Moral judgments that justify or vilify different economic arrangements on the basis of some final value are extremely common in the social sciences. Since the beginning of political economy, market institutions have elicited strong and rival views across a broad spectrum of positions. Those who marvel at the coordinating power of the invisible hand confront those who revile capitalism’s inherently exploitative nature. The celebration of efficiency faces the condemnation of waste. And democratic interpretations of laissez faire meet the hard reality of growing social inequalities. There is no economy that is not political and moral at the same time.
Social scientists, of course, are not the only ones to judge the economy while living in it. E.P. Thompson famously coined the term “moral economy” to denote the inchoate feelings and obligations that orient workers, and make them see certain courses of action (such as riots) as legitimate or illegitimate. To the extent that individuals and institutions act on them, those judgments help constitute economic lines of action, too.
Finally, economic instruments and technologies lay down, and perform, moralized rules about what is expected of economic actors. All exchange systems embed implicit or explicit codes of moral worth in their specific designs and rules; all economic institutions make and remake kinds of moral beings by shifting their classificatory schemes or treatment algorithms. These “economic moralities,” typically fashioned by the action of markets and states, interact more or less peacefully with people’s “moral economies.” Indeed many of today’s pressing political conflicts may be understood in terms of the hiatus between these two social forms.
The 2016 SASE conference in Berkeley, California, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley from 24 – 26 June 2016, will seek contributions that explore the relationship between economy and morality from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, reaching back to SASE’s origins and moving forward into new territories. Fiat Lux!
SASE/Berkeley Program available here.
SASE will take place on the University of California, Berkeley campus, with meetings and events in several different buildings. Registration will take place in the Tilden Room, on the fifth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union/ASUC building (star 2 on the map below). If your hotel is further than a walk away, we recommend using Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART subway train) or the AC Transit buses to get to the conference, as parking near campus is scarce and can be expensive. The Downtown Berkeley BART station is marked by star 1.
By Public Transportation from San Francisco International Airport. Take the yellow line Pittsburg/Bay Point BART train from the airport and switch to the red or orange line Richmond train at the Daly City, 19th Street/Oakland, or MacArthur stations, and get off at the Downtown Berkeley station.
By Public Transportation from Oakland International Airport. Take the BART train from the airport to the Coliseum station and switch to the orange line Richmond train, and get off at the Downtown Berkeley station.
Getting to Berkeley from San Francisco. The best way to get to the ASUC is via Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). From any BART stop in downtown San Francisco, you can take a Richmond (red line) train to the Downtown Berkeley (NOT North Berkeley) stop, or you can take a Pittsburg/Bay Point (yellow line) train to 19th St. Oakland, and transfer there (by walking across the platform) to a Richmond train, and get off at Downtown Berkeley. From the BART station, it is a 12-minute walk to the ASUC.
Getting to Berkeley from Oakland. You can take BART from any of the Oakland stops. Take a Richmond (red line) train to the Downtown Berkeley stop. Several bus lines also run from Oakland to campus, including the 1, 1R, and the 18.
For more information about BART, including a mobile trip planner, visit www.bart.gov. You can purchase BART tickets at ticket machines inside any BART station. Tickets are priced by distance traveled, which is posted on the machines. For more information about bus service, visit the AC Transit website at www.actransit.org.
Below is a zoomed-in map of campus, with the locations of various conference events marked by stars. Registration, the banquet, and hospitality space are located in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union/ASUC building (1). Conference sessions will take place in Barrows Hall (2); South Hall, Stephens Hall, and Moses Hall (3); Dwinelle Hall (4); and Evans Hall (5). Hospitality space is also located in South Hall. The welcome reception will take place on the Haas patio (6).
Coffee and bottled water will be available throughout the conference in the two hospitality spaces (ASUC/Tilden room and South Hall Lounge). For lunch, there are a number of options on Bancroft Street and Telegraph Avenue, including Café Milano, Julie’s Café, Free House, Tako Sushi, and the Musical Offering Café. There are also a number of options on campus, including Café Zeb (located inside the School of Law, closed Saturday and Sunday), the Free Speech Café inside Moffitt Library, the Bear’s Lair near the ASUC building, as well as a food court in the bottom floor of the ASUC building.
There are many hotel options in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco. Below, we offer more information about the locations of the hotels featured on the SASE website. To get to any of these hotels from the airports (SFO or OAK), use BART.
When booking, keep in mind that it takes 20-40 minutes to shuttle from San Francisco or Oakland to Berkeley (and vice versa) on the BART public transportation system.
The Faculty Club
The Women’s Faculty Club
Berkeley City Club
Hotel Durant
Bancroft Hotel – Berkeley
The Berkeley YMCA
Rose Garden Inn
Berkeley Lab Guest House
Oakland Marriott City Center
San Francisco Hyatt Embarcadero
There are many other hotel options in Oakland and San Francisco. We suggest however that you reserve a hotel very near a BART station. There are, for instance, a number of hotels near the Powell and Montgomery BART stations in San Francisco, including the Omni San Francisco ($$$), The Inn at Union Square ($$), The Galleria Park Hotel ($$), the Parc 55 San Francisco Hilton ($$), and the Grand Hyatt San Francisco ($$$). There are also other hotels near the 12th St Oakland City Center BART stations in Oakland, including the Courtyard Oakland Downtown ($$), and the Clarion Hotel Downtown Oakland City Center ($$).
You can also reserve rooms or entire apartments in residential properties via Airbnb. Please note that Berkeley has a lot of hills. Be sure to consider that when you consider distance to campus. North or East of campus is most likely uphill from campus and can be quite steep.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Located in Downtown Berkeley.
The Berkeley Campanile. This iconic tower is located in the center of campus. For a few dollars, you can take an elevator to the top for commanding views of Berkeley and the Bay.
Hike or picnic in Tilden Regional Park, located in the hills above the Berkeley campus, or take a hike elsewhere in the Bay Area.
Drink great coffee. The original Peet’s coffee on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto” was the inspiration for Starbucks. Popular local franchise Philz Coffee is also on Shattuck near Peet’s.
Reserve a table at Chez Panisse. Alice Water’s original restaurant, where she pioneered new California cuisine. Chez Panisse features a prix-fixe restaurant downstairs and a more moderately priced café upstairs. Reservations recommended. Located at 1517 Shattuck Avenue.
Catch a concert at Freight & Salvage. Featuring folk, alternative, and world music acts in a beautiful venue with affordable ticket prices. Located in Downtown Berkeley.
Visit Lake Merritt. A walking/running path surrounds the lake. You can stop for a drink and a snack at the Lake Chalet.
The Cathedral of Christ the Light, an architecturally impressive church on Lake Merritt.
The Oakland Museum of California. Located in downtown Oakland and featuring a variety of temporary and permanent exhibitions on the history of California.
Yoshi’s. A jazz venue, bar, and restaurant at the edge of Jack London Square in Oakland.
Check out San Francisco Magazine’s special issue on Oakland for more!
SASE received an huge number of submissions for mini-conference themes this year. We are pleased to announce those selected for our 2016 annual meeting!
Submissions to the SASE conference must be made through one of the mini-conferences below (or through a research network). Please note that mini-conferences require an extended (~1,000 word) abstract, and ask that you submit a full paper by May 30th. For further information, please contact the organizer of the mini-conference to which you are submitting.
Mini-conferences are based around a selected number of focused themes, and have open submissions for panels and papers, based on an extended abstract (approx. 1000 words). Each mini-conference will consist of 3 to 6 panels. Each panel will have a discussant, meaning that selected participants must submit a completed paper by May 30th. In the event that a Mini-Conference proposal fails to attract sufficient participants to make three viable sessions, the conference organizers reserve the right to move any sessions which are organized into an appropriate Network. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within a mini-conference, organizers will forward it to the program committee, who will pass it on to one of the networks as a regular submission.
Ruth Berins Collier is Heller Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on regime change, popular participation, and state-labor relations and has included comparative analyses of Latin America, Africa, and Europe. She is the author of Regimes in Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy, 1945-1975; Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics; The Contradictory Alliance: State-Labor Relations and Regime Change in Mexico; and Paths Toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America; and Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America. Most recently, she has written “The High-Tech Economy, Work, and Democracy 2.0: A Research Agenda,” IRLE Working Paper 114-15, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.
Martin Kenney is a Professor in Community and Regional Development at the University of California, Davis; a Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; and Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for the Finnish Economy. He has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge, Hitotsubashi, Kobe, Stanford, and Tokyo Universities. He co-authored or edited six books and 150 scholarly articles on industrial clusters, entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation, university-industry relations, and value chain upgrading. His first book Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex was published by Yale University Press. His most recent edited books Public Universities and Regional Growth, Understanding Silicon Valley, and Locating Global Advantage were published by Stanford University Press where he edits the book series Innovation and Technological Change in the Global Economy. His forthcoming co-edited book Building Innovation Capacity in China: An Agenda for Averting the Middle Income Trap will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. He is a receiving editor at the world’s premier innovation research journal, Research Policy. His research has been funded by the NSF, the Kauffman, Sloan, and Matsushita Foundations, among others.
John Zysman is Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. He was co-founder, and remains co-director, of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE).
Recent books include: The Third Globalization: Can Rich Countries Stay Wealthy in a Changing Global Economy? (Oxford University Press) and Can Green Sustain Growth: From the Religion to the Reality of sustainable prosperity: Energy systems transformation for sustainable prosperity (Stanford University Press).
