the global financial crisis.
He has published numerous articles and book chapters on comparative law and regulation, with a focus on the comparative political economy of corporate governance, financial regulation, and labor relations. His articles have appeared in the Politics & Society, Regulation & Governance, Law & Policy, the Journal of Law and Society, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and various law reviews.
Prof. Cioffi’s current research investigates conflicts of interest as products of complex legal, political, and institutional processes that pose a persistent insidious threat to democratic politics and the rule of law. At its core is the reciprocal dynamic in which law and politics influence the forms, prevalence, and political economic consequences of conflicts of interest, even as legally constituted and institutionalized conflicts of interest generate allocations of power that, in turn, alter law and politics.
Ruthanne Huising
Ruthanne Huising is Professor of Management and Organizations, and Director of the WorkTechOrg Research Center at Emlyon Business School. Her research is motivated by the documented difficulties in achieving organizational compliance with regulations, standards, and other ethical and social expectations. Using ethnographic methods, Ruthanne studies the organizational processes that are central in shaping how compliance is understood and practiced within and across organizations. Within organizations she examines how prosocial demands are harmonized, translated, and implemented, analyzing issues of expertise and power. Across organizations, she examines governance processes, including the organized spaces in which stakeholders (regulators, social movement actors) and members of organizations interact to negotiate the meaning of organizational compliance and develop resources to facilitate organizational compliance. Ruthanne is a Deputy Editor at Organization Science and founder of the Ethnography Atelier. She received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. Prior to joining Emlyon, she was as Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University.
Stefano Pagliari
Stefano Pagliari is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. His research investigates a number of different themes related to the international and comparative political economy of finance, with a focus on the role of the financial industry and the regulation of financial markets.
Eleni Tsingou
Eleni Tsingou is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the Copenhagen Business School. Her work focuses on the role of professionals and experts in regulatory networks and policy clubs. She is working on projects on the themes of global financial governance, the global anti-money laundering regime, and demographic and medical fertility. Her research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including: British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Crime, Law and Social Change, International Political Sociology, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Professions and Organization, New Political Economy, Regulation & Governance, and Review of International Political Economy. She has also contributed chapters in collections and has edited volumes and special forums on financial regulation and legitimacy in global governance.
This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels. It was formed to foster interaction between the more specialized group of regulatory governance scholars and larger sets of scholars of political economy, socio-economics, law, public policy, development, the welfare state, institutional analysis, risk management, and democracy. Regulation and governance relies in part on state power and domestic politics, but also extends beyond the state, as seen in systems of professional authority, private regulation, and transnational governance. As such, the study of regulation and governance intertwines with the study of markets, firms, associations, political parties, public and private bureaucracies, and international organizations. Going beyond typical policy analysis, this network seeks to broaden our understanding of how regulation and governance relate to processes of democratization, state building, liberalization/marketization, development, and legitimation of political economic orders.
A lively Spanish-speaking section that was established in 2011.
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Laura Pérez Ortiz
Laura Pérez Ortiz is a lecturer in the Department of Economic Structure and Development Economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Her research is focused on Labor Economics, particularly labor market institutions, collective bargaining, quality of employment, and gender economics. She is a member of the SET-LASE research group on Labour Socio-Economics.
Julimar da Silva Bichara
Julimar da Silva Bichara is Associate Professor at Departamento de Estructura Económica y Economía del Desarrollo at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). He has been a member of SASE since 2006, participating as a Spanish Language Network co-organizer since 2008, member of the Organize Committee of the SASE Ibero-American regional conferences and Member of the Executive Council since 2018. As a member of SASE’s Ibero-American chapter, Julimar has participated of the four editions of SASE Ibero-American Meeting (2013 UNAM – Mexico; 2015 UFRGS – Porto Alegre, Brazil; 2017 – UTB Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; 2019 – UNC – Costa Rica) as member of the organizing and scientific committees.
I have recently published in Cepal Review, Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Sustainability, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Metroeconomica. I edited the book Economic Policies for Development: Beyond the Milenium Goals (Nova Science Publishers, 2020) alongside Carmen Díaz-Roldan and Laura Pérez Ortiz.
Ana Urraca-Ruiz
Ana Urraca-Ruiz holds a degree in Economics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain, 1989) and a PhD in Economic Sciences from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain, 1998). She was a Visiting Student at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex (UK, 1994-1995) and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Universitá degli Studi di Siena (Italy, 2010). She is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Economics at Universidade Federal Fluminense, participating in undergraduate and graduate programs. She works in the areas of Industrial Economics and Economics of Innovation and Technological Change, working mainly on the following topics: technological internationalization, national technological specialization and its links with productive and trade specialization; economic growth, convergence and structural change; national patterns of innovation and national and firm’s technological competences. She was editor-in-chief of the ECONÔMICA/PPGE-UFF Journal from March 2008 to December 2009 and is currently a member of the editorial board of the Brazilian Journal of Innovation (Campinas-Unicamp). She is also a member of the Brazilian Association of Industrial Economics (ABEIN) and of the LALICS networks (Red Latinoamericana para el estudio de los Sistemas de Aprendizaje,. Innovación y Construcción de Competencias) and GLOBELICS (Global innovation and competence building in the context of economic development) networks.
Ana Viñas Apaolaza
Ana Viñas Apaolaza is Professor of Economics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her main lines of research revolve around economic analysis and labor economics, as shown by her numerous contributions to national and international conferences and publications. She is a member of the UAM’s Socio-Economics of Labor research group SET-LASE.
