Hotels, taxis, plumbers, tool sellers or hires, and car renters are all facing the challenges presented by the ever-growing number of apps and social networks that organize exchanges between non-professionals and ephemeral users.
Many claim this is a radical transformation for the traditional economy. Although digital technologies are crucial to the development of this new form of economy, there is greater innovation in the new behaviors it generates, in the alternative forms of valuation it requires, and in the new social practices it implies than in the technologies themselves.
But these new forms of exchange may take rather different if not opposed paths. Some develop as a kind of anti-market alternative: these are based on swap – with one partner providing time or skills to another who reciprocally provides another skill or service – or even on altruism – as when one welcomes visitors for the sake of meeting and exchanging with new people. Collaboration, solidarity, reciprocity, and sharing play a strong role and are strong drivers in the development of forms of counter-institutional exchange. These exchanges take place not only on the Internet, but also in places that are neither workplace nor domicile. Are these collaborative spaces/communities (fablabs, hackerspaces, makerspaces, coworking spaces, etc.) reinventing the way we produce, work, innovate and exchange?
Solidary-based exchanges are quite different from those relying on monetary exchange and create new markets that compete with the more traditional ones. They directly challenge the monopoly built by professionals, disputing the necessity of professional skills for the activities concerned and thus disputing the exclusive access and control wielded by certain professional groups. They also challenge employment relationships, state regulation, institutionalized work, and the very valuation of the activities in question. Indeed, we are seeing the extension of collaborative habits developed on the Internet (sharing data, information, and knowledge) to organizations. Competition, deregulation (or even disruption), and conflicts over competence are major features of this development, which some consider the return of the commons.
Both forms of economy nevertheless raise similar issues. They question the conditions allowing for the development of these new forms of exchange. Allowing others to use one’s apartment or one’s car (for free or for money), sharing common goods, or producing in common (with open-source material) not only implies a relationship of trust on the part of borrowers, shared users, or producers, but also a certain relationship to one’s personal goods and to property more broadly.
The collaborative economy also has a policing function that should be explored in two ways: on the one hand, the continued vitality of exchange relies heavily on the reputation of partners, which is built upon the visibility of ratings obtained by both users and providers alike. Everyone assesses everyone else and thereby exercises control over the group. On the other hand, people are creating rules to organize and protect their common work from the “enclosures” of the market (creative commons licenses).
SASE’s 29th conference, to be held in Lyon from 29 June to 1 July 2017, will explore the various impacts of these new forms of exchange and production on different sectors in a comparative way. It will inquire about the future of the collaborative (and disruptive) economy – will it really and durably effect more traditional exchanges or, in the end, will it be business as usual?
The 2017 SASE conference in Lyon, France, hosted by the University of Lyon I from 29 June to 1 July 2017, will welcome contributions that explore new forms of economy, their particularities, their impact, their potential development, and their regulation.
President: Christine Musselin
Program Committee: Christine Musselin, David Vallat, Michel Lallement
Local Organizing Committee: David Vallat, Solange Perrel, Jérôme Blanc, Ludovic Frobert
SASE/Lyon Program available here.
Each mini-conference will consist of 3 to 6 panels, which will be featured as a separate stream in the program. Each panel will have a discussant, meaning that selected participants must submit a completed paper in advance, by 1 June 2017. Submissions for panels will be open to all scholars on the basis of an extended abstract. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within a mini-conference, organizers will forward it to the most appropriate research network as a regular submission.
Sabine Carton is professor in Management of Information Systems at Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CERAG. Her research works deal with information systems adoption, information systems project management and knowledge communities. She specifically studies the role of social structures within an organization and between organizations embedded in adoption or pre-adoption phase, in project management activities and knowledge communities. She published articles in Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Management International, Systèmes d’Information et Management.
Julie Fabbri is an Assistant Professor in Innovation Management at EMLYON Business School and a Research Fellow at the Management Research Center (i3-CRG) of Ecole polytechnique. She is interested in the synergies between space and organization in the context of innovation. Her research activities focused on the intersection between the recent spatial turn in the management and organization theory literature and the empirical phenomenon of the rise of new inter-company & collaborative spaces (e.g. makerspace, fab lab, hacker space…). She has completed a doctoral degree (2015) on intra- and inter-organizational dynamics within coworking spaces for innovative entrepreneurs. Her main research projects deal with the materiality of organizations, open innovation management, and collective learning dynamics.
Since 2015, prior to joining EMLYON Business School, she was General Secretary of the i7 Institute for Innovation & Competitiveness at ESCP Europe Business School (2011-2014), and then Research Fellow at the Innovation Management Chair of Ecole polytechnique (i3-CRG) (2015-2016). She is also one of the co-founders of the international research network RGCS (Research Group on Collaborative Spaces – Paris, London, Montreal, Barcelona), dealing with work and workplace transformations in the context of the sharing economy.
Martine is a PhD student in human resources management at Lyon II University (France) and works as a consultant in an independent consultancy – AMNYOS – specialized in employment and economic development policies as well as human resources management.
As part of her academic research and consultancy missions, she focuses on the changing boundaries surrounding firms in the era of the sharing economy and open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003). She is particularly interested in the impacts of these changes on the internal organization of companies and especially on their human resources management. She works closely with clusters, start-ups, collaborative workspaces (FabLab, coworking spaces) and seeks to understand the impact of new labor organizations on workers and on their skills. As an active member of the RGCS, she regularly participates and leads workshops and conferences on these subjects.