His earlier work includes: Governments Markets and Growth: Financial Systems and the Politics of Industrial Change; American Industry in International Competition (with Laura Tyson); Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-industrial Economy; and Political Strategies for Industrial Order: State Market and Industry in France, published in French as L’industrie Francaise Entre Marche et L’Etat
His current work focuses on the “platform economy”, the foundations of green technology, and the dynamics of current trade policy and trade negotiations.
Marion Fourcade received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009), explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract. This book investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Other recent research focuses on the valuation of nature in comparative perspective; the moral regulation of states; the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); the sociology of economics, with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, and with Rakesh Khurana; the politics of wine classifications in France and the United States (with Rebecca Elliott and Olivier Jacquet). A final book-length project, Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification, will examine the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call “national classificatory styles” across a range of empirical domains.
Fourcade is also an Associate Fellow of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (Maxpo), and the current President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
Moral judgments that justify or vilify different economic arrangements on the basis of some final value are extremely common in the social sciences. Since the beginning of political economy, market institutions have elicited strong and rival views across a broad spectrum of positions. Those who marvel at the coordinating power of the invisible hand confront those who revile capitalism’s inherently exploitative nature. The celebration of efficiency faces the condemnation of waste. And democratic interpretations of laissez faire meet the hard reality of growing social inequalities. There is no economy that is not political and moral at the same time.
Social scientists, of course, are not the only ones to judge the economy while living in it. E.P. Thompson famously coined the term “moral economy” to denote the inchoate feelings and obligations that orient workers, and make them see certain courses of action (such as riots) as legitimate or illegitimate. To the extent that individuals and institutions act on them, those judgments help constitute economic lines of action, too.
Social scientists, of course, are not the only ones to judge the economy while living in it. E.P. Thompson famously coined the term “moral economy” to denote the inchoate feelings and obligations that orient workers, and make them see certain courses of action (such as riots) as legitimate or illegitimate. To the extent that individuals and institutions act on them, those judgments help constitute economic lines of action, too.
Henry Farrell is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He has previously been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, assistant professor at George Washington University and the University of Toronto, and a senior research fellow at the Max-Planck Project Group in Bonn, Germany. He works on a variety of topics, including trust, the politics of the Internet and international and comparative political economy. His book, The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation, was published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press. In addition he has authored or co-authored 25 academic articles for journals including International Organization, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies and the Annual Review of Political Science, and numerous book chapters for edited volumes. He is a co-founder of the popular academic blog Crooked Timber, and also blogs at The Monkey Cage, which is currently hosted at the Washington Post and winner of the 2010 The Week award for Best Blog. He has written articles for publications including Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy among others. He is an associate editor of Perspectives on Politics and Research and Politics, an international correspondent for Stato e Mercato, a faculty member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Opening Governance, co-chair of the Social Science Research Council’s Digital Culture initiative, an affiliated scholar at Stanford University Law School’s Center for the Internet and Society and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
How should we understand power, interdependence, expertise, collective identity, and rule-making in the global economy? Both economic sociologists and political scientists of international relations are generating exciting new perspectives on these issues, yet there has been little dialogue between them. This mini-conference will bring the two fields together to explore emerging points of convergence and debate in the study of international political economy. Traditionally, economic sociologists have emphasized the political, cultural, and relational embeddedness of markets, while international relations scholars have analyzed coordination and distributional aspects of trade and investment. In some instances, analyses in the two fields appear to be evolving toward one another—as with recent work on cultural categories in international political economy or research on trade and standard-setting in economic sociology. But sustained dialogue on these points of convergence has yet to occur.
Economic sociology was founded on debate with economics, and it soon developed an alliance with comparative politics, especially in the historical institutionalist and “varieties of capitalism” traditions. It is surprising, then, that economic sociologists have had little dialogue—whether friendly or critical—with research in international political economy or international relations. Recent lines of research are going beyond the field’s initial emphasis on diffusion to develop different accounts of interdependence. This includes work on the translation and adaptation of globalizing policy scripts and on the multi-sited production of neoliberalism. Similarly, distinctive accounts of power, coordination, and change in the global economy are emerging out of research on new production architectures, public and private rule-making within these architectures, and the evolution of philanthropic fields. This work is relevant to political science and sometimes borrows from it, but rarely engages in sustained dialogue.
International political economy and international relations have similarly paid little sustained attention to economic sociology. Early sociological work on rationalization, including the work of John Meyer and colleagues, influenced international relations scholarship, and constructivist scholars have similarly been interested in sociological insights. However, with some important exceptions, this interest has not been sustained. This is unfortunate, especially since some scholars of international political economy are looking to broaden out from the dominant ‘open economy politics’ account, which borrows theories of preference formation and institutions from economics. They are developing new accounts of interdependence, cross-national identity formation, and power in the international economy; analyzing rise of institutional architectures that reshape domestic economies; and identifying complex relationships between international trade and social rights within nations. Like economic sociologists, international relations scholars are becoming increasingly interested in global production networks and the standards that govern them, as well as the role of categories and classification in shaping global markets.
We believe that the time is right for a new set of conversations. We invite papers that make either empirical contributions (i.e., by analyzing phenomena of shared interest in the international political economy) or theoretical/agenda-setting statements. We are hopeful that this mini-conference will facilitate both long-term dialogue and collaboration and shorter-term outputs, such as the publication of special issues on the intersection between the two fields.
Catherine Casey is Professor of Organization and Society in the School of Management at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, New York. Her research interests lie principally in areas of economic sociology including organizations and institutions, industrial and employment relations, management and governance. Particular attention currently includes new modes of governance, participation and regulation, and comparative institutional analysis of firms and trade unions. She is formerly a Senior Editor of Organization Studies and currently Vice-President of the International Sociological Association’s Participation and Organizational Democracy. She is a member of the editorial boards of Organization, and Organization Studies.
Juliane Reinecke is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, United Kingdom. She is a Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, from where she received her PhD. Her research interests include global labour governance in supply chains, Fairtrade, sustainability and social movements, focusing on how organizational and political processes shape notions of ethics, fairness and responsibility. Juliane serves as Associate Editor of Business Ethics Quarterly and on the editorial boards of Organization Studies and Organization.
Calls for “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) in the actions of powerful corporate firms gain increased public, business, and social scientific attention. Questions about the role of socio-cultural norms and moral constraints in the regulation of business corporations and the promotion of business ethics have a long history. Current debates on CSR reveal a general confluence of concerns about the effects of firm action in society and at the same time much contestation and ambiguity over what CSR means and who may be its beneficiaries. For many business actors, taking CSR initiatives is normatively the “right thing” to do. Critics contend that CSR is controlled by powerful firms to serve their strategic interests especially to enhance their reputation or brand. On that view, CSR has little or no substantive effect in regulating the firm’s economic rationality and utility maximization.
However, as global production and trading relations expand in complex networks of transnational operations and value chains, CSR has become an extensive domain of corporate voluntary and quasi-mandatory action. Of particular importance is the role of CSR in responding to, or possibly exacerbating, observed weaknesses in the substance, reach and enforcement of mandatory law, notably labour and employment and environmental protection laws in transnational production and trade. Those weaknesses at state-level regulation propose greater legitimation of the corporate firm’s voluntary regulation. Many transnational corporations find themselves engaged in negotiations and alliances with civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in addition to or instead of interlocution with state actors.
The role of CSR in corporate governance, politics and economy, and the public’s interests in the assumed private actions of the firm, invite a sharp spotlight on CSR’s enterprise and raise probing questions. CSR as moral economy and private governance may entail a public role with significant societal effect.
This mini-conference aims to explore the values, uses and limits of CSR as moral economy in governing the firm. It invites papers of both theoretical and empirical nature that address substantive topics in CSR research. International and comparative studies are especially welcome. Orienting questions include:
Saskia Freye is a postdoctoral researcher at the Political Science Department of the Ruhr University Bochum. She holds a Diploma in Economics and a Doctorates-Degree in the Social Sciences from the University of Cologne. Before her engagements with the Ruhr University, Saskia was affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Her research interests include theories of capitalism, corporate governance, management studies, elite theory, and institutional theory. Empirically Saskia is especially interested in the changes of German capitalism. Her current research focus lies on processes of formalization and juridification of corporate governance in Germany and the personalization of responsibility in corporations.
Sascha Münnich, born in 1977, is Junior Professor of Comparative Sociology at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany. Until 2013 he was senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Until August 2015 he worked as John. F. Kennedy-Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies of Harvard University for a full year.
Münnich’s primary research fields are economic sociology, comparative political economy, institutional theory, comparative method and welfare state research. He is currently working on the cultural legitimacy of financial profits and its influence on the historical and current evolution of divergent financial systems in Europe. His dissertation on the role of ideas and interests in the evolution of labor market policy in Germany and the U.S. has been awarded the Otto-Hahn-Medal for academic excellence by the German Max-Planck-Society.
Latest Publications: Münnich, Sascha (2015): Readjusting imagined markets. Morality and institutional resilience in the German and British bank bailout of 2008. In: Socioeconomic Review, S. mwv014. DOI: 10.1093/ser/mwv014.; Münnich, Sascha (2015): Thieves, Fools, Fraudsters, and Gamblers? The Ambivalence of Moral Criticism in the Credit Crunch of 2008. In: Archives Europeénnes de Sociologie / European Journal of Sociology 56 (01), S. 93–118.