During her first pre-doctoral period, Prof. Viñas worked in the field of the economics of innovation and economic growth, and regional technology policies. Her predoctoral participation in two research projects financed by the European Commission stands out, as well as the results of such research through the publication of articles and book chapters in prestigious journals and publishers.
After the presentation of her doctoral thesis, she entered the labor market, first as head of a technological diffusion center of the Community of Madrid and in 2005 as economist of the Research Service of the UGT Union, marking her specialization in the area of labor market and employment policies.
At the same time, in 2004, she joined the European University of Madrid as assistant professor, developing her teaching work in this University until 2021. Since 2016 she has also collaborated with other universities, where she teaches postgraduate courses.
During this stage, she has participated in a project of the State Program for Research, Development and Innovation oriented to the Challenges of Society and in international congresses, and has published articles, book chapters, and books, and received the Accésit of the III José Luis Sampedro Award at the XII Meeting of World Economy, SEM in 2010.
This network appreciates contributions on the general issues of Ibero American socio-economic development, particularly, related to sustainability, inequality, poverty, social and labor relations, international economic relations, industry and technology, and the macroeconomic policy. Papers with analytical and theoretical perspectives, from a socioeconomic point of view, and with a public policy approach, are also welcome. Presentations can be in Spanish, Portuguese or English.
The goal of this network is to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue on the study of finance and include perspectives from social sciences outside of economics.
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Natalia Besedovsky
Natalia Besedovsky is a research assistant at the Professorship for Social Analysis and Social Change at the University of Hamburg. Her main research interests are the sociology of financial markets, valuation studies, sociology of risk and the sociology of sustainability.
Megan Doherty Bea
Megan Doherty Bea is an Assistant Professor of Consumer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies family financial well-being and access to financial services from a sociological perspective informed by law, economics, and geography. Bea’s current research focuses on structural factors that shape small dollar loan markets and how social policy and financial regulation can foster more equitable access to affordable financial products. Her research has been published in top general and special interest journals in sociology and consumer science, including the American Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, Law and Society Review, and the Journal of Consumer Affairs. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University. Prior to graduate school, Bea was the Associate Director of the Group of Thirty, an economic think tank.
Daniel Maman
Daniel Maman is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Ben Gurion University, Israel. My fields of interest include economic sociology, sociology of finance, comparative political economy, and institutional change. Among my books are The Military, State and Society in Israel: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (co-editor with Eyal Ben-Ari and Zeev Rosenhek, Transaction Publishers, 2001); and The Israeli Central Bank: Political Economy, Global Logics and Local Actors (co-author with Zeev Rosenhek, Routledge, 2011). I also published in leading journals, including Socio-Economic Review, Review of International Political Economy, Organization Studies, British Journal of Sociology, and Journal of Cultural Economy. Currently, I am studying the emergence and development of financial literacy in Israel and the restructuring of Israel’s financial system.
Simone Polillo
Simone Polillo is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He works at the intersection of cultural, political, and economic sociology, with a focus on money, finance, globalization, and the sociology of expertise and ideas. He is the author of Conservatives versus Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2013) and The Ascent of Market Efficiency: Finance that Cannot Be Proven (Cornell University Press, 2020); and coeditor of Beyond Liquidity (with Brad Prasanek, Routledge, 2013). His current research centers on the public face of technocracy, and especially of institutions of monetary governance like central banks.
The goal of this network is to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue on the study of finance and include perspectives from social sciences outside of economics. Specifically, we encourage research that highlights the social embeddedness of finance (for instance, the continuing importance of social networks and the role of ideas, theories and devices in shaping financial practices), or examines the links between finance and a number of other topics including public policy, legal and economic development, inequality, and corporate governance, inspired particularly by the recent financial crisis; investigates historic origins of modern financial instruments, analyzes regional or international differences in financial markets, or focuses on the social and cultural consequences of the redistribution of resources through financial markets, the financialization of everyday life and the expansion of credit. We welcome a wide range of methodological approaches, including but not limited to archival research, ethnography, interviews, formal network analysis and survey research.
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The following interview with Network N organizers Alya Guseva and Akos Rona-Tas was conducted by Emma Greeson, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego.
When was your Network founded?
It was founded in the fall of 2010 on the heels of a successful mini-conference on The Global Rise and Spread of Consumer Financial Services organized at the summer SASE meeting in Philadelphia. The idea for the mini-conference on finance was suggested to us by Marc Schneiberg, who introduced us to then- president Jonathan Zeitlin. We briefly talked and later wrote a short rationale for the mini-conference. In the fall, SASE asked us whether we would like to launch a Network focused on finance, and we enthusiastically said yes.
Were you among the founders? Briefly, what was the genesis of the Network?
Yes, we both were. We also invited Bruce Carruthers to join the Network, reasoning that three would be the magic number: better visibility and more opportunities to spread the work organizing the panels. We have known Bruce and his work for many years and enjoyed working with him in other formats. The time following the global financial crisis was ripe for a Network focused specifically on finance. Prior to 2010, papers with a focus on finance would most likely go to the Markets, Firms, and Institutions Network, the catchall for economic sociology at SASE. But because there was an explosion of interest in finance, it made sense to give it a separate home. We put our three heads together and came up with a name and a description.
What academic disciplines are most represented in your Network?
Several disciplines are represented (including economics and management, with occasional anthropologists and historians), but economic sociology dominates.
How has the focus of the Network changed over time?
The focus has not changed as we purposefully set the confines of the Network pretty broadly – Finance and Society – though the range of topics certainly expanded. For instance, when we started there was barely one panel out of ten or twelve that dealt with household or consumer finance, most of them focusing on financial markets and regulation. Last year we had three or four, plus panels devoted to morality, inequality, and responsible banking/social impact investing.