Jean-Louis Magakian s a researcher in strategic management, organization and cognitive sciences at EM Lyon Business School. His works focuse on strategic thinking, collective intelligence, space works, materiality and activity theory.
David is an Associate Professor of Economics in Lyon I University (France). His research interests include Knowledge Management (epistemological and managerial approaches: from knowledge as a commons to learning organization) and Collaborative/Sharing Economy. He is interested in collaborative spaces and collaborative communities, in particular maker spaces and maker movements, fab labs, hacker spaces and hacker movements. He is a member and coordinator a of the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (https://collaborativespacesstudy.wordpress.com). He is on the SASE/Lyon Program Committee, chairs the SASE/Lyon Local Organizing Committee, and is co-organizing a mini-conference “Collaborative Communities, What’s Next?”.
He has recently published (with S Bertezene) : Manager la RSE dans un environnement complexe : le cas du secteur social et médico-social français, éd. EMS, 2015
Sharing economies are united in action. Certain initiatives are managed collectively, based on reciprocity, and remain nonprofit. Others – victims of their success – shift to the side of “netarchical capitalism”. No matter where they end up, they appear to share an original impetus – to act, to make, which contributes to the transformation of our worldview.
What does it mean to “make” (Lallement, 2015; Anderson, 2012)? It is more than a political agenda, it is a way of life: to no longer be a passive consumer – to join the ranks of the producers. Production liberates, as Proudhon emphasized (in hackerspaces we approach the Proudhonian notion of mutualism that was opposed to the Marxist vision of communal ownership of the means of production) – production in places where space, tools, experiences and knowledge (fab labs and hackerspaces) are shared, production to affirm one’s identity, in collaboration and for collaboration’s sake. To make is to learn by doing – it is a practice of production/personal liberation that fosters empowerment; it is the union of art and technique (which encourages disciplinary decompartmentalization). One might ask if the sharing economy announces the triumph of pragmatism over ideology, of the maker over the professional.
The maker movement and its DIY approach encourage us to be/make the world, challenging our relationship to knowledge, to work and workplaces. This mini- conference is focused on work and workplace transformations in the context of the collaborative economy.
It explores collaborative spaces and collaborative communities, in particular coworking spaces (external or corporate) and coworking movements, maker spaces and maker movements, fab labs, hacker spaces and hacker movements. Articles related to this mini-conference cover the social, political, managerial, digital and spatial dimensions of collaborative spaces and collaborative communities.
We are particularly interested in discussing following questions: Coworking communities & movements: what’s new for organizations, entrepreneurs and project leaders? Collaborative communities & movements: new muses for management or counter-cultures? Makers and maker movements: a new industrial and artistic revolution? Collaborative communities, hacktivism and city renewal: towards new civil infrastructures for citizens and consumers?
Possible but not exhaustive topics:
Sebastian Billows is a doctoral student in sociology at Sciences Po, Paris. His areas of interest are economic sociology, the sociology of law, and public administration. His dissertation investigates competition policy in France, with a focus on the retail sector.
Timur Ergen is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and an interim professor of sociology at the University of Oldenburg. Timur co-organizes the SASE Research Network Digital Economy and has been a member of SASE’s Executive Council since 2020. His research investigates competition, energy transitions, industrial and technology policy, and the postindustrial economy. His previous work has appeared in Competition and Change, Energy Research and Social Science, the Review of International Political Economy, and the Socio-economic Review.
David Reinecke is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at Princeton. His work lies at the intersection of the history of technology and economic sociology. He has received support from the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and most recently the National Science Foundation.
Scott Viallet-Thévenin is a post-doctoral researcher at Sciences Po. In his PhD dissertation, he investigated the interaction between French public administration and conceptions of control of state owned firms in the energy industry. He is currently working on a project mapping the organization of French government from 1980 on.
We invite contributions that illuminate how the digital economy has affected economic competition and competition policy. The digital economy and especially the increasing relevance of data collection, processing, and monetization represent momentous forces in contemporary capitalism that change business models, consumption, corporate structures, and production. Examples of its effects that challenge core parts of our conventional wisdom about economic organization are the pronounced role of platform control, network effects, intellectual property, the monetization of user input and activity, rapid scale-up, and white-collar worker skills. So far, the structural effects of digitalization on the organization of firms, industries, markets, and political economies have rarely been explored systematically. By bringing together detailed analyses of the effects of the digital economy on competition and competition policy the mini-conference seeks to provide building blocks for systematic accounts of the evolution of capitalism in the face of digitalization.
Supplementing this general line of questioning, we particularly welcome contributions that explore the following issues:
The mini-conference invites both conceptual and empirical contributions of all methodological varieties.
Cathie Jo Martin is professor of Political Science at Boston University, former chair of the Council for European Studies, and president-election of the APSA Comparative Politics Section. Her book with Duane Swank, The Political Construction of Business Interests (Cambridge 2012) received the APSA Politics and History book award. She also wrote Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton 2000) and Shifting the Burden: the Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (Chicago 1991). Martin co-edited with Jane Mansbridge an APSA presidential task force report, Negotiating Agreement in Politics (Brookings 2015), and has published articles in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Socio-Economic Review, Governance, Regulation and Governance, Politics and Society, and Polity among others. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the University of Copenhagen; in addition, she has received grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Danish Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation. She serves on the strategic advisory board of the Danish National Institute for Social Science Research and holds a long-term appointed position as visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School. She received her PhD from MIT in 1987.