This mini-conference aims to explore the analytical power and boundaries of Polanyi’s concept of the countermovement in the era of a globalized capitalism. Intensification of economic integration on a global scale and the increasing financialization and marketization of business, politics and the everyday life has undermined the post-war settlement in many (Western) countries, producing what might be called a “second Polanyian moment”. These developments advance forcefully and (re-)expose ever more parts of society to the market, thereby undermining its social, environmental, and economic preconditions. By re-integrating economy and society, Polanyi’s concept is a powerful tool to analyze social movements and political re-regulation on different levels (from local to cross-national) and in different forms (reactionary, nationalistic, progressive).
The mini-conference is organized alongside three themes:
1) Inventory and analytical boundaries
The concept of countermovement enables us to look beyond classical social movements and integrate and make sense of phenomena such as spreading religious fundamentalism and nationalism and their ambivalent relation to marketization. While countermovement can take very different forms, we must prevent degrading the concept as a catch-all category and sharpening the conceptual core and its boundaries.
If capitalism is a social order, does this mean that every non-market engagement is part of a countermovement? Which empirical developments and phenomena do we currently observe? How do we distinguish engagements and phenomena as parts of a countermovement from other forms of societal engagement (and which)? How do we explain the lack of countermovement?
2) Systematization of countermovements
The countermovement is by no means homogenous and relies neither on shared intellectual preconceptions, nor on anti-liberal attitudes. Furthermore, the precarious sharpness of the distinction between market and (non-market) institutional regulation complicates a Polanyian analysis: Liberalism may be part of a countermovement against the status quo of market economies. Social protest may be directed at blocking particular aspects of contemporary market economies while others are very much accepted or even welcomed.
Alongside what aspects can we differentiate forms of engagement that may be subsumed as countermovements? To which degree do movements such as Anti-Globalization, Occupy, the Arab spring movement or the recent European wave of nationalist or racist protests represent Polanyian countermovements? How do different engagements situate themselves in relation to capitalism? What new or re-newed reactionary or conservative forms of protection against marketization do we find? How do they differ from progressive forms? Is there a liberal or rationalistic countermovement against marketization? What normative basis do the different approaches to protect society have today?
3) Historic advancement, successes and reactions
How does countermovement today differ from the processes analyzed by Polanyi? How successful are different forms of countermovement? How do we explain the cleavages within the counter-countermovement of today’s global neoliberalism? Which role do certain economic sectoral interests play for fostering (or blocking) certain countermovements? Which forms of economic knowledge do countermovements make use of? Are economically based agendas more successful than positions that are rooted in classical political or social philosophy? How does global/today’s capitalist economies “react” to countermovements? Do we see changing “spirits of capitalism” answering critics?
Jean-Samuel Beuscart is Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po Medialab in Paris. His research focuses on the digitization of markets and consumption. His current work focuses on the digitization of music consumption, the digital guidance of sustainable behaviours, and the ecological footprint of digital technologies.
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.
Kevin Mellet is Associate Professor of 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 and organization of markets. Kevin’s current research focuses on the history of market research, the sociology of marketing professionals and the formation and regulation of the personal data economy. He is the author of Marketing. A Sociological Approach (Polity Books, 2025).
Olivier Pilmis is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (Sciences Po – CNRS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). His research applies economic sociology, organizational sociology and sociological theory to the study of macroeconomic forecasting. Pilmis’s work focuses on the emergence of beliefs, the production of legitimate discourses about the future, and the social structure of the market for forecasting.
Current Research Project : http://www.sciencespo.fr/liepp/en/content/informer-pour-gouverner-les-dynamiques-institutionnelles-des-mondes-de-la-gouvernance-macroe
Marie Trespeuch is a sociologist at the social sciences department of Orange Labs (Sense). She received her PhD from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in 2011 for a dissertation focused on the transformations of the French gambling market. Her research interests lie at the impact of the Internet on markets. Her recent studies deal with online valuation devices and the sharing economy. She is also interested in the moral issues on markets, and co-edited on this topic a book with Ph. Steiner (Marchés contestés. Quand le marché rencontre la morale, PUM, 2015).
In the past two decades, the development of Internet and digital technologies has radically impacted capitalism, by transforming the organization of markets, firms and consumer agencies. All economic sectors are, in one way or another, affected by this transformation. Particularly relevant for socio-economists is the reshaping of many markets through digital platforms, as well as the disruption of industries (music, urban transportation, advertising, media…) by online ‘pure player’. Although the promise of economic efficiency and rationalization of markets – particularly strong during the New Economy bubble – still remains pregnant, more recent expectations associated with digital capitalism include consumer empowerment through online participative devices or the rise of a “sharing” economy explicitly distancing from pure economic rationality. The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together researchers studying digital markets. We will particularly welcome contributions that address the following thematic strands (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered):
The infrastructure of digital capitalism. Internet and digital technologies provide a turnkey infrastructure of platforms and market intermediaries. These intermediaries support economic coordination between multiple actors, potentially on a large scale, by defining and organizing the economic qualification of goods, pricing and transaction standards, as well as matching modalities. In doing so, they embed and perform conventions and rules that define and stabilize the expectations of economic actors. Digital capitalism produces new coordination instruments, such as judgement and evaluation systems based on consumer participation (online consumer reviews), virtual and alternative currencies, cryptomarkets, “zero-price” business models, scoring algorithms and predictive calculation, etc.. The design of electronic marketplaces and the establishment of digital business models are therefore privileged observation sites for studying the process of internalization of values and moral norms in economic coordination.
The expansion of capitalism? The diffusion of digital technologies has also led to the inclusion of new entities to the market economy. This process of marketization relies on the ‘digitization’ of existing goods and services – mainly those produced by knowledge-intensive and creative industries – and also on the creation and circulation of new commodities such as in-game objects, personal data or online reputation. It is also based on the inclusion of new types of actors into the game of economic exchange: video-sharing websites (Youtube, Vimeo), marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy), lodging websites (AirBnB, Homeaway), micro-task websites (Fiverr, Amazon Mechanical Turk…) have in common to give private individuals means to step into amateur commercial activities. This ongoing process shifts market boundaries and softens the separation between economic and non-economic activities. It has consequently raised many debates and controversies related to the moral dimension of markets: digital labour, contested commodities, online participation, etc.
Market regulation in the digital age. The digital economy challenges existing regulatory frameworks in many ways. First, it tends to weaken existing national or multi-country regulations, because products and services are distributed and made available on a global scale. On various markets such as those for cultural goods, urban transportation, hotel industry, gambling, etc., national regulators are often providing various and loosely coordinated late answers to the challenges posed by new global digital services. Moreover, digital markets share economic characteristics (winner-takes-all dynamics, multi-sided markets, etc.) that make them more difficult to regulate. Secondly, the expansion of digital markets produces contradictions between different orders of worth. Many actors condemn the legal impediments to the development of digital innovation, whereas others focus on the problems of laissez faire (inequalities, monopolies domination…) and wish that the regulator protects specific economic actors (incumbents, national firms, consumers…), by law or tax policy. Different studies about digital markets regulations could bring a valuable input to understand what are the specific economic and moral orders produced on digital markets, and how law and politics aim at translating them in regulation frameworks and instruments.
Joe Deville is a lecturer at Lancaster University based jointly in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology and the Department of Sociology. His first book, Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection, and the Capture of Affect was published by Routledge in early 2015. He is working on a number of ongoing collaborative projects, including an analysis of new online, lending platforms that use big data to assess creditworthiness. He is an editor and co-founder of the Charisma: Consumer Market Studies network, an Editor at Journal of Cultural Economy, and a co-director of the Centre for Mobilities Research.
Jeanne Lazarus is a tenured CNRS research fellow at the CSO in Sciences-po (Paris). Her research has focused on relationships between bankers and customers in French retail banks. She published L’Epreuve de l’argent in 2012, and edited several special issues on banking, credit and money management. The latest was co-edited with Mariana Luzzi «L’argent domestique: des pratiques aux institutions». Jeanne has also conducted research on the sociology of money and the consumption and monetary practices of the impoverished. She is currently studying the ways in which public policy structures household finances and conceives the protection of populations deemed to be at risk of financial insecurity, due to precarious employment and the withdrawal of social welfare provisions.
Mariana Luzzi is Sociology Professor and CONICET research fellow at the University of General Sarmiento (Argentina). She received a Ph.D. from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Her research explores the social construction and questioning of trust in money and social disputes over money meanings and politics. She has studied the conflicts about bank deposits, credits and regional currencies during the Argentine crisis of 2001 and is currently working on the dollarization of money practices in Argentina since the 1960s. She has also conducted research on the creation and use of social currencies. She published Réinventer le marché? Les clubs de troc face à la crise en Argentine.
José Ossandón is Assistant Professor in the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School and received his PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. His main areas of interest are the enactment of finance objects, how markets are organized, evaluated and tamed, and broad contemporary social theory. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the history of private health insurance in Chile and is currently studying the consumer credit industry. José coordinates the collective academic blog https://estudiosdelaeconomia.wordpress.com/, has recently co-edited the books Adaptación. La empresa chilena después de Friedman and Disturbios Culturales and his most recent articles appeared in the Journal of Cultural Economy, Consumption Markets & Culture and the collected book Making Things Valuable.
The mini-conference “Domesticizing financial economies, part 3” will pursue the rich and exciting discussions of the first two Domesticizing financial economies mini-conferences, held at Chicago and London at the 2014 and 2015 SASE meetings. Our starting point is that the use of even the most sophisticated financial products can be understood in the light of a close empirical description of their various social and technical contexts, ranging from social ties and obligations, to ways of calculating, to specific devices and informational infrastructures. Rather than (or as well as) seeking to understand how financial economies are “economized”, to draw on a term used by Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon, we are thus interested in work that explores how monetary transactions are woven into the fabric of the everyday and come to be “domesticized”.