What are some of the most important issues or themes that have guided your Network in recent years? What do you think will be central in the next few years?
One significant trend that we followed is the reversal of globalizing processes. When we got into research on finance in the late 1990s and early 2000s, finance seemed to be moving towards the U.S. model partly by integration of local practices on U.S. terms and partly by imitation of U.S. practices. It is clear now that financial globalization has been fracturing along the national lines, and the trend will likely only strengthen in the future. A second important trend is the growing surveillance of consumer financial behavior and its integration with other instruments of governmentality. Not only are the data generated from the digitalization of consumer financial transactions monitored by states and market actors, but consumer financial information can also be merged with other types of data (phone and internet records, commute and travel data, etc.) making consumers more ―transparent‖ than ever before. A related development is the growing importance of computer algorithms and information infrastructures that may appear neutral but, in fact, are powerful mechanisms of ―social sorting‖. Consumer finance data already play a significant role in the accumulation of social advantages and disadvantages, for instance, when credit reports and credit scores guide the decisions of landlords, employers, and insurers. These processes create new sources of power and inequality.
What do you get from SASE and this Network in particular that you do not get at other conferences that you attend?
We are big SASE fans. What you get is an incredible sense of community interested in similar issues, but often approaching them from diverse disciplinary perspectives and refracted through different national traditions. You also get to hear about empirical developments in many other countries and regions. This is a great learning experience because you have a chance to find out more about your particular topic in other contexts. These meetings are conducive to thinking about your research comparatively, which the international and interdisciplinary crowd helps to foster. This is a very different experience from the one we get when we attend large disciplinary meetings like the ASA where topics are more segmented and the perspectives are more consistent.
Is there anything about this Network and its dynamics, frameworks, orientations, or central issues that make it different from other Networks?
This Network is possibly a bit less oriented toward purely descriptive work and has a stronger engagement with theoretical and policy issues.
What would you want people to know about your Network?
Our Network believes deeply in methodological diversity and equally welcomes qualitative and quantitative, theoretical, empirical and experimental, cultural, institutional, historical, and structural approaches.
What is your most recent book?
We recently co-authored Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries (Stanford, 2014). While a lot has been written about how markets work once they are built, our book explains how markets are engineered from the ground up – by selecting key players, ensuring cooperation, and providing conditions for the valuation of a product. We do this through a historical comparison of how banks constructed markets for credit cards in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, China, and Vietnam in the two decades following the fall of communism. The book was the result of ten years of research that included fieldwork in all of these countries.
Anything else you’d like to add?
We are very happy to see great interest among young researchers in the field of finance.
This network aims to bring together social scientists interested in analyzing the causes and consequences of this offshoring-outsourcing phenomenon.
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Matthew Alford
Matthew Alford is Senior Lecturer in International Business and Management, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
My research interrogates questions of development in the context of globalization, transnational trading networks and labour. More specifically, I focus on the role of nation states in governing labour in global value chains, and how public regulations interact with lead-firm driven private codes of conduct and civil society initiatives. My recent work investigates these issues in the context of regional agricultural and garment value chains spanning Sub-Saharan Africa. I earned my PhD in International Development from the Global Development Institute (GDI) and am currently employed as Senior Lecturer in International Business and Management at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS), University of Manchester.
Jennifer Bair
Jennifer Bair is Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She earned her PhD in Sociology from Duke University and her BA in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests are at the intersection of global political economy, work, and development. She is the editor of four books, including Frontiers of Commodity Chains Research (Stanford, 2009), and she has published widely, including articles in World Development, Social Problems, Economy and Society, and Signs. Jenn has conducted extensive research on global value chains and uneven development, primarily in Latin America but more recently also in South Asia. She has spoken at the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the International Labor Office about global value chains and labor standards. In addition to a collaborative book project on labor organizing along global value chains, she is currently studying efforts to improve human rights protections for migrant workers in U.S. agriculture. Jenn is an editor of the Review of International Political Economy and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and a past Chair of both the Sociology of Development and the Political Economy of the World-System Sections of the American Sociological Association.
Rory Horner
Rory Horner is a Senior Lecturer in Globalisation and Political Economy at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, and a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management, and Energy Studies, University of Johannesburg. His research focuses on South-South value chains and the role of the state in global value chains. His empirical fieldwork has largely focused on the pharmaceutical industry. Rory is working on a major project on the South-South dynamics of India’s pharmaceutical industry and its implications in sub-Saharan Africa. His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the US National Science Foundation, the British Academy, and the Regional Studies Association. His research has been published in leading journals in economic geography, development studies, and in the interdisciplinary fields of globalisation and political economy.
Cornelia Staritz
Cornelia Staritz is Tenure Track Professor in Development Economics at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. She is also Research Associate at the Austrian Foundation for Development Research (ÖFSE) and at the Policy Research on International Services and Manufacturing (PRISM) at the Department of Economics at the University of Cape Town. Prior to her position at the University of Vienna, she worked as a Senior Researcher at ÖFSE and as a Junior Professional Officer in the Trade Department at the World Bank in Washington D.C. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York and a Doctorate in Economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Cornelia’s research focuses on political economy of development, international trade and trade policy, global value chains and production networks, and labor and global production. She is generally interested in the (uneven) development outcomes and contradictions of global value chain-based development strategies in countries of the Global South, which she studies from a political economy perspective. Cornelia has researched widely on different global value chains focusing on manufacturing sectors, particularly apparel, and commodity sectors, particularly cotton and cocoa, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. She has published in leading journals in the fields of political economy, economic geography, and development studies. Cornelia has led and contributed to research projects funded e.g. by the German Research Foundation and the Austrian Science Fund or the Danish Council for Independent Research as well as various consultancies for international organizations and donors.