Mark Thatcher is Professor of Comparative and International Politics, Department of Government, London School of Economics. He has also taught in Paris and Oxford and been a fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. Recent publications include Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (co-editor with Vivien Schmidt, 2014, CUP) and ‘European Commission merger control’, European Journal of Political Research 53(3) (2014): 443-464, while his book, Internationalisation and Economic Institutions (OUP 2007) won the 2008 Charles Levine Prize awarded by the International Political Science Association. His research expertise lies in comparative public policy in Europe. He has researched on the governance of markets, and is currently working on policies towards cultural sectors, the EU’s political identity and the links between historic buildings and national identity.
The mini conference explores the impact of culture on the historical development of capitalist democracies and on cross-national variations in contemporary policy choices. Panel participants will consider how cultural artifacts influence policy choices and how institutions shape new cultural frames and policies. The organizers of the mini-conference invite papers that have a strong empirical grounding as well as theoretical foundations, and we especially seek those that compare cultural artifacts over time and across polities.
Culture is under-represented as a determinant of democratic and capitalist institutions in part because historical uses of cultural arguments are rather thin. These arguments often rely on vague generalizations about national values and can be seen as too amorphous for rigorous empirical investigation. Theories about culture are often linked to national economic and political models; but these neglect significant variations in economic markets, shifts in significant policy issues, and perceptions of groups that vary across time. National culture may influence the broad boundaries of markets and political engagement, yet this sweeping view misses how cultural artifacts shape political struggles and responses to economic change. Moreover, the relationship between institutional innovations and cultural norms is undoubtedly reciprocal.
The panels in this mini-conference will develop and use a more robust view of culture, grounded in empirically testable cultural artifacts. These include art, literature, images, historic buildings and food and drink. If distinctive cultural artifacts matter to how citizens perceive and engage in their political world, then one should expect to see empirically-verifiable variations across countries, communities, social groups and time. For example, panelists might consider how cultural artifacts contribute to the evolution of institutions within diverse capitalist democracies. These may range from economic institutions to social ones.
Panelists might also investigate how cultural artifacts exert an influence on the operation of markets and economic reforms. Cultural goods and services themselves represent major markets — from the arts to certain types of food and tourism, and even parts of the housing market. Culture is often linked with identity and these may be subject to specific rules, ranging from controls on ownership to issues of content. Equally, papers can study the effects of marketization, new suppliers and altered rules governing supply. The panel will also consider how culture affects actors in markets for non-cultural products and government policies- for example, their preferences and identities which can have major implications for markets ranging from labour or entrepreneurship.
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 is concerned with disruptions to established patterns of the regulation of work and employment, and with how social actors are attempting to respond to these disruptions through various forms of institutional experimentation. Our aim is to bring together a wide range of contributions, analysing social actors’ adaptation to disruptive change across a number of fault-lines and geographical spaces. This will allow us to build a more generalised picture of the scope of institutional experimentation, and whether and how experimental practices can meet the challenge of responding to disruptive change in ways that support worker wellbeing, social cohesion, and sustainability.
We are interested in contributions which address how social actors have attempted to innovate across one or more of the following ‘fault lines’:
We seek papers which go beyond elucidating the nature of these fault-lines, and which seek to analyse how social actors (at local, regional, national or transnational levels) attempt to build new institutions, or reconfigure existing ones, in response to these challenges. We are particularly interested in how social actors use existing identities in these processes, and with how social learning develops within and between actors seeking to experiment. We also specifically welcome papers which examine and problematise the international transfer of policy ideas which necessitate institutional experimentation in recipient countries.
Christian Azaïs is a full professor of Sociology at CNAM Paris and a member of EPN Travail (Equipe pédagogique nationale). He is a Brazilianist and specialist in labour and employment issues. His last publications deal with ‘grey zone’, norms of employment, informality and South North countries comparison. Blurry frontiers, indeterminacy, the prevailing uncertainty in wage-employment relationship are his current main research subjects. Brazil, France, Italy and Mexico have been his main research fields in recent years and nowadays.
He contributed to the ANR project “ZOGRIS” “Evolving Employment Standards and Emerging Forms of Inequality Towards a Comparison of Grey Zones” (2012-2016, Dir. Pr. Donna Kesselman).
He has coordinated a four-year French programme ANR (French Research Agency) on governance and globalisation in four metropolises in Latin America (Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City and São Paulo). His own research deals with the professionalisation of helicopter pilots and the way a new profession is being built both in Mexico City and in São Paulo. Theoretically, it corresponds to a preoccupation of how employment and labour issues in current capitalism are taken into account while diverse forms of wage-earner relationships are emerging.
Patrick Dieuaide is an associate professor at Sorbonne University Paris Cité. He is a member of the Laboratory Integration and Cooperation in the European Area (ICEE, University of Paris 3). His research focuses on corporate policies and transformations of the employment relationship in globalization. He coordinated and published in two books: “Strategies of Multinational Corporations and Social Regulations. European and Asian Perspectives”, (2014, Springer, 260p.) and “Globalising Employment Relations? Multinational Corporations and Central and Eastern Europe Transitions”, Palgrave Mac-Millan, London. He contributed to the ANR project “ZOGRIS” entitled “Evolving Employment Standards and Emerging Forms of Inequality Towards a Comparison of Grey Zones” (2012-2016, Dir. Pr. Kesselman) and organized a workshop “Grey areas of employment” in the framework of the Sorbonne Paris Cité Summer University devoted to “New Figures of the Social” (July 6-8, 2016). Several publications on the subject are forthcoming in the journals Industrial Relations/Relations Industrielles, Interventions Economiques and Transfer.