The precise ways in which financial economies become domesticized, as recent literature and many of the papers presented at the last two versions of this mini-conference have shown, are deeply morally entangled. Credit evaluation mechanisms, for example, inevitably involve a moral dimension, with debtors being routinely connected, via a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches to collective categories of expected behavior (Deville 2015a, Fourcade & Healy, 2013, Han 2012, Lazarus, 2012, Ossandón 2012, 2014). Such financial instruments are in turn continuously ‘earmarked’ as they pass through domestic settings. Those who participate in monetary interactions cannot but perform what Zelizer calls “relational work” as they delimit the moral frames according to which their transactions are located (Zelizer, 2010; Guérin, Villareal and Morvant-Roux, 2013, Wilkis, 2013). Similar practices can be observed in the extension and creation of new monetary infrastructures (Maurer (2012). Mobile monies in countries in Africa and Central America, for instance, are intimately related with the actions of agencies that explicitly justify their action in moral terms (e.g. the Gates Foundation, most prominently). Meanwhile, governments and multilateral organizations around the world have made the extension of formal banking into a goal that is framed not only in economic but also moral terms. This can be seen in the advancement of goals such as financial inclusion and social and economic development that directly target financial citizens at the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (Elyachar 2012, Langley, 2008, McFall, 2015), or in the global proliferation of financial literacy workshops in which actors from the banking, policy and not-for-profit sectors attempt to educate individuals into becoming ‘financially literate’ (Lazarus, 2016). Such processes do not, however, encounter passive populations: controversies about financial instruments can lead to the development of new moral and political collectives, such as the variety of debtor publics that have emerged in different social and historical contexts (Deville, 2015b, Luzzi, 2012, Ross, 2014).
We invite papers that look at specific situations of monetary transaction and domestic credit and money management. Papers with varied disciplinary backgrounds discussing the following issues are welcome:
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 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.
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 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 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.
This mini-conference concerns subnational economic and social governance (regions and industries), with a particular focus on its implications for work and employment. The objective is to develop a better understanding of experimental practices and policies developed by a range of actors and notably those promoting worker and community deliberation, wellbeing and sustainability.
Subnational regions and industries are engaged in a perpetual struggle to ensure jobs and prosperity. Policy makers, corporations, trade unionists and other civil society organizations are seeking to maintain or change institutions to attract capital and engage in skill development, firm upgrading and economic innovation. Institutional actors at this level are often key interlocutors for foreign direct investors and geographically mobile domestic firms attracted to some combination of low- and high-road competitiveness strategies, ranging from low-cost, total flexibility to innovative ecosystems supported by dense institutional networks. Workers and their communities often appear to be excluded from the experimentation under way, but there is increasing consensus that both the traditional institutions regulating work and employment and the neo-liberal narratives that seek to undermine them are failing to produce good results for workers and their communities. This potentially opens up space for alternative moral economies, centred on worker and community wellbeing, sustainability and deliberation and requiring new narratives and new capabilities to engage in institutional experimentation.
Contributions to this mini-conference might include one or more of the following themes.
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).
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.
Haider Hamoudi is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of Iraq Studies of Boston University, and served in 2014 as the Kraemer Distinguished Middle East Scholar in Residence at William & Mary Law School. Professor Hamoudi’s scholarship focuses on Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, with a primary emphasis on commerce. Professor Hamoudi has written on Islamic finance and Islamic law for numerous law reviews, and spoken at conferences in distinguished academic and practitioner venues. In 2009, Professor Hamoudi was awarded the Hessel Yntema prize by the American Society of Comparative Law for the best article produced in the American Journal of Comparative Law by an author under the age of forty for an article related to understanding Islamic finance from a Realist perspective. In 2014, he was selected by the graduating law school class as the winner of the Robert T. Harper Excellence in Teaching Award.
M. Kabir Hassan is Professor of Finance and Hibernia Professor of Economics and Finance in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of New Orleans. Kabir is a financial economist with consulting, research and teaching experiences in development finance, money and capital markets, Islamic finance, corporate finance, investments, monetary economics, macroeconomics and international trade and finance. Kabir has done consulting work for the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, African Development Bank, Transparency International-Bangladesh (TIB), Islamic Development Bank, Government of Turkey and many private organizations.
Kabir has 177 (42 in ISI, 181 in Scopus, 138 in ABDC and 79 and ABS ) papers published in refereed academic journals. Kabir is the editor of The Global Journal of Finance and Economics, Journal of Islamic Economics, Banking and Finance (ABDC and ABS), International Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Finance and Management (ABDC and ABS), Co-Editor of Journal of Economic Cooperation and Development (SCOPUS), and Chief Editor, International Journal of Excellence of Islamic Banking and Finance. Kabir has also edited and published nine books.
Aaron Z. Pitluck is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago (2015-2016). He is also serving as elected Vice President for the Economy and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association. His research investigates the intersection of finance and society. His current principal research project investigates financial innovation and social control inside Islamic investment banks, so as to better understand the potential and limitations of secular radical reform of financial markets. His previous research includes a series of articles on professional investors’ behavior in emerging markets. He has published essays in such journals as the Socio-economic Review, Economy and Society, and the Journal of Cultural Economy.
Lena Rethel is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the interrelationship between finance and development and the emergence of alternative economies with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Her recent books are: The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016fc, co-edited with Juanita Elias), Global Governance in Crisis (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Andre Broome and Liam Clegg) and The Problem with Banks (Zed Books, 2012, co-authored with Timothy J. Sinclair). Lena is currently finalising the manuscript of her next book, provisionally entitled Capital Markets by Design. From Crisis Recovery to Islamic Finance in Southeast Asia.
This mini-conference invites contributions from across the social sciences and humanities to reflect on the past, present, and contested futures of Islam’s new financial and economic moralities. As part of the Islamic revival of the 1970s and 1980s, social movements worldwide have pursued multiple strategies to imagine and implement an economic system organized around Islamic values such as social justice, reciprocity and the spiritual, moral, intellectual, social, and material well-being of individuals. This includes the US$2.5 trillion Islamic finance industry and US$1.29 trillion halal food market, not to mention Islamic “modest fashion,” halal pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and Islamically-marketed travel, recreation, and lifestyle products. It also includes philanthropic institutions such as pious foundations (waqf) and charities funded by almsgiving (zakah). Islamic economic practices range from the morally guided everyday practices of individuals to those of multinational corporations and state elites seeking to enter and advance Islamic markets. With the hindsight of forty years, we can observe heterogeneous and explicitly competing Islamic economic moralities, found at various scales of socio-economic organization.
Three overlapping research projects have emerged as a result of the rapid growth of the Islamic economy. First, it has attracted social scientists seeking to document and interpret the historical and contemporary dynamics of this new socio-economic phenomenon. This strand of scholarship studies the emergence of the Islamic economy either on its own terms, or with reference to its convergence and divergence with other economies, be they explicitly moral or otherwise. Second, it has generated research by academics and practitioners to advance this socio-economic project. In this scholarship, Islamic economy is often conceptualized as part of an emerging alternative modernity that explicitly embraces the morality of economic action. Third, it has also generated scholarship critical of Islamic economic practices, particularly in Islamic banking and finance. Much of this third research stream argues that Islamic finance is excessively focused on efficiency and profitability at the expense of Islamic moral values such as equity, fairness, and individual development. Importantly, it debates the extent to which the Islamic finance industry has diverged from Islamic idea(l)s, investigates alternative aspirations for Islamic finance, and deliberates strategies for transforming its current trajectory.
Embracing all three research streams, the conference aims to (i) (re-)examine the key axioms and moral claims of Islamic economy both in theory and as practiced; (ii) explore the economic, social and political dynamics underpinning the various sectors, scales and sites of the Islamic economy; and (iii) interrogate the extent to which the Islamic economy provides a substantive alternative to mainstream economic activity with a special emphasis on the Islamic finance sector. A provisional list of panel topics and indicative research questions can be accessed at the University of Warwick or University of Durham. King Saud University is providing a limited number of travel grants for graduate students – read the Conference Submissions and Awards Guildelines for more information.
Barb Brents is professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is a co-author of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland (Routledge Press, 2010). Brents’ research and teaching interests include political sociology, gender and sexuality, urban sociology, and public sociology. Brents is also a faculty affiliate in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, and heads a research team collecting data about sex work clientele through a confidential online survey of adult industry consumption: the UNLV Consumer Survey. Her past research has explored intersections of politics, culture, economics and gender looking at topics such as the politics of terrorism and violence, and business and social policies. Her current research uses a political economy lens to study sex and gender in market culture, with recent work using the sex industry as a site to understand the intersections of culture and economics — including the construction of “market morality” in political debates around sexuality; the relation between tourism, consumption and sexuality; the emotional and bodily labor of selling sex; and consuming sex.
Erica Coslor (PhD in Sociology, University of Chicago), is a lecturer in Management at the University of Melbourne, Australia. As an economic sociologist in a management department, her research interests include market structure and process, valuation issues, calculative practices, and the sociology of finance and accounting. Her scholarly publications on the financialization of art have also been used by legal practitioners such as the US Copyright Office. In addition to teaching in the areas of organizational change and strategy, she is conducting ethnography at the Melbourne Museum.