Global value chains (GVCs) involve the production of goods and services that cross international borders. GVCs grew rapidly during the era of post-war trade liberalization and export-oriented industrial policy, especially in the 1990s and 2000s. Many studies have shown that GVCs are a “mixed blessing” for engaged countries, accelerating exports, generating employment, and often supporting technological learning in lower-income countries while raising risks of isolation from leading-edge innovation and new industry creation, becoming stuck in highly competitive, low-value activities, and raising crucial social and environmental concerns that states may not have the capacity or leverage to address. Much GVC research has sought to tease out the nuances that influence these various outcomes and their development implications. However, recent economic, technological, public health, and geopolitical changes have triggered considerable restructuring of GVCs and suggest an uncertain future. Trade wars and the global pandemic have caused businesses and policy-makers to rethink cherished assumptions about how the global economy can be expected to function and be governed. Key concepts such as global integration, vertical specialization, and lean supply chains have been called into question. The new watchwords are decoupling, reshoring, regionalization, and supply chain buffering. These changes raise the prospect of more domestic and regionally oriented value chains and possibly speeding the rise of multipolar GVCs. Also, new digital technologies may make participating in and coordinating GVCs easier, or deepen existing divides and uneven development outcomes. Now more than even research on GVCs is needed to understand the magnitude and the direction of these changes and how they are going to influence sustainable development in the next years. Accordingly, network O welcomes qualitative and quantitative work that considers private as well as public governance of GVCs, and the implications of GVCs and GVC-oriented policies for economic, social, and environmental up- and downgrading and (uneven) development outcomes.
Click here for Network O’s 2021 GVC Conversations webinars.
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The following interview with Network O organizers Gary Gereffi, Mari Sako, Tim Sturgeon, and Eric Thun was conducted by Emma Greeson, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego. It has been updated by the current organizers (2020).
When was your Network founded?
The global value chain (GVC) Network began as a mini-conference in 2009, and then as a full-fledged Network in 2010.
Briefly, what was the genesis of the Network?
The GVC perspective focuses on the intersection of global industries with national and local economies, and highlights the linkages between economic actors across geographic space. The “lens” of GVC analysis can offer a range of insights related to the dynamics and drivers of economic development, as well as industrial and social upgrading (or downgrading), with implications for firm strategy, public policy, and the production of economic statistics. The SASE Executive Council approached the organizers because GVC research had been yielding fresh insights into the processes of global integration and economic development and because its interdisciplinary character made it a good candidate for a SASE Network. Initial motivating topics included how advances in information and communication technologies were creating new possibilities for outsourcing and offshoring and how these impacts varied significantly across industries. While other SASE Networks focus on issues relating to economic development, none take global integration and the industry lens as their starting point.
What academic disciplines are most represented in your Network?
A defining feature of the GVC Network is its explicitly inter-disciplinary approach and its focus on firm-level analysis. The Network regularly has contributions from economic sociology, political science, geography, and international business.
How has the focus of the Network changed over time?
The focus of the Network reflects the evolution of the GVC research agenda and shifts in the global political economy. In earlier years there was a very strong focus on the economic impact of GVCs, especially on the power of large, global firms to set the terms of industrial upgrading. Research largely consisted of a series of industry/country case studies in agro-food, forestry, and high- and low-tech manufacturing, and a bit later, services. More recently we have seen a growing focus on the social implications of GVCs. Scholars have sought to understand if and how the benefits (and potential costs) of GVC participation spread beyond the walls of the firm to broader society, and in recent years, geopolitics, public health, and environmental concerns have forced their way toward a more central place on the agenda. Along the way, there has also been a concerted effort to improve the methodology underpinning GVC analysis and the forms of data that are available for research.
What do you get from SASE and this Network in particular that you do not get at other conferences that you attend?
A real strength of SASE, and the GVC Network in particular, is the opportunity for different disciplines to engage in intimate dialogue with one another. All too often in academia, subjects close themselves off from each other, but at SASE there is a real search for cross-fertilization. The recurring nature of the Networks creates a unique space for longer-term evolution of discussion, debate, and sharing of insights.
Is there anything about this Network and its dynamics, frameworks, orientations, or central issues that make it different from other Networks?
The Network is based on an explicitly global view of the political economy that nevertheless takes the specificity of domestic and local institutions and historical context into account. As such, GVC research has a proven track record of addressing the economic and social policy concerns of governments and non-governmental organizations alike.
What would you want people to know about your Network?
The Network has gone from strength to strength in attracting a mix of senior and junior scholars, and doctoral candidates are always welcome. As the selection process has become more competitive, the quality of discussion has increased markedly.
This network focuses on the intersection of accounting, economics and law. Institutional design, rules and social norms are critical to the working of organizations in economy and society.
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Reuven Avi-Yonah
He is the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law and director of the International Tax LL.M. Program at the University of Michigan Law School. He specializes in corporate and international taxation. He has served as consultant to the U.S. Treasury and to the OECD on tax competition and is a member of the Steering Group of the OECD’s International Network for Tax Research and chair of the American Bar Association’s Tax Section Committee on Tax Policy. He is co-editor of the journal Accounting, Economics and Law – A Convivium, published by The Berkeley Electronic Press
Yuri Biondi
Yuri Biondi is tenured senior research fellow of the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research of France, IRISSO – University Paris Dauphine. Graduate of the Bocconi University of Milan (DES), of the University of Lyon (DEA, PhD), of the University of Brescia (PhD) and of the University of Paris I Sorbonne (HDR), he is founding editor of the Journal “Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium”. Yuri has been working with the SASE since 2005, as mini-conference organiser and research network convener for “Accounting Economics and Law.”