The notion of “employment grey zones” is widely used in developing countries and informal economies. It is equally present in developed countries and reflects the incomplete nature of employment relationship boundaries. It highlights the difficulties in identifying the employer’s power in productive systems characterised by subcontracting firms or interdependent networks or, more recently, by “uberised” working conditions.
We intend to reflect on the meaning of the grey zone in relation to the changes in production systems and the proliferation of new social and professional figures in the margins of wage-earning relation and labour law. Theoretically, the notion of employment grey zone enriches the classical neo-institutionalist approaches (Schreek, Thelen) that underestimate extra-institutional, cultural and political, infra- and supra sources. It stresses power or “micro-political” process (Almond, Ferner), underpinning the institutionalisation of new labour and employment regulations.
Proposals are welcome from all academic and non academic participants, referring to wage-earning societies transformations and to the emergence of collaborative economy workers.
Panel 1
“Emerging Figures of Labour in a Circular and Collaborative Economy”
Session Organizer: Christian Azaïs, LISE/CNAM Paris
“Emerging figures of work” reflect transformations in labour and employment relations. Three interpretations of emerging figures appear: declining figures, intermediary figures –between the declining and ascending ones, marked by individuals wishes or utopia. ”Uber” and collaborative jobs exemplify these three statements. The emerging work figure expresses how individuals and collectives react to labour transformations. We expect examples from Northern and Southern countries. The panel focuses on two main dimensions: individual & collective.
We wish to highlight the impact of collaborative economy forms on workers and how they make their own living, conveying their own subjectivity. We expect participants to dialogue around “Uber and collaborative economy” workers all around the world in a comparative dimension. Therefore, we will contribute to understanding the current features of employment wage-earning relationship and social protection in an e-economy, at a time when convergence appears between global North and South.
On the other hand, we would like to focus on trade union and state actions, from a comparative perspective. The idea is to underline how they incorporate or not labour market changes and their strategies.
At the same time, contributions that focus public and civil actions and judicial reviews against Uber and collaborative workers are welcome. By legislating and reinterpreting rules, paradoxically the state collaborates in individualisation and recontracting labour relations. The logics of individualisation, uncertainty on labour and life conditions are expressed as collective situations and are experienced by collectives of workers who, starting from an individual work status, can stand up for their interests.
Panel 2
“Grey Zones of Employment, MNC and Labour Law:
What Articulations for What Regulation(s)?”
Session Organizer: Patrick Dieuaide, ICEE/USPC/Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle
The relationship between “employment grey zones”, MNC and labour law is closely linked to globalisation, characterised by the predominance of finance in organisation, capital mobility and the contribution of multinational firms in the production and creation of jobs in national economies. This economic landscape draws a new map of power relations leading to profound changes in the employer-employee relationship. While at the post-war period in Europe (1945-1975), conflicts between employers and employees could lead to mutually beneficial collective agreements under the auspices of national states, globalisation is radically changing the perspective. Enclosed in a network of authorities and economic and financial interdependence of transnational dimensions, the employment relationship now follows a dual power asymmetry: the legal and economic subordination of the employee to his employer in subsidiaries or subcontractors is more or less overlaped by legal and financial constraints of the parent companies. This double asymmetry sketches the outlines of a new pragmatic order regulating, deployed at different levels (from transnational to infranational). Such a new order does not cancel existing institutional legal frameworks but tends to bypass or encourage privatisation labour law and a formal de-salarisation.
This panel will identify and analyze concrete examples of employment grey zones, considering the relationship with company policies and/or discussing the place and role of law (and institutions) in this relationship. A series of questions will be addressed: How to understand the existence and persistence of employment grey zones? Do they reflect institutional delays in job codification at a national level? Should we consider grey zones as a new process of employment relationship recodification? What is then the place of labor law and of institutions?
Jérôme Pélisse is professor of sociology at Sciences Po Paris since 2015. He was assistant professor at Universities of Reims and Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines before, where he has a CNRS chair and directed the Printemps (Professions, Institutions, Temporalities, CNRS) between 2011 and 2013. He co-founded GESTES (Groupe d’Etudes Sur le Travail Et la Souffrance au travail), a large academic multidisciplinary network on labor studies funded by the region Ile de France. Since 2015, he is member of the Conseil National of Universities and researcher at the Center for Sociology of Organizations (CNRS). He is working on various topics, at the crossroad of labor, science and legal sociologies. After a PhD on working time reduction laws in France, he analyzed industrial relations in French firms, and union’s organizations. He developed also researches on forensics (notably in economy) and the management of risks in laboratories of nanoscience in France and US. He participated to various academic networks and notably SASE or Law and Society Association, introducing legal consciousness and law and organizations studies in France through various articles and publications, notably the edition of Law and regulations of economic activities. Institutional and sociological perspectives, LGDJ, 2011 (with C. Bessy, T. Delpeuch).