Brett Crawford (Ph.D. in Organization and Management Studies, Copenhagen Business School) is Assistant Professor of Organizational Leadership in the Department of Technology Leadership and Innovation at Purdue University. His research explores how organizations influence radical social change, primarily relating to environmental issues and stigmas. Brett’s research has been published in outlets such as Management and Organizational History, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Social Science & Medicine and the International Journal of Medical Education. He is a member of the Academy of Management and the American Sociological Association and previously held appointments at the University of Pittsburgh and Northwestern University.
Martin Parker is Professor of Organisation and Culture at the University of Leicester School of Management. He has previously held posts at Staffordshire, Keele and Warwick universities, with a background in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. His research and writing is an attempt to widen the scope of what can be properly covered by the business school, whether in terms of particular sorts of organisations (the circus, the worker co-op, Apollo space programme), or ways of representing organising (in art, cartoons, films etc). Martin’s recent writing has been about ‘alternative’ organisation in two senses. One is work on co-operatives, worker self-management, alternative finance and so on. The other is on different ways of thinking about what ‘organisation’ means, with writing about angels, shipping containers, art galleries, as well as a book on outlaws. He is also very interested in how academics write, and how they might cultivate new audiences for their ideas. Martin’s books include Fighting Corporate Abuse: Beyond Predatory Capitalism, and Alternative Business: Outlaws, Crime and Culture.
Intersections between morals and economic forces provide a productive niche to study blurring of cultural factors, economic trends, and values-driven behaviour at the individual, organizational and market level. In the same age as ethical investing, which can be seen as one redefinition of legitimacy, we find an explosion of formerly taboo goods and services elsewhere. From the increasing access to pornography to the newly legal US gay wedding industry, or the exclusion of alcohol and tobacco firms in investing, we see wide redefinition of what is, and what is not, considered acceptable for consumers, firms and society.
This theme welcomes empirical papers that focus on redefinition and movement of moral and ethical lines, and the factors that influence these shifts, from culture to regulation to potential profits. For example, neoliberal promotion of free markets fosters a culture of consumption promoting individual freedom and self-management. This paradoxically seems to promote conservative gender and sexual norms, while mainstreaming the growing sex industry. More widely, moral and political boundaries impact producers, conditions of production and consumers. Selling sex toys is legal, selling sex often isn’t, and selling other people for sex is usually illegal, yet we find a $870 m. market for transnational organized crime. Morals and categories are seen in calculative practices from non-interest Islamic mortgages to museums that avoid valuing sacred and human remains. We also welcome organizational-level work, given how contemporary corporations are expected to pursue morality while providing financial returns, such as Starbucks’ anti-gun/ pro equality stance.
Papers for this session could address questions such as the following:
Dean Curran is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Calgary. He has previous degrees in economics, the philosophy of the social sciences, and a PhD in sociology. His research interests include social theory, sociology of risk, and class and inequality theory. He has publications in the British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Economy and Society, Journal of Classical Sociology and a forthcoming book with Palgrave Macmillan, Risk, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century (2016).
Dave Elder-Vass teaches sociology and digital economies at Loughborough University in the UK. Before returning to academic life he was a senior IT technology manager in the private sector. He writes on social ontology and more recently on economic sociology, particularly the gift economy and the digital economy. His publications include The Causal Power of Social Structures (2010), The Reality of Social Construction (2012), and Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (2016), all with Cambridge University Press.
Elisa Oreglia is a lecturer at SOAS, University of London. She studies the appropriation and circulation of new media among marginal users in China and Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on local knowledge production and information sharing practices. She is currently researching the self-invention of new media users in rural China, and the “digital imagination” in Myanmar.
Nikos Sotirakopoulos teaches sociology at Loughborough University in the UK. His research interests include social and political theory (the problematization of some key modernity’s values, such as economic growth and individual agency, in the narratives of both the Left and the Right), the social construction of environmental issues, and economic sociology (mainly, the application of ideas from the Austrian School of Economics in current social problems). He has published on issues around the anti-globalization movement, the 2011 international wave of protests and the Greek economic and social crisis.
Janaki Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB). She studies the political economy of information and ICT-focused development initiatives. Janaki is currently working on the role of intermediaries in ICT-based transactions among agricultural actors in India, and the role of information determinism in ICT-based initiatives.
Digital technologies have opened up new opportunities for novel forms of economic practice and for the economic empowerment of individuals and communities. But what happens when they encounter the mesh of pre-existing social, cultural, and economic relations within which they are deployed in practice? We invite papers that explore the moral economies underpinning the use of digital technologies, and examine how they encourage or constrain the use of technologies to renegotiate existing power structures and economic practices. We are particularly interested in the following themes:
1. How do existing moral economies shape digital economies?
2. How are moral economies reworked in the digital world?
Christopher Steele is Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Organization at the Alberta Business School, of the University of Alberta. His research interests include the production and use of knowledge, the formation and influence of collective intentionality and identity, and the internal dynamics of practices and institutions. His current research projects use qualitative methods to explore these topics in the contexts of U.S. healthcare, and of U.S. business intelligence and analytics. This research draws from various literatures, including practice theory, institutional theory, cultural sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. These literatures also form the basis of several theoretical projects, extending beyond this empirical work. Along with Klaus Weber, he is currently working on theorizing the multiple ways in which materiality expresses and enacts moral principles and understandings. His work has been published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations and Advances in Group Processes, and is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Review.
Klaus Weber is an associate professor of Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His research is grounded in cultural and institutional analysis, with substantive interests in the political economy of globalization, the intersection between social movements and the economy, sustainability and social enterprise. Klaus’ research has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, the American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, and the Strategic Management Journal. His work has won best paper awards at the American Sociological Association and Administrative Science Quarterly. He has guest edited volumes on culture and social movements for Organization Studies and Organization Science.
Morality in markets has traditionally been cast as a matter of ethical decision-making by individuals, or perhaps of cultural mores and dispositions. Focusing predominantly on these aspects of market moralities, however, downplays the many ways in which economic behaviour is embedded in material infrastructures. These infrastructures encompass a variety of devices, technologies, and objects that generate, regulate, discipline, or automate market behaviour. Historically, one can think of the importance of physical marketplaces in shaping economic activity, or of the role of calculative devices such as double-entry bookkeeping, or spreadsheet models of investing. More recently, new online sites for market activities have emerged, such as crowd-sourcing platforms that are reshaping the representation of economic and social enterprises to their various audiences. Analytic technologies, such as algorithmic trading in financial markets and computer-generated purchasing suggestions and feedback opportunities in consumer markets, potentially put decision-making and market behaviour on a different foundation. Such material infrastructures have moral assumptions built into them: they influence who can be admitted as a qualified market participant, the information deemed relevant for attaching value to goods, and the types of relationships and market behaviours that are deemed appropriate.
Materialized moralities influence market behaviour, and cognition; frequently in ways unrecognized by participants, and in line with principles to which participants might not subscribe. In some cases, deliberate moral decision-making may take place in the design of material objects and infrastructures, rather than during everyday market activity – which may be relatively unreflective, if not automated. In other instances, morality is smuggled into material infrastructures by the unaware. Market moralities that are materially embedded can be shaped by elite actors that control their design; yet sometimes even the designers do not see the moral assumptions in their work. Increased attention to materiality should uncover the multiple loci and forms of moral decision-making regarding markets, and some of the ways by which particular market moralities extend their jurisdiction and influence over space and time.
For this mini-conference theme, we call for work that explores the intersection of materiality and morality in market contexts – whether in contemporary or historical markets. An important goal of the mini conference theme is to facilitate conversations between researchers that study materiality from different traditions. The following examples of related questions are not exhaustive:
Brice Laurent is a State engineer and teaches at Sciences Po Paris. His work focuses on the relationships between the making of science and the construction of democratic order. Using an approach based on Science and Technology Studies, his work analyzes the devices that connect research programs, the making of technical objects and the production of various types of publics. The overall objectif is to study the formation of political spaces through the analysis of sites (within regulatory, standardization or expertise arenas) where scientific objectivity and democratic legitimacy are questioned.
Brice Laurent graduated from the Ecole des Mines and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In 2008, he joined the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation where he wrote his dissertation on nanotechnology (Democracies on trial. Assembling nanotechnology and its problems). In this work, the problematization of nanotechnology in Europe and the United-States, in places such as science museums, public debates or regulatory arenas, appears as a trial for contemporary democracies.
Benjamin Lemoine is a researcher in Political Science and Socio-Economics at CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research. He has been based at Paris Dauphine University (IRISSO) since 2013. Supervised by Michel Callon at CSI (Mines ParisTech), he developed a geneological approach to the French public debt problem through the analysis of quantification controversies and financing devices. He mobilizes a critical Science Studies and Technology (STS) approach in order to analyze the materiality of public debt. During a post-doctoral research at IFRIS (Université Marne-la-Vallée) and Sciences Po (CSO), he studied the increasing power of credit rating agencies in defining sovereign risk, policy choices and economic decisions. He is now currently working on the ways in which sovereign debt techniques shape economic and social policies, but also political entities such as states and cities. His current fieldworks include an analysis of public debt diplomacy and the politics of sovereign debt restructuration, but also the relationship between law and private finance, in Argentina after the State defaulted. He recently published L’ordre de la dette. Enquête sur les infortunes de l’État et la prospérité du marché, La Découverte, Paris, February 2016; “Dealing with the State. The Politics of French Sovereign Bond Transaction and Wholesaling”, Sociétés Contemporaines, December 2013; and “Measuring and Restructuring the State. Debt Metrics and the Control of Present and Future Political Order”, Chapter in Transforming European States, D. King and P. Le Galès, (eds.), Oxford University Press, (Forthcoming, 2016).