He was chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Committee (FASC) of the American Accounting Association (AAA) from August 2011 to August 2013. His research program combines economics with law and accounting, focusing on the relations between individuals, organisations and institutions in economy, polity and society. His research interests include economic theory, dynamic systems analysis, corporate governance and social responsibility, financial and prudential regulation, accounting theory and regulation, and governmental accounting and finances.
Shyam Sunder
He is the James L. Frank Professor of Accounting, Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management, and Professor of Economics at Yale University. His research interests include financial reporting, dissemination of information in security markets, and statistical theory of valuation. A pioneer in the fields of experimental finance and experimental macroeconomics, he has published five books and more than 160 scholarly articles. He is a Past President of the American Accounting Association. He is co-editor of the journal Accounting, Economics and Law – A Convivium, published by The Berkeley Electronic Press.
This network focuses on the intersection of accounting, economics and law. Institutional design, rules and social norms are critical to the working of organizations in economy and society. Financial, economic, social, and legal processes and languages play an influential and largely neglected role in this working, and raise broad societal and global concerns. They lie at the heart of control, governance and regulation. The network will explore their influence in the context of social, cultural, and political economy and history. It will foster disciplinary cross-fertilization, novel investigations and institutional analyses of their role in the dynamic relationship between individuals, organizations and institutions. Among others, issues of control, valuation, finance (and financialisation), accountability, responsibility, governance, and regulation will be central to the concerns and development of the network. Methodological tolerance and pluralism are also essential to the overarching purpose of enhancing our understanding of the phenomena of interest.
This network relates to the journal CONVIVIUM (Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium).
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The following interview with Network P organizers Reuven Avi-Yonah, Yuri Biondi, and Shyam Sunder was conducted in 2017 by Emma Greeson, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego.
When was your Network founded?
We founded the Network with the SASE annual meeting in Budapest, in 2005, through a mini-conference devoted to accounting, economics, and law.
Were you among the founders? Briefly, what was the genesis of the Network?
The Network was founded by its current conveners: Reuven Avi-Yonah, Yuri Biondi and Shyam Sunder. In 2005, we were discussing about topics of control, governance, and regulation. We identified a need to better understand legal, economic, and financial aspects that are central to these matters. We were convinced that received disciplinary approaches tend to not address them comprehensively. Therefore, we decided to invite scholars and experts in these fields to join us, to foster a dialogue and generate trans-disciplinary understanding and knowledge.
What academic disciplines are most represented in your Network?
Our research Network aims to synthesize and cross-fertilize disciplinary approaches to better understand our phenomena of interest. Accountants, economists, and lawyers have been attending our Network, along with sociologists, political scientists, and other social scientists. Occasionally, scholars from institutions and regulatory bodies contribute to our discussions.
How has the focus of the Network changed over time?
While the main focus is sufficiently broad to remain stable, every year we seek and organize panels and Network conferences (series of panels) on matters of new interest within our broad framework.
What are some of the most important issues or themes that have guided your Network in recent years? What do you think will be central in the next few years?
Since 2005, for instance, we have devoted special attention not only to critical social events such as the international accounting convergence and the aftermath of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, but also to fundamental topics such as the evolution of regulation, and the emergence of shareholder value and primacy in corporate governance and social responsibility. Our ambition is to constantly discover interesting and emerging issues to be investigated. We shall keep paying attention to accounting and control, auditing, corporate governance and social responsibility, financial and prudential regulation. But money, credit and banking, central banking, prudential regulation, sustainability, and tax avoidance are also important emergent issues.
What do you get from SASE and this Network in particular that you do not get at other conferences that you attend?
SASE has been an open and collaborative environment to the development of our intellectual venture. It has trusted us on the scientific work while assuring the organizational and reputational resources that have been required to establish, maintain, and develop it through time.
Is there anything about this Network and its dynamics, frameworks, orientations, or central issues that make it different from other Networks?
Our focus on accounting is certainly distinctive, but also the ambition to address socio-economic instruments not only to understand and situate them in their organizational and institutional contexts, but also to analyze, assess, and possibly improve on their socio-economic performances.
What would you want people to know about your Network?
The main message is that we are open to discuss and welcome scholars willing to engage challenging topics and an open dialogue across methods, disciplines and national traditions.
What is your most recent book?
Our research Network relates to our journal ‘Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium’, active since 2011. This is certainly our main outlet for publishing ideas and analyses that have been discussed at our SASE events. Feel free to have a look at it here.
Anything else you’d like to add?
We wish to thank Martha Zuber for her kind, open and effective support all along our research Network work. In the future, we would be honored to be more involved in SASE‘s core activities, including by contributing to the plenary sessions and strategic planning. Last but not least, perhaps the link to the 2017 call for papers in our journal, here.
The basic idea of this first area network within SASE is to make Asia a central field of investigation for theories of institutional change and diversity of capitalism.
Network Page
Tobias ten Brink
Tobias ten Brink is Professor of Chinese Economy and Society and Director of the China Global Center at Jacobs University Bremen. His research focuses on China and large emerging countries.