Shauhin Talesh is Professor of Law and holds an affiliate appointments in the department of Sociology and department of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his J.D. and LL.M in Insurance from the University of Connecticut, and his B.A. in Criminology, Law & Society from the University of California, Irvine. His legal expertise and experience is in civil business litigation, with a focus on commercial, consumer, and insurance law. Professor Talesh is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans law, sociology, and political science. His research interests include the empirical study of law and business organizations, dispute resolution, consumer protection, insurance, and the relationship between law and social inequality. In particular, his research focuses on how private organizations respond to legal regulations and what impact these responses have on rights in terms of procedural fairness and substantive justice for individuals. Theoretically, his work draws upon and elaborates neo-institutional work in organizational sociology, political science studies of business influence over legislation and regulation by political scientists (American Politics, American Political Development), the sociology of risk, and law and society scholarship on dispute resolution in organizations, studies of the law-in-action, and access to justice. Professor Talesh’s scholarship has appeared in multiple law and peer-reviewed social science journals including Law and Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Law & Policy. His work has won multiple best paper awards for the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Law & Society Association.
Much research highlights the importance of various types of legal intermediaries in explaining the meaning and import of judicialization of economic and organizational behavior in France, the US and elsewhere. The concept of legal intermediary helps us analyze the role of actors who contribute to legal endogeneization processes, by which the meaning of law is defined by the economic actors law is designed to regulate.
Bringing neo-institutional approaches to organizational behavior into socio-legal studies, researchers such as Lauren Edelman, Mark Suchman, Robin Stryker, Frank Dobbin, David Levi-Faur and other have analyzed not only how the meaning of legal rules becomes endogenous to organizational behavior but, more generally, how law and organizations interact to build new forms of legality in business relations as in new types of economic relations.
To understand these processes – and notably how they are probably more and more crucial in a context of disruptive and collaborative economy, which raises new questions to public actions and regulations -, the role of legal intermediaries today is important to scrutinize. Where some types of legal intermediaries are members of the legal profession – as in-house corporate counsel – many other types of legal intermediaries are not legal professionals. Street-level bureaucrats are one such well-known type, but legal intermediaries also include regulatory intermediaries inscribed in public or private institutions, human resource managers and other kinds of compliance professionals, including safety officers, inspectors and auditors, as well as insurers, union members or some social movement or non-governmental activists. In short, the category of legal intermediaries includes all actors who in their daily activities work with legal concepts, rules and principles, whether or not they are formal-legal professionals. To understand the development and economic implications of law over time, we need to deepen our understanding of various types of legal intermediaries, their professional training and legal consciousness, and the constraints on and opportunities for their meaning attribution and behavior. In so doing, we also can understand whether and how different types of legal intermediaries contribute to the managerialization of law, that is, to law’s adaptation to such business imperatives as productivity and profit. As well, we can better understand how legal intermediaries contribute to shifts in legal consciousness and mobilization, and ultimately to reproduction and/or change in economic relations, reproducing business as usual and/or contributing to disruptive, collaborative and new economic relations.
Themes and research questions could address the identities and activities of legal intermediaries, their role at the interface between law or legality and economy or business, how they contribute to reproduce business as usual or disrupt economic logics, how they distinguish them from legal professionals and how they interact with them, how they are marginalized or central and what resources, constraints and power they develop in the multiple processes of regulation, implementation and building of the legal-economic frame of organizational activities.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The development of digital and online technologies has deeply impacted the organization of markets, firms, institutions and consumer agencies. In some cases, these changes have disrupted value chains and market equilibria. In many industries digital players have built new sociotechnical arrangements, including those forms of intermediation sometimes referred to as the platform economy. In the Global South, digital money and financial services offered through digital technologies have been hailed as having the potential to create financial inclusion and grow the economy. More generally, digitization affects the way most ordinary economic activities are designed, undertaken and assessed, from marketing through consumption, including for example tracking and targeting devices, the imperative of data collection, and the rise of collaborative consumption.
Empirical studies show that the outcomes of digitization are not technically determined, but depend on local arrangements. On some markets, the internet provides opportunities for challengers, on some others it favors concentration; some digital tools empower consumers, whereas tracking and targeting devices aim at controlling their behavior. Indeed the market form itself is sometimes bypassed in favor of new forms of economic organization.
The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together empirical studies on digital markets and the digitization of economic practices. We particularly – though not exclusively – welcome contributions on:
1) Digital goods & services
In many creative and knowledge-intensive industries, goods and services have been “digitized”. Moreover, new categories of digital items circulate and are traded: digital money, digital artifacts (e.g. in-game objects), digital reputations. How are these digital commodities designed, valuated and traded? How does the machine-based intermediation that underlies digital services compare with human-based intermediaries?
2) Market infrastructure and equipment
Digital infrastructures provide new kinds of intermediaries and business models, now gathered behind the concept of ‘platform economy’ (eBay, Etsy, Amazon, etc.). But they also equip markets with new coordination instruments, such as judgement and evaluation systems based on participation (online consumer reviews), virtual and alternative currencies, bots, algorithms and new forms of calculation. To what extent do these infrastructures lead to new ways of performing markets practices online and offline?
3) Engaging with markets
Online market devices have triggered or extended specific forms of market participation and enhanced new forms of consumerism. Digital technologies gave support for consumer empowerment: evaluation of products (price comparison, online reviews), coordination (forums, communities),amateur commercial activities – and digital labor. Symmetrically, firms invest in conversational forms of connection with consumers. How do these ongoing processes shift market boundaries and change the balance of power in the economy?