Roi Livne is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He is also affiliated with Berkeley’s Center for Ethnographic Research and Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture Program. His research engages a variety of topics, including economic sociology, science and technology studies, medical sociology, morality, organizations, and political sociology.
He is currently working on a book project (under contract with Harvard University Press) on the U.S. economy of dying. Combining historical and ethnographic analyses of Hospice and Palliative Care clinicians, Roi investigate how economic and organizational constraints play into life-and-death decisions at the bedside. His first article on the topic, “Economies of Dying: The Moralization of Economic Scarcity in U.S. Hospice Care” was published in the American Sociological Review. His other research projects focus on the techno-politics of sovereign debt management (with Yuval Yonay and Benjamin Lemoine) and on the micro-sociology of court expertise (with Marion Fourcade).
New forms of international regulation and increasing global flows of capital, people, and knowledge are transforming the economic roles states assume, as well as the very essence of statehood. We invite papers from diverse disciplines, which examine how new patterns of economic exchange, valuation, and operation configure new sovereign ontologies (i.e. what states are), moral and normative discussions of statehood (what states should be), and states’ relationship to populations, economies, territories, resources, and global institutions. Participants can explore the co-production of sovereignty, state methodologies and technologies, objects of state sovereignty (e.g. the economy, the environment, welfare, education), and moral orders (e.g. judgments of state actions’ legitimacy, definitions of the “public good.”)
This mini-conference has four themes:
Francesca Forno is Associate Professor at the University of Trento and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bergamo where she teaches Sociology and Sociology of Consumption. She has published on citizen politics and social movements. Two of her ongoing research interests are political consumerism and sustainable community movements. A special focus in these areas is on the consequences of the spread of market-based forms of action for citizens’ participation and mobilization. She is Co-director and Co-founder of University of Bergamo’s CORES LAB (research group on Consumption, Networks and Practices of Sustainable Economies) and Associate Editor of Partecipazione e Conflitto, the first Italian / International academic journal specialized in the analysis of social and political participation.
Dr. Torsten Geelan is a sociologist interested in trade union movements, media counter-power, and just transitions to sustainable economies and societies. His research is comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from industrial relations, environmental sociology, environmental labour studies, critical social theory, and media and communication studies. He is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economic Sociology and the Future of Work at the University of Bristol. Prior to joining Bristol, he worked as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology, and as a Lecturer in Sociology of Work and Employment at the University of Leicester Business School. He holds an MPhil and PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Economics and Social Studies from the University of Manchester.
Torsten’s EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie project Eco-Unions (2021-2024) explores how the trade union movement is navigating the so-called ‘jobs versus environment’ dilemma. The project focuses on two new labor-environmental coalitions in Denmark and the UK, and analyses the environmental discourses being produced and circulated across the interconnected arenas of union strategizing, climate policy-making and public debate. He’s particularly interested in understanding whether these discourses are able to challenge the dominance and pervasiveness of capitalist realism. During the project, he held a position as a Visiting Fellow at the LSE’s world-leading Department of Media and Communications in London. In the run-up to Eco-Unions, he led a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant on the role of Twitter in organising the 2018-2020 UK higher education strike.
He is currently co-founder and co-chair of the Alternatives to Capitalism Research Network at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) and co-editor of the Bristol University Press book series Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21stCentury. He also co-edited the Palgrave Macmillan volume From Financial Crisis to Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons (2018; 2020 paperback) and has worked as a columnist for the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information.
As a public speaker, Torsten is regularly invited to give talks to research centres, NGOs such as Rethinking Economics, and the trade union movement in England and Denmark.
Paolo R. Graziano is Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua, Italy, and Associate Fellow at the European Social Observatory in Brussels. He has published three books and edited several volumes and special issues on topics such as Europeanization, welfare state politics, European social policy, political consumerism, European governance. His most recent book – ‘Sustainable Community Movement Organisations’ – will be published in 2016 (Il Mulino, in Italian) and his work has appeared in the following journals, among others: Comparative European Politics, European Journal for Political Research, European Political Science, Global Social Policy, Governance, International Journal of Social Welfare, Journal of Consumer Culture, Journal of European Social Policy, Journal of Social Policy, Regional and Federal Studies, Social Policy and Administration, The Annals of the America Academy of Political and Social Science.
Dr Lara Monticelli is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer and public speaker interested in analysing contemporary capitalism, its crises, and more just and sustainable alternative futures. Her approach draws insights from economic and political sociology, critical social theory, political economy, and the humanities. Prior to joining UCL, she worked as Assistant Professor and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark. She also held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Stockholm, and University of Rotterdam (Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, DRIFT).
Her EU-funded research project EcoLabSS (2018-2024), focused on the (re)emergence of community-based, prefigurative social movements (e.g. sustainable communities, eco-villages, transition towns, solidarity networks) 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, sustainable futures. Her most recent edited volume is titled “The Future is Now. An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics” (2022, Bristol University Press).
With Dr Torsten Geelan, she co-chairs the international research network “Alternatives to Capitalism” at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) and co-edits the book series “Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century” at Bristol University Press.
The recent and yet unresolved Great Recession has revealed all the limitations and flaws of the ‘economic moralities’ embedded in neoliberalism which have been guiding the functioning of economic and political institutions in numerous countries. In tandem with the rise of new social movements and the success of radical political parties, every day economic practices of production and consumption are also being questioned and challenged by a growing number of ‘critical’ citizens. These attempts often take the form of local, horizontal and collaborative initiatives such as consumer-producer networks, cooperatives, ethical banking, co-working spaces, and the like.
All these practices share a steadfast belief in the idea of ‘social sustainability’, and a desire to move towards a society which promotes not just environmentalism but also values of equality, diversity, and social cohesion. Such economic practices and ideas have the potential to gradually disrupt the economic moralities underlying many capitalist modes of production and the ways in which we consume goods and services.
This Mini Conference welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions from around the world and across the social sciences (sociology, political science, development studies, economics, anthropology, business, and philosophy) that touch on the following three themes:
1) New Modes of Production
The social economy refers to economic activity that is directly organized and controlled through the exercise of some form of social power – rooted in the voluntary association of people in civil society, and based on the capacity to organize people for collective action of various sorts.
The range of economic activities that can be organized through the social economy is very broad and includes recycling, childcare, housing, healthcare, disaster relief and web applications.
This stream welcomes contributions that:
2) Critical Consumption
Over the past years, new social movements (Sustainable Community Movement Organizations) have emerged, going beyond more traditional forms of mobilization and of contentious politics. SCMOs are focused on exploiting alternative forms of consumption as a political tool: organizations and movements such as community food networks, community sustained agriculture and fair trade, are all examples of SCMOs which have gained increasing relevance globally. The crisis has provided further space for such organizations which have helped to build new social relationships and resistance.
Many of the studies on the topic, however, have analyzed this phenomenon mainly from the individual consumer perspective while less attention has been paid to the role of social movements promoting collective political actions.
This second stream welcomes contributions discussing theoretical challenges posed by SCMOs and/or empirical illustrations in both the Global North and the Global South.
3) Alternative Lifestyles
In our final stream we will discuss theoretical and empirical (academic and/or activist based) research on all those, increasingly diffused, everyday practices that are based not (or not only) on monetary transactions but on trust, interchange and reciprocity. Examples range from daily ‘sharing economy’ practices – such as car sharing, couch-surfing, house swapping, co-working – to more radical and explicitly anti-capitalistic ones like eco-villages or intentional communities.
We welcome papers that address:
Lane Kenworthy is professor of sociology and Yankelovich Chair in Social Thought at the University of California, San Diego. His books include The Good Society (thegoodsociety.net), How Big Should Our Government Be? (2016), Social Democratic America (2014), Progress for the Poor (2011), Jobs with Equality (2008), and Egalitarian Capitalism (2004).
Ive Marx is professor at the University of Antwerp and directs the Master Program in Socioeconomics there. His main focus is on inequality, poverty and minimum income protection. Recent books include A New Social Question? (Amsterdam University Press) and Minimum Income Protection in Flux (Palgrave MacMillan). He is also co-editor of two volumes on Changing Inequalities in Rich Countries (Oxford University Press). He is currently preparing a Handbook on In Work Poverty (Edward Elgar).
Brian Nolan is Director of the Employment, Equity and Growth Programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin School, Professor of Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford. His main areas of research are income inequality, poverty, and the economics of social policy. Recent books published by Oxford University Press include The Handbook of Economic Inequality (2008) co-edited with W. Salverda and T. Smeeding, Poverty and Deprivation in Europe (2011) co-authored with C. T. Whelan, The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income (2013), co-edited with S. Jenkins, A. Brandolini and J. Micklewright, and two co-edited volumes from the Growing Inequalities’ Impacts (GINI) EU FP7 project in 2014.
Wiemer Salverda is Professor of Labour Market and Inequality and Director emeritus of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (University of Amsterdam). He coordinated the 30-country research project Growing Inequalities’ Impacts GINI (2010–2013) which published its results in two volumes with Oxford University Press (2014). He managed the European Low-wage Employment Research Network LoWER (1996–2008), which has published 16 books, special journal issues and reports, including the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality. For the Russell Sage Foundation he led the Dutch research for the Low-wage Work in Europe project. He contributes extensively to comparative research on wages, employment, and inequality, and regularly serves as an expert for the European Commission, OECD and ILO. At the European Commission he was an ECFIN Research Fellow 2014-2015 for which he contributed on EU policy making and growing inequalities.