Nana de Graaff
Nana de Graaff is Associate Professor in International Relations at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her main research interests are within International Relations, International Political Economy and Elite Studies (political sociology). Her particular research fields are Chinese political and economic elites, the globalization of Chinese firms and Chinese engagements with Europe; American political and economic elites and US foreign policy, US-China relations, and the politics and political economy of oil. She publishes in leading journals in International Relations, International Political Economy, and Sociology (e.g. Review of International Political Economy, European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, Global Networks) and with publishers like Routledge and Cambridge University Press.
Nana De Graaff is currently Chair of the EU COST Action 18215 China in Europe Research Network (CHERN), a Europe-wide network aimed at pooling, exchanging, disseminating and generating research on Chinese socio-economic engagements with Europe. She is also co-Principal Investigator in an ESRC (UK) funded project Fraying Ties? Networks, Territory and Transformation in the UK oil sector, an interdisciplinary research project led by Prof. Gavin Bridge (Durham University) in collaboration with London School of Economic (LSE) and Platform. She is co-investigator in the Corporate Mapping Project, a SSHRC funded research-project aimed at systematically mapping the structure and influence of the fossil fuel industry in Canada led by Prof. William Carroll (University of Victoria). De Graaff is an advisory board member for International Affairs and The International Spectator.
Boy Lüthje
Boy Lüthje is Senior Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research and a visiting scholar at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii. His research focuses on the political economy of
global production networks, innovation, and work. His interest in China and Southeast Asia developed in the course of his research on global production and work in the IT industry during the recent decade. He recently completed an extensive research project on regimes of production and industrial relations in China’s manufacturing industries. Together with Tobias ten Brink and Christopher McNally (East-West Center) he is conducting a major research project on China’s new capitalism and its perspectives of economic and social re-balancing.
Wei Zhao
Wei Zhao is Associate Professor of International Management at ESSCA School of Management (France) and Special Research Fellow at Institute for Reform & Development of Pearl River Delta (IPRD), a think-tank jointly established by China’s Guangdong Provincial Government and Sun Yat-sen University. Specialized in research and consulting on industrial upgrading and innovation policy in South China, he is author of the Lead Report of 2017 Guangdong Innovation-driven Development Blue-cover Book (in Chinese), and the forthcoming book Remade in Guangdong: How China’s World Factory Will Become Innovative (World Scientific, 2018).
Network Q promotes theory and research on the diversity of socio-economic systems and capitalist development in Asia. New approaches to the study of Asia are needed to better understand how different systems and their socio-economic institutions such as labour markets, capital markets or product markets and outcomes (e.g. comparative advantages, innovation, cooperation) are related. The network promotes studies that examine these relationships as well as how processes of institutional change affect them. The network contributes to an interdisciplinary perspective on trajectories of development within Asia, and their consequences for socio-economic development.
We welcome a wide range of theoretical perspectives (e.g. political economy, economic sociology, management studies, industrial relations, innovation studies and innovation management, neo – institutionalism, and comparative institutional analysis). Topics of particular interest are: state and capitalism; systems of innovation; production networks and value chains; science, innovation, and technology policies; welfare states; innovation and specialization; entrepreneurship; knowledge-based economies; processes and politics of institutional change; varieties of capitalism, internationalization and regional integration; and creation, persistence and plasticity of technological trajectories.
The network is supported by Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS, which will fund the award for the best paper and the travel grants (amount: 1000 €). To have your paper considered for the prize, please consult the SASE award guidelines page.
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The following interview with Network Q organizers Boy Lüthje, Cornelia Storz, and Tobias ten Brink was conducted by Emma Greeson, a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC San Diego.
When was your Network founded?
We started with a mini-conference in 2011, and founded our Network in 2012.
Were you among the founders? Briefly, what was the genesis of the Network?
The Network promotes theory and research on the diversity of socio-economic systems and capitalist development in Asia. New approaches to the study of Asia are needed to understand better how different systems and their socio-economic institutions (e.g., labor markets, capital markets, product markets, etc.) and outcomes (e.g., comparative advantages, innovation, cooperation) are related to each other. The Network promotes studies that examine these relationships as well as how processes of institutional change affect them. Thus the Network contributes to an interdisciplinary perspective on trajectories of development within Asia, and their consequences for socio-economic development.
What academic disciplines are most represented in your Network?
Political science, sociology, and economics. A few papers have a background in area studies with a focus on social sciences.
How has the focus of the Network changed over time?
We enlarged our geographic focus. Originally, we mostly had papers on East Asia, but now we have also moved to South and South East Asia, and some presenters compare Asian economies to other economies in the Global South.
What are some of the most important issues or themes that have guided your Network in recent years? What do you think will be central in the next few years?
We welcome a wide range of theoretical perspectives (e.g., political economy, economic sociology, management studies, industrial relations, innovation studies and innovation management, neo-institutionalism, and comparative institutional analysis). Topics of particular interest are the state and capitalism; national, regional, local, and industrial systems of innovation; production networks and value chains, science, innovation, and technology policies; welfare states; emergence of inequalities; innovation and specialization; knowledge-based economies; processes and politics of institutional change; national business systems, varieties of capitalism, internationalization and regional integration; and creation, persistence and plasticity of technological trajectories. Given that we founded the Network only a few years ago, we aim to hold this focus constant for the next years.
What do you get from SASE and this Network in particular that you do not get at other conferences that you attend?
Definitely the interdisciplinary and broad perspective, and in particular the talks at the “interfaces” – be it between economics and sociology, between political science and innovation studies, or between sociology and management studies.
Is there anything about this Network and its dynamics, frameworks, orientations, or central issues that make it different from other Networks?