4) Beyond the market
Digital technology also provides a platform for non-market forms of economy. On the web vast amounts of information are transmitted at no cost to the consumer, and this is further developed in organizations like Wikipedia. What are the contributions and prospects of non-market forms of digital economy?
Antoine Bernard de Raymond is a sociologist at the National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), in Paris, France. He is specialized in the sociology of markets and the sociology of agriculture, and studies the transformations of food systems. He has published or edited books about the market for fruit and vegetables in France (En toute saison. Le marché des fruits et légumes en France), industrial farming, and economic sociology. He currently works on food security and the globalization of public issues.
Vincent Cardon is an assistant professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, and a member of the Centre Universitaire de Recherches sur l’Action publique et le Politique, Epistémologie et Sciences Sociales and of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Society. He holds a PhD in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and has published articles about the analysis of insecure labour markets, the social organisation of production in the movie industries, the effects of the Internet on evaluation (online consumer reviews in the hospitality industry), the risk assessment of unprecedented risks (agro-terrorism) and of pesticides’ health effects. His current research interests span the social construction of markets, valuation processes and quantification. He recently opened a field work on global food security issues, with a focus on the scenario analysis tools designed by agro-economists to model the long term future of agriculture.
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
In recent years, socio-economists have studied social actors’ ability to shape representations of the future convincing enough to enable present actions when uncertainty prevails. Economic regulation and policy-making also rely on a definition of what a desirable future is and is constantly threatened by unexpected situations. The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together researchers examining the construction of knowledge and ignorance regarding the future in economic activities and regulation. We will particularly welcome contributions that address the following thematic strands (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered):
The technologies of future-related regulation. Present anticipations of the future involve a set of tools and calculative technologies, most of them relying on expertise and making use of specific data and inputs. These techniques not only differ in the way they process “data” but also in the construction of the economic reality they engage. They also depend on the category of actors (institutions, NGOs, firms, individuals, pressure groups etc.) who produces and/or makes use of them. The development of future-knowing (or -guessing) for regulation emphasizes connections between socio-economics and science and technology studies, and leads to an interrogation on the social conditions according to which expertise is regarded as reliable.
From planning to preparedness: knowledge of the future and governmentality. Anticipating the future is in tight relation with forms of government. For instance, while central planning drew on the assumption that the future was predictable, new forms of regulation are based on the hypothesis of the occurrence of unlikely events (e.g. worst-case scenario). This shift questions the appropriate form of economic regulation and projection, conceivably leading to technological or cognitive disruptions. Yet, the assumption of a close relationship between “central planning” and linear modelling on the one hand, and “neoliberal era” and preparedness one the other hand, may be challenged, in order to shed light on more complex socio-historical configurations.
The temporal orientation of regulation. The regulation of economies requires dealing with the future in the present. Future-guessing widely relies on the knowledge of the present. Yet, the way future economic orientations are designed affects the implementation of regulation in the present. Socio-technical devices cannot be understood without reference to the specific objective of economic regulation, to its temporal order (e.g., shorter- or longer-run). Investigating the relationship between projections about the future and action in the present also requires studying how these projections and calculations are translated into actual and present promises, decisions and guidelines, especially once a crisis occurred.
Queries can be sent to antoine.deraymond@inra.fr, cardon@ehess.fr, or olivier.pilmis@sciencespo.fr.
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. Prior to joining the University of 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.
‘Collaborative economy’ has become the buzzword in academic research and public debate. While much has been said about the ways in which digital technology is transforming entire swathes of the economy and constructing new forms of exchange, the predominant tendency has been the reification and expansion of modern capitalism aimed at maximizing profits and reproducing exploitative mechanisms towards workers, natural resources and the environment.
Within this critical juncture, alternative economic practices and lifestyles are being adopted and advocated by a growing number of social groups. These practices share a steadfast belief in the idea of ‘social sustainability’, and a desire to move towards a society which – in the words of Amartya Sen – promotes not just environmentalism but also values of equality, diversity, social cohesion, quality of life and democratic governance of our workplaces and every-day lives.
This Mini Conference follows on from last years’ successful one held at the University of California, Berkeley and welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions from the global North and South and across the social sciences that touch on the following three themes:
1) Cooperatives and Cooperativism
As a form of economic organization, it has long been acknowledged that cooperatives can help buffer economic insecurity and provide the building blocks for economic democracy. By inculcating solidaristic social relations and the values of democracy, solidarity, equality, and reciprocity, cooperatives also play an ideological role in society.
This stream welcomes contributions that explore the following lines of enquiry:
2) Political Consumerism, Collective Action and Social Innovation
Calls to citizens to take action in their role as consumers have been made by social movements of different types. Along with large-scale boycotting and global fair-trade initiatives, political consumerism has entered the repertoire of actions of a number of local grassroots organizations seeking bottom-up solutions for sustainable development. Some example are: solidarity-based exchanges and networks, such as barter groups, new consumer-producer networks and cooperatives, time banks, and local savings groups.
In this strand, we are interested in papers that investigate:
3) Alternative Lifestyles: Embodying the Critique
This last panel aims to gather and discuss collective and community-based practices that aim at ‘embodying’ the critique to consumerist and capitalist societies. These include co-housing, eco-villages, intentional communities and transition towns which are increasingly widespread and inter-connected examples of how people are trying to concretize, not without effort, ‘real utopias’ (Wright 2010).