The postwar period brought strong economic growth to the rich democracies of the West. During the first few decades, the fruits of that growth were relatively widely shared. This is no longer the case. What it worse, it is starting to look like this relatively brief episode of growing affluence and declining inequality was a historical exception. Poverty has remained stubbornly high throughout the rich world in recent decades, even when times were good, and social progress on other fronts has stalled. The rewards of economic progress these days end up in fewer and fewer hands. Economic inequality has taken center stage in the political debate. It is now even seen as threatening economic progress itself.
Many studies and conferences have addressed the causes of rising inequality. This mini-conference is about what can be done.
We face an uphill battle to sustain the egalitarian ideals many of us hold dearly. But many influential scholars believe that uphill battles can be won. In a just published book, the doyen of inequality research, Tony Atkinson, sets set out concrete policy proposals that could bring about a genuine shift in the distribution of income towards less inequality. He identifies ambitious new policies in five areas: technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital, and taxation. Likewise, in Social Democratic America Lane Kenworthy puts forward very concrete proposals to bring about more equal and just societies, especially in America. Everywhere there are vibrant debates on the living wage, top income taxation, taxation of wealth and intergenerational transfers, on the reform of income protection policies, on social investment, on seeking to direct technological advance in socially useful directions, and more.
The aim of this mini-conference is to discuss such proposals from a range of disciplinary angles. Papers can take an ethical or theoretical perspective, or be mostly empirical, including building on such techniques as microsimulation.
We have in mind three streams: Employment and wages; Capital and wealth: Taxation, social protection and welfare state.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Director of the Center for Employment Equity. He also convenes the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN), which includes thirty-plus scientists from fifteen countries exploring organizational inequalities with longitudinal linked employer-employee data. His work has won numerous awards and has held visiting faculty appointments in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, and Denmark. He is currently doing research on organizational inequality variation, intersectional wage gaps, and developing theoretical and empirical models based on relational inequality theory. Recent publications from these projects have appeared in PNAS, PLosOne, Socio-Economic Review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology. He has published four monographs, including Recapitalizing America: Alternatives to the Corporate Distortion of National Policy (Routledge, 1983), Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Cornell, 1993), Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). His most recent monograph, with Dustin Avent-Holt, Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (Oxford, 2019), won the best book awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association.
Eunmi Mun is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research tries to answer why gender inequality in the workplace persists and what can be done to reduce it. She is most interested in understanding how public policies to reduce gender inequality are implemented at the workplace level, as well as their impact on the gender pay and promotion gaps. She is currently working on a comparative project to examine the implementation of parental leave policies across different policy contexts.
She has also investigated the local interpretation of global pressures. Specifically, she examines how large Japanese firms respond to the global norm of corporate social responsibility and the rising pressure to adopt practices from liberal market economies, and whether and to what extent they modify traditional Japanese corporate governance and employment practices. Finally, she has been actively participating in international collaboration with scholars from different countries. In particular, she is part of Comparative Organizational and Institutional Network (COIN), which is composed of scholars from 15 countries, who analyze the patterns of inequality using employer-employee linked data. COIN’s on-going projects examine cross-national variation in gender wage gap and the growing segregation between top earners and bottom earners at workplaces.
She received her BA in sociology from Seoul National University, South Korea, and her PhD in sociology from Harvard University.
This mini-conference will focus on research that explains the role of organizations in the growing inequality across many countries. Attempts to understand mechanisms growing inequality have been mostly focused on two fronts. Comparative capitalism scholarship has provided insight into the macro-level processes that contribute to the increase of inequality, such as the shrinking welfare states and the rise of the free market ideology of the liberal economy. On the other hand, stratification research has documented an extremely unequal distribution of resources, such as income and housing, at the individual and household levels. But how did the macro-level forces produce these micro-level inequalities? We are prioritizing research on organizations where the distributional action takes place. We attempt to understand how organizations mediate these two levels; they respond to the pressures to adopt liberal-market practices, implement or obstruct government social and economic policies, alter the distribution of resources among internal members, and eventually produce and sustain inequalities based on gender, race/ethnicity, class and citizenship. We are particularly interested in papers that are comparative across organizations, countries or time. We are also interested in eclectic methodological approaches, which combine multiple research methods and collect innovative data. Papers using longitudinal employer-employee data are especially encouraged and we hope to discuss the development of a comparative inequality project using such data. The eventual organization of sessions will reflect the papers submitted, but potential sessions topics might include:
1. The role of organizations in the growing inequality across national institutional contexts
2. Interaction between organizations and the state policies
3. Patterns of relational inequality within organizations
4. Theories of organizational inequality regimes
5. Citizenship, gender, race/ethnicity, and class intersections in organizational context
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).
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).
With the expansion of web platforms such as Airbnb.com, Craigslist.org, Etsy.com or Vizeat.com, people are encouraged to commodify their personal possessions as well as their domestic or leisure practices. More generally, this Mini-Conference scrutinizes the marketization of practices previously considered as recreational or domestic, such as cooking, doing handicrafts, blogging, taking care, raising pets, carrying a child, etc. The commodification of the attributes of the self – human body, personal data… – is also in the scope of this issue. The moral dimensions of marketization will be of special interest: what moral changes favor the commodification of previously non commodified activities? How do market and domestic orders of worth combine? Are markets used to achieve non-economic ends? What about the distinction between legal activities and grey economy in such emerging markets? The main goal of the Mini-Conference is to improve our understanding of the causes and effects – at individual and collective levels – of the extension of the market.
The following topics could be addressed:
1) Becoming an entrepreneur
By commodifying their domestic or leisure practices, amateurs or ordinary people turn themselves into entrepreneurs. They become concerned by financial investments, by the need to promote their products or services, and they must learn how to engage in economic transactions as sellers. Such investments are expected to alter work-life articulation and to transform the meaning of their activity. Actually, different kinds of commitment in marketization, different profiles and finally different career paths can be identified in each domain.
2) Online platforms as new marketplaces
The marketization of everyday life is strongly supported by the development of technological devices that play a crucial role as market intermediaries by enabling ordinary people to reach a large audience of potential “consumers”. Those platforms also allow people who share similar interests to locate each other and build communities of interest. They bring values that can be either close to the traditional market values or seemingly of a new kind (community building, resource sharing…). Online platforms are thus interesting places to study in order to understand the transformations of contemporary capitalism.
3) The social and moral status of newly commodified practices
Market rules are often considered as opposed to social and moral values. However, marketization could also be perceived as a means to improve social recognition, at individual and collective levels, since transactions are also providers of social relationships. Simultaneously, the marketization of specific practices could favor their social upgrading. These questions could be particularly scrutinized in a gender perspective, as they especially concern traditionally depreciated feminine activities.
4) Market regulation
The marketization of domestic and leisure activities blurs the boundaries between amateurs and professionals. Leisure and work are less and less differentiated. For example, bloggers tend to compete with journalists, private drivers with taxi drivers and so on. The public reactions of well-established professions towards the rise of new “competitors” express the disrupting effect of the commodification of domestic or leisure practices. This phenomenon therefore questions the existing regulation of professions.
Cecilia Manzo is research fellow in Economic Sociology at the University of Teramo. Her research deals primarily with local development, innovation, and the role of social networks in professional paths. Most recently, her research appeared in Sociologia del Lavoro and in the volume L’istruzione difficile, Dall’Isola al Mondo, La nuova occasione. Among her recent works in English: Fab Labs in Italy: Collective Goods of the Sharing Economy (with Francesco Ramella, in “Stato e Mercato” 2015, forthcoming).
Ivana Pais is Associate Professor in Economic Sociology at Università Cattolica, Milano. Her research interests focus on social networks in labour markets, organizations, entrepreneurship and new ways of working through social media. Her most recent publications are about sharing economy, social recruiting and crowdfunding. Among her recent works in English: Collaborative Economy and the Digitalization of Timebanking: Opportunities and challenges (with Lucia Del Moral, in “Studi di Sociologia”, 2015); Predictors of job seekers’ self-disclosure on social media (with Mariam El Ouirdi; Jesse Segers; Asma El Ouirdi, in “Computers in Human Behavior”, 2015); Looking for a Job Online. An International Survey on Social Recruiting (con Alessandro Gandini in “Sociologia del Lavoro”, 2015); New Graduates Social Capital: Nodes and Ties in the Transition from University to the Job Market (con Claudia Girotti in “Sociologia del Lavoro”, 2015).
Francesco Ramella is professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Torino (Italy), where he is President of the Undergraduate Programme in “Social and Political Sciences” and Director of the International MAPS Programme (Advanced Master in Public Policy and Social Change). He is also the Editor of the journal “Stato e Mercato”, a member of the Editorial Boards of “Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy” and “South European Society & Politics”. He has carried out extensive research on innovation, local development and urban policies.
Among his recent works in English: Sociology of Economic Innovation (Routledge 2016); Fab Labs in Italy: Collective Goods of the Sharing Economy (with Cecilia Manzo, in “Stato e Mercato” 2015, forthcoming) Political Economy (in G. Ritzer, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Blackwell 2015, forthcoming); Surfing between State and Market, for One Hundred Times (in “Stato e Mercato” 2014); Society, Politics and Territory in Italy: What is Left? (in “South European Society & Politics” 2010); Negotiating Local Development: The Italian Experience of “Territorial Pacts” (in “Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy” 2010).