Yes. Our Network consists of a cross-sectional structure, covering other Networks’ topics, but reflecting them within the broader perspective of Asian capitalisms.
What would you want people to know about your Network?
We are one of the youngest Networks, but also one of the largest. We have a strong community spirit, which makes the Network highly enjoyable. Further, thanks to support of the Fondation France-Japon, we are able to offer travel grants and a prize for the best paper.
What is your most recent book?
We publish mostly in internationally, peer-reviewed journals, including Research Policy, Industry and Innovation, Journal of Contemporary China, Global Networks, Harvard Asia Quarterly, and others.
Our most important and recent books are:
This network aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to consider and discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving its stated ideals by highlighting the tension areas as well as the dynamism observed in the practice of Islamic finance.
Network Page
Mehmet Asutay
Mehmet Asutay is a Professor of Middle Eastern & Islamic Political Economy and Finance at the Durham University Business School; is the Director of the Durham Centre in Islamic Economics and Finance; is the Director for MSc in Islamic Finance & MSc in Islamic Finance and Management programmes, and is the Director of the Durham Islamic Finance Summer School.
His research, publication, teaching and supervision of research is all on Islamic moral economy, Islamic banking and finance, Islamic political economy and the Middle Eastern political economies including Turkish and Kurdish political economies. His articles on his research interest have been published in various international academic journals and professional magazines. He has published and edited books on various aspects of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance, the latest of which are: Islamic Finance: Political Economy, Values and Innovation; Islamic Finance: Performance and Efficiency, and Islamic Finance: Risk, Stability and Growth (these three volume are co-edited with A. Turkistani) published in 2015; Islamic Banking and Financial Crisis: Reputation, Stability and Risks (co-edited with H. Ahmed and R. Wilson) published in 2014; Takaful Investment Portfolios: A Study of the Composition of Takaful Funds in the GCC and Malaysia (co-authored with A. Tolefat) published in 2013.
Mehmet is the Managing Editor of the Review of Islamic Economics; Associate Editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences; and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Finance and Management, Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, and Borsa Istanbul Review. He is also the Honorary Treasurer of BRISMES (British Society for Middle East Studies) and of the IAIE (International Association for Islamic Economics).
Necati Aydin
Dr Necati Aydin is an Associate Professor of Economics at Alfaisal University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He received his bachelor’s degree in public finance, master’s degree in international economics, and two doctoral degrees, one in education and the other in economics. He worked as a researcher at Florida State University and Florida TaxWatch Research Institute and also taught at Florida A&M University and Tallahassee Community College for several years. He had worked at King Saud University for 3.5 years before moving to Alfaisal University in August 2014.
Dr Aydin has conducted research in variety of topics including local and state government budget analysis, economic impact studies, tourism, higher education, virtual education, information technology, and Medicaid. He has published theoretical and empirical papers on these matters. He presents his works through conferences and seminars at top universities around the world including Harvard and Cambridge. In total, Dr Aydin has completed over forty research projects; authored seven, translated two, and co-authored three books; and published many peer-reviewed articles. Dr Aydin currently focuses on Islamic economics, welfare, subjective well-being, institutional economics, and neureconomics. He is currently directing two two-year research projects worth of nearly one million riyals funded by KACST. He also leads three million riyals project on corporate governance index. He has published in top academic journals including Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Social Economics, International Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Finance and Management etc.
Zurina Shafii
Dr. Zurina Shafii is a lecturer in the Faculty of Economics and Muamalat, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) and a research fellow in Islamic Finance and Wealth Management Institute (IFWMI), a research Centre of Excellence in USIM. She holds an Accounting Degree from Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) and a Master’s degree and PhD in Islamic Finance from Durham University, UK. She holds professional accounting qualification, ACCA and a Certified Islamic Financial Planner.Her research interests are Shariah audit, Islamic financial institutions’ accounting and reporting, Islamic financial planning and Halal Compliance Procedures. She authored four books on Islamic financial planning, Shariah audit and Islamic finance. She won some recognition for her innovation on Shariah audit; bronze medal for Shariah Audit Kit in PECIPTA and a silver medal for Shariah Audit Step by Step Procedures in ITEX. In 2015, her team working on a game-based board game for Islamic finance education, Muamalat Interactive Game (MIG) won gold medal in 14th International Conference and Exposition on Inventions by Institutions of Higher Learning (PECIPTA 2015) and bronze medal in i-INOVA, an Islamic innovation competition.In 2014-2015, she was a visiting researcher in Durham University Business School (Durham University, UK), Islamic Research Training Institute (IRTI) of Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and Global Islamic Finance Development Centre, a research centre for World Bank based in Istanbul. She is also the Chairman for Education Committee for a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Association for Islamic Financial and Wealth Management Malaysia (AIFiWM). She is an expert panel for Finance Accreditation Agency (FAA) as well as serving as an exco in International Council of Islamic Finance Educators (ICIFE) and Association of Shariah Advisor in Islamic Finance Malaysia (ASAS).
Islamic moral economy has emerged as a post-colonial movement to respond to the observed developmentalist failures including socio-economic failures and the failed political process. As a project, Islamic moral economy aims at human-centred development by essentialising social justice, equality, and participatory and sharing society by rescuing and re-defining the role of human as well as land, labour and capital among all other stakeholders within new modes of production and Islamic social formation. Thus, Islamic moral economy has theorised an alternative way of re-organising economy, society and politics in an interactive and integrative manner to form a participatory and sharing economy and society as termed ihsani or good society.