In this panel, we welcome papers addressing the following issues:
Robert M. Bauer is Associate Professor of Organization and Innovation at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. His research focuses on innovation, specifically, explaining and shaping creative processes as well as their individual, organizational and regional antecedents. He has a particular interest in digital economies and crowd-based organizing. Robert was a visiting professor for several years at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, a leading institution in the field of ‘Design Thinking’. His study of potential cultural usages of the historic industrial area Tabakfabrik Linz forms the basis for the future development of this precinct. He is currently leading a project that explores the link between governmental policies and actions, and regional capacities for technical, economic, cultural and social innovation. His works have appeared in German books and journals as well as in international journals such as Information Systems Journal, Organization, and Organization Science.
Thomas Gegenhuber is currently a visiting doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He is a recipient of a three-year DOC-team-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of a Marietta Blau Grant of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economics at the Institute of Organization Theory at Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz. Thomas Gegenhuber’s research interests are organization theory, crowdsourcing, open innovation & strategy and organization theory; his work appears in several books and international journals such as Long Range Planning and Organization.
Stefan Kirchner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences at the University Hamburg. His research interests cover the international comparison of job quality and the transformation of economic processes. In his current research, he investigates the diffusion of digital technologies in different societal areas. He is especially interested in the transformative effects of digital technology for working conditions and the organization of markets. His most recent research highlights that market organizers modify digital markets and reshape the ways goods and services are exchanged. His work also emphasizes how this in turn reconfigures working conditions and opportunities for regulation. He published his work in journals such as the International Journal of Manpower, Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie.
Elke Schüßler is Professor of Business Administration at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. She studies macro-organizational contexts like organizational fields, industries, global supply chains or regional clusters that are crucial for shaping the behavior of firms and hence for bringing about economically and socially relevant outcomes such as innovation and a sustainable future. One stream of her research investigates the impact of digital technologies on the organization of work, particularly in high-skilled sectors. She is a Principal Investigator in the Research Unit “Organized Creativity”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She has also led an international research project on the regulation of labor standards in global production networks funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. She is particularly interested in regulatory dynamics unfolding in the interplay between national and transnational arenas. Her work is published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Industrial and Corporate Change, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Human Relations, Organization Studies, and Socio-Economic Review.
Information technologies enhancing communication among numerous and dispersed actors enable new forms of creating value and organizing work. Exemplary for this shift is the rise of so-called crowdsourcing and sharing economy platforms, intermediaries that organize buyer-seller relations in digitally-enabled markets — trading a wide range of services including basic (micro-)tasks (e.g. Mechanical Turk, Clickworker); standard creative solutions (e.g. 99designs, Upwork); highly creative, knowledge-intensive solutions (e.g. Innocentive, Jovoto); and services monetizing private assets (e.g. Uber, Airbnb).
These digital intermediaries uniquely excel in large-numbers management: specifically, mobilizing service providers globally through broadcast calls and taming the resulting crowds by means of flat, techno-structure-based organizing. This new potential of what is sometimes called “platform capitalism” raises severe regulatory challenges regarding, e.g., labor and consumer rights. Crowdsourcing markets, for instance, evade traditional, nationally-based labor market institutions such as social and health insurance, minimum wages, or collective interest representation. Like sharing economy platforms, they play an ambiguous role in improving wealth for some while sharpening inequalities for others.
Digital platforms typically benefit from favourable regulation or from sidestepping existing regulation. At the same time, a platform’s success also depends on its ability to regulate its respective market. To date, digital intermediaries decide and enforce platform rules that shape the way services and the required work are commissioned, performed, paid, and evaluated. This development not only creates new lines of competition and contestation between traditional regulatory actors and digital intermediaries, but also among digital intermediaries competing for market share.
The sessions in this mini-conference seek to unpack the new regulatory role of digital intermediaries and their interactions and contestations with traditional regulatory actors. Panels will be organized around the following themes:
We encourage submissions that address these and related themes and showcase convincing arguments grounded in conceptual or empirical (qualitative and quantitative) studies.
Prof. Katherine K. Chen’s research specialties cover organizational studies and economic sociology. Her award-winning book, Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event, shows how an enabling organization can support members’ efforts without succumbing to either under-organizing’s insufficient structure and coordination or over-organizing’s excessive structure and coercive control. Additional articles on prosumption, storytelling, and communification have appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, The Sociological Quarterly, and other journals.
To understand how organizations collectively innovate—or maintain the status quo—through relational work and advocacy, Chen is working on two parallel ethnographic projects. One examines the coordination efforts among organizations that help older adults who prefer to “age in place” in their homes. A 2019 Socio-Economic Review article based on this research shows how markets are supported by “bounded relationality” a process by which intermediary organizations train people to undertake consumer routines. Another project studies how a flagship microschool and its network of affiliates communicate innovative ways of organizing learning to multiple audiences. This research focuses on how this network blends a seemingly unlikely mixture of practices from the democratic free school movement, decolonization and abolition efforts, and software project management to promote lifelong learning in communities.