The transformations that have occurred in the aftermath of the economic crisis, together with the diffusion of technological innovations and new cultural sensibilities, have determined the emergence of a new logic of integration of the economic into the social, based upon collaboration and sharing, something which was framed in the public debate under the term “sharing economy”.
Premised upon the principle of accessing resources rather than owning them, in a context where social relations are increasingly being mediated through online digital platforms, the sharing economy has determined the emergence of new forms of organization.
Examples of such organizations, born around software development and the “open source movement”, can now be found in finance, with crowdfunding and social lending; in education, with new platforms of social learning; within mobility, with car sharing and car pooling services; within work, with the diffusion of co-working, maker spaces and fab labs, together with online platforms of contracting and ‘digital work’; in public administration, with new models of governance of the ‘commons’; in the new supply chains of rural entrepreneurship and hospitality, based on house exchange and couch-surfing.
The sharing economy, however, is a multi-faceted concept that presents a number of critical aspects. This mini-conference will gather both theoretical and empirical contributions that deal with the analysis of the collaborative and sharing economy from a plurality of perspectives, focusing on three main topics:
Here is a sampling of the outstanding scholars giving featured talks or participating in featured panels in Berkeley this summer.
Joshua Cohen is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Science, as well as a faculty member at Apple University. He is a political theorist, trained in philosophy, with a special interest in issues that lie at the intersection of democratic norms and institutions and has written extensively on issues of democratic theory, particularly deliberative democracy and its implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, religious freedom, political equality, and global justice. He has also written on issues of global justice, including the foundations of human rights, distributive fairness, supranational democratic governance, and labor standards in supply chains. Cohen serves as co-editor of Boston Review, a bimonthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. He has published Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2009); Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford University Press, 2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2011); and edited (with Alex Byrne, Gideon Rosen, and Seana Shiffrin) The Norton Introduction to Philosophy (2014).
Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Pierson’s teaching and research includes the fields of American politics and public policy, comparative political economy, and social theory. His most recent book is American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (Simon and Schuster 2016), co-authored by Jacob Hacker. Pierson is an active commentator on public affairs, whose writings have recently appeared in such outlets as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. Pierson is also the author of Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge 1994), which won the American Political Science Association’s 1995 prize for the best book on American national politics. His article “Path Dependence, Increasing Returns and the Study of Politics” won the APSA’s prize for the best article in the American Political Science Review in 2000, as well as the Aaron Wildavsky Prize for its enduring contribution to the field of public policy, awarded by the Public Policy Section of the APSA in 2011. He has served on the editorial boards of The American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and The Annual Review of Political Science. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Chair of the Berkeley political science department.
Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. She holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Ananya’s scholarship has focused on urban transformations in the global South, with particular attention to the making of “world-class” cities and the dispossessions and displacements that are thus wrought. Her books on this topic include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, the latter co-edited with Aihwa Ong. A separate line of inquiry has been concerned with new regimes of international development, especially those that seek to convert poverty into entrepreneurial capitalism and the economies of the poor into new markets for global finance. Her authored book on this subject, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, received the 2011 Paul Davidoff award, which recognizes urban planning scholarship that advances social justice. A resident of Oakland, CA, for many years, her recent research uncovers how the U.S. “war on poverty” shaped the city and how it became the terrain of militant politics as well as experiments with community development. This work appears in her new book, Territories of Poverty: Rethinking North and South, co-edited with Emma Shaw Crane. Ananya’s ongoing research examines what she calls the “urban land question”, in India, as well as in globally interconnected nodes across North and South. Her emphasis is on how poor people’s movements challenge evictions and foreclosures, thereby creating political openings for new legal and policy frameworks as well as for rethinking the liberal foundations of property and personhood.
Maciej Cegłowski was thrust naked into an uncaring world forty years ago and has been doing his best to deal with the situation. He is a developer, businessman, writer, and owner of the bookmarking service Pinboard. He has described programmatically-generated web advertising as a model that encourages the growth of surveillance, and compared large stocks of data on Internet users to the archives of Communist secret police services in his native Eastern Europe. He presently divides his time between making fun of large technology companies on Twitter and writing a series of articles about a recent, crowd-funded trip he took to Antarctica.
Kieran Healy is Associate Professor in Sociology and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. His research interests are in economic sociology, the sociology of culture, the sociology of organizations, and social theory. He is the author of Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. His articles have appeared in numerous journals including the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the American Journal of Sociology. Healy has taught at the University of Arizona and was a research fellow at Australian National University. He was awarded a Residential Fellowship with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2008. His current focus is on the moral order of market society, the effect of quantification on the emergence and stabilization of social categories, and the link between these two topics.
Stuart Russell is Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco, and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University and from 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision-making, multi-target tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring, and philosophical foundations. His books include The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction, Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality (with Eric Wefald), and Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (with Peter Norvig).
AnnaLee Saxenian is Dean and Professor in the School of Information and professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2006), explores how the “brain circulation” by immigrant engineers from Silicon Valley has transferred technology entrepreneurship to emerging regions in China, India, Taiwan, and Israel.
Her prior publications include Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard University Press, 1994), Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs (PPIC, 1999), and Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley (PPIC, 2002).
The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2014)
In recent years, many disciplines have become interested in the scientific study of morality. However, a conceptual framework for this work is still lacking. In The Moral Background, Gabriel Abend develops just such a framework and uses it to investigate the history of business ethics in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s.
According to Abend, morality consists of three levels: moral and immoral behavior, or the behavioral level; moral understandings and norms, or the normative level; and the moral background, which includes what moral concepts exist in a society, what moral methods can be used, what reasons can be given, and what objects can be morally evaluated at all. This background underlies the behavioral and normative levels; it supports, facilitates, and enables them.
Through this perspective, Abend historically examines the work of numerous business ethicists and organizations—such as Protestant ministers, business associations, and business schools—and identifies two types of moral background. “Standards of Practice” is characterized by its scientific worldview, moral relativism, and emphasis on individuals’ actions and decisions. The “Christian Merchant” type is characterized by its Christian worldview, moral objectivism, and conception of a person’s life as a unity.
The Moral Background offers both an original account of the history of business ethics and a novel framework for understanding and investigating morality in general.
Jens Beckert is the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. His main research field is economic sociology, particularly the correlation between economic processes and the social and cultural structures in which economic action is embedded. In recent years his work has focused on the role of expectations in economic decision-making and for capitalist development. In coming years this focus will shift to research on wealth and social inequality, building upon my earlier work on inheritance law. He is the author of numerous and influential articles and books in the field, including Imagined Futures. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Harvard University Press 2016) and Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy (edited with Richard Bronk) (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Heather A. Haveman is Professor of Sociology and Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a BA and MBA from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley in 2006, she taught at Duke (1990-94), Cornell (1994-99), and Columbia (1998-2007).
When she’s not moving around North America, she studies how organizations, industries, and employees’ careers evolve, and the impact of organizations on their employees and society at large. Her work combines insights from institutionalism, organizational demography, social movements, economic geography, micro economics, and social history. Her published studies have investigated California thrifts (1872-1928 and 1960s-1990s), Iowa telephone companies (1900-1917), Manhattan hotels (1898-1990), California hospitals (1978-1991), U.S. electric power plants (1980-1992), U.S. wineries (1940s-1990s), American magazines (1741-1860), American law-school professors, and Chinese listed firms (1992-2007). These studies have appeared in many journals, including theAcademy of Management Journal,Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review,American Journal of Sociology, Organization Science, Law and Society Review, Socio-Economic Review, and Sociological Science, as well as in several edited books. Her book, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture 1741-1860, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. Her current research involves American magazines, U.S. wineries, American law-school professors, Chinese firms, and state-legal marijuana markets in the U.S.
Kimberly Kay Hoang is Professor of Sociology and the College and the Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago.
Prof. Hoang is the author of two books. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets(Princeton University Press 2022). This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the rich and powerful use offshore shell corporations to conceal their wealth and make themselves richer. Drawing on rich interview data this book uncovers the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. Spiderweb Capitalism is the winner of seven distinguished book awards from the Association of American Publishers, the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California Press 2015). This monograph examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam’s informal economy. Dealing in Desire is the winner of seven distinguished book awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Association for Asian Studies.
She is an award winning scholar, author, and teacher. She received the 2020 Lewis A Coser Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Sociological Theory— a mid-career award for Theoretical Agenda Setting. Her books and articles have been awarded over 26 prizes from several different professional associations. In addition to her research, she is the winner of the 2018 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Teaching at the University of Chicago.
Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, City & Community, Contexts, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her peer reviewed journal articles have won over 14 prizes and honorable mentions from the Sociologists for Women in Society, Vietnam Scholars Group, and the American Sociological Association: Section on Global & Transnational Sociology, Section on Race, Gender and Class, Section on Sociology of Sex & Gender, Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment, Section on Asia and Asian America, and the Section on Sexualities.
During our conference at UC Berkeley this past summer, there took place a passionate impromptu session on the Brexit referendum. Many of those who spoke at the session were later asked to expand on their participation in writing. You can find contributions by Jacqueline O’Reilly, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Karel Williams, Chris Warhurst, Glenn Morgan, Christopher Grey, Geoffrey Wood, Mike Wright, Robert Boyer, Sabine Frerichs, Suvi Sankari, Akos Rona-Tas, and Patrick Le Galès here, in the latest issue of Socio-Economic Review.
As SER was unable to publish all of the speakers from this session within their pages, we make the unpublished contributions available to you here.