Within this alternative paradigm, Islamic finance has emerged as the initial operational aspect of Islamic moral economy, which has demonstrated an unprecedented growth in asset size and global expansion. However, despite this phenomenal growth in the transactional nature through prohibition of interest and limiting uncertainty and speculation, we are yet to see the transformational impact of Islamic finance on contributing to a new form of
modes of production based on Islamic principles of risk-sharing and profit-and-loss sharing as well as expanding its contribution on social justice, equality (prevention of inequality and poverty), equity-based finance, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constituting participatory and sharing economy.
This network aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to consider and discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving its stated ideals by highlighting the tension areas as well as the dynamism observed in the practice of Islamic finance.
The network welcomes conceptual, theoretical, and empirical papers to address the particularities and promises of Islamic moral economy and finance along with the emerging issues in the practice of Islamic finance and in developing theories and practices for the implementation of Islamic moral economy.
This Network aspires to advance a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical dialogue on the interactions between the economy, society, and the environment.
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Stéphanie Barral
Stéphanie Barral is a sociologist at the French National Institute for Agronomic and Environmental Research, with expertise in economic sociology and political sociology. Her work focuses on the contemporary transformation of environmental and agricultural policies. Her first book (Capitalismes Agraires, Presses de Sciences Po, 2015) analyzes the hegemonic development of capitalist palm oil plantations in South East Asia against social and environmental criticism. Her on-going research deals with carbon and biodiversity offsets as well as payments for environmental services in France and in the USA, in particular as they highlight trade-offs between scientific knowledge, economic constraints and institutional normativity and as they constitute a trend of agricultural policies privatization.
Neil Fligstein
Neil Fligstein is the Class of 1939 Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California. He has made research contributions to the fields of economic sociology, organizational theory, political sociology and social stratification. He is the author of eight books including The Transformation of Corporate Control (Harvard University Press, 1993), The Architecture of Markets(Princeton University Press 2001), Euroclash (Oxford University Press, 2008), A Theory of Fields (with Doug McAdam, Oxford University Press, 2012), and The Banks Did It (Harvard University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a project trying to understand corporate and governmental responses to climate change.
Ritwick Ghosh
Ritwick Ghosh is a Social Science Research Fellow at the New Carbon Economy Consortium, located within Arizona State University. He studies and teaches global environmental governance, drawing on ecological economics, rural sociology, and science and technology studies. His expertise lies in market-based solutions such as biodiversity offsetting, carbon markets, and payments for ecosystem services. Ritwick has worked in multiple international organizations including the UN Environmental Program and in private companies such as the Centennial Group. He has a Postdoctoral Fellowship from New York University and a PhD and a Masters in Public Administration from Cornell University.
Ian Gray
Ian Gray is a postdoctoral scholar at the French Institute for Research and Innovation in Society, based in Paris. His research draws on a mix of economic sociology, political sociology, and science and technology studies, and focuses on how concerns about global environmental change are understood and managed as economic concerns. This work includes empirical studies of efforts to price climate risk within American insurance markets, the role state bureaucrats play in managing competing logics of efficiency in water-stressed river systems in France, and the constraints current models of public finance face in promoting equitable forms of climate adaptation. Gray received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was a visiting doctoral fellow in the Anthropocene Formations group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Simone Pulver
Dr. Simone Pulver is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Environmental Leadership Incubator at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research investigates patterns in the environmental impacts of business, what drives those patterns, and how those drivers might be transformed. She has led NSF-funded research projects on oil industry responses to climate change, climate politics in Mexico, low carbon investments by firms in Brazil and India, and toxic pollution in American manufacturing. Pulver publishes in leading environmental journals including Environmental Research Letters, Global Environmental Politics, and Organization and Environment and is a co-author of Foundations of Socio-Environmental Research: Legacy readings with commentaries, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has received numerous distinctions, including a Fulbright Senior Research Scholarship, a Visiting Professorship at the University of Hamburg’s KlimaCampus, and an appointment as a Distinguished Mentor for the SESYNC Postdoctoral Immersion Program. Before coming to Santa Barbara, Pulver was the Joukowsky Assistant Research Professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, with a joint appointment in the Center for Environmental Studies. She holds a PhD in Sociology and an MA in Energy and Resources, both from the University of California, Berkeley.
This Network aspires to advance a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical dialogue on the interactions between the economy, society, and the environment. Major problems from climate change to ecosystem collapse prompt an urgent need to analyze the interdependence of economy and environment and to reimagine current models of economic prosperity and wellbeing. Among the core challenges are the need to limit carbon emissions, industrial pollution, and biodiversity decline, and to adapt our cities and rural spaces to unprecedented forms of environmental risks. Now more than ever, the social sciences need to investigate the environmental basis of economic activity and the social and economic structures that shape socio-environmental interactions, in order to assess the possibilities and tradeoffs for transforming our political, economic, and social institutions toward less ecologically destructive modes of living.
The “Environment and Climate Change” network is intended as an interdisciplinary collective, drawing on scholarship and expertise from sociology, economics, international relations, political science, STS, geography, and political ecology. We invite papers that examine both institutional change and persistence in response to multiple and simultaneously unfolding environmental crises. This includes work that focuses on national and international policy developments as well as innovative approaches that center on market coordination and private self-regulation. We seek to understand why institutional change has been so incremental and to identify instances where lasting transformations have been achieved and sustained. We are also particularly interested in understanding how proposed solutions affect those least responsible yet most vulnerable to these changes, both in the Global South and North. An overarching goal of this Network is to consider how the dominant political economic structure, call it capitalism, is positioned to address the socio-ecological crisis, and to identify plausible alternatives.