Besides serving as a mentor to tenure-track faculty in CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP), Chen has focused on developing and supporting interdisciplinary communities that study organizations and markets, with a focus on participatory and liberatory practices that prefigure and expand future possibilities. With Victor Tan Chen, she co-edited a special issue that showcases cutting-edge research on democratic practices by presenters from SASE annual meetings between 2017 and 2019. This Research in the Sociology of Organizations volume, titled “Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy,” will be published in March 2021. In addition, Chen has contributed to methodological discussions regarding research on organizations, including what we can learn from “extreme” cases and how to undertake organizational ethnography in her work as a regular contributor to orgtheory.net, a popular sociology blog, and its 2021 spin-off, the Markets, Power, and Culture blog.
Chen is currently an associate professor of sociology at The City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from Stanford University.
Joyce Rothschild is professor emerita at Virginia Tech, having served as a professor in the university’s Department of Sociology and School of Public and International Affairs for 27 years. Her research projects have had several empirical foci – from worker cooperatives to whistle blowers – while her writing has returned frequently to the question of how organizations can accomplish their purposes without hierarchical control. Overall, her work develops a collectivist-democratic alternative to bureaucracy – that is, a form of organization that effectively offers voice and agency to all of its members. Her book with J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), won the C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Forty years ago, as the most recent wave of economic collectives and cooperatives emerged, they advocated a model of egalitarian organization so contrary to bureaucracy that they were widely called “alternative institutions” (Rothschild 1979). Today, the practices of cooperative organizations appear in many movement organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even “sharing” firms. Cooperative practices are more relevant than ever, especially as recent political changes in the US and Europe threaten to crush rather than cultivate economic opportunities.
Cooperative groups engage in more “just” economic relations, defined as relations that are more equal, communalistic, or mutually supportive. The oldest collectives – utopian communes, worker co-operatives, free schools, and feminist groups – sought authentic relations otherwise suppressed in a hierarchical, capitalist system. Similar practices shape newer forms: co-housing, communities and companies promoting the “sharing economy,” giving circles, self-help groups, and artistic and social movement groups including Burning Man and OCCUPY. While some cooperatives enact transformative values such as ethically responsible consumerism and collective ownership, other groups’ practices reproduce an increasingly stratified society marked by precarity. Submitted papers might analyze the reasons for such differences, or they might examine conditions that encourage the development of more egalitarian forms of organization.
Submitted papers could also cover, but are not limited, to exploring:
Selected Bibliography
Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Rothschild, Joyce. 1979. “The Collectivist Organization: An Alternative to Rational-Bureaucratic Models.” American Sociological Review 44(4): 509-527.
Rothschild, Joyce and J. Allen Whitt. 1986. The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Zelizer, Vivianna A. 2012. “How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean?” Politics & Society 40(2): 145-174.
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.
As part of the Islamic economics movement, since 1970s, Islamic banking and finance (IBF) as an emergent pattern has demonstrated an unprecedented performance in terms of transforming the transactional or financial base of the Muslim societies and beyond with various forms of financial institutions and practices.
Theoretically IBF practices are shaped by the normative world of Islamic moral economy, which esssentialises a morally guided everyday practice of economy and finance in a submerged sense beyond the observed practices of IBF. The essential principles of ‘sharing economy of Islam’ within this normative world are: ‘risk-sharing’ and ‘profit-and-loss sharing’ along with the prohibition of interest, curbing of speculation and uncertainty, sustainable development, discouraging debt and debt-based system in favour of real economy and asset based economy, de-commodification and non-fictitious products along with developing a human-centred development process.
Islamic moral economy and finance, as a counter hegemonic movement, hence, essentialises sharing and distributive as well as disruptive and collaborative economy beyond contributing to financialisation as the current practice demonstrates. However, the evaluation of the performance of IBF sector shows that it has been converging towards conventional financial practices and institutions through the shari’ah compliant practices beyond its authentic forms.
The recent trends in economic and financial world, however, identify disruptive and collaborative economic and business practices as well as sharing and participating economic practices in the sense of counter-hegemony. Therefore, one may argue that Islamic moral economy and finance can contribute significantly to growing new phenomena of global sharing economy. However, we also acknowledge that despite its positive contributions, one can also argue that sharing economy depletes certain cultural and moral values for the sake of money.
This mini-conference, hence, invites conceptual and empirical papers to:
Hence, we propose to bring scholars together to discuss both sides of sharing and distributive/collaborative economy practices in the light of ideals and realities of Islamic moral economy and finance within the following themes:
A provisional list of panel topics and indicative research questions can be accessed at Durham University’s Durham Centre for Islamic Economics and Finance.
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 social dimensions of marketization will be of special interest: what social 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:
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 have to 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.
The marketization of everyday life is strongly supported by the development of technological devices that enable 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 (profit seeking, efficiency, optimal matching, etc.) or seemingly of a new kind (community building, resource sharing, friendliness, etc.). Online platforms are thus interesting places to study in order to understand the transformations of contemporary capitalism.
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 practices.
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 also questions the existing regulation of professions.
Nicole Helmerich is a post-doctoral researcher at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany. Prior to that, Nicole was researcher at the Free University Berlin, and a visiting researcher at University of Washington, Seattle. Nicole holds a PhD in International Relations from the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies (BTS), Free University Berlin. Her publications are concerned with the role of business in transnational governance, transnational private regulation, corporate responsibility and transnational workers’ rights. She heads a research project on workers’ voice in transnational European firms and good corporate governance and a data set project on the same topic. Her most recent book ‘Sustainability Politics and Limited Statehood’ with A. Esguerra and T. Risse is on public-private partnerships, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and market-based instruments in sustainability governance. The authors critically examine the performance of new modes of governance in areas of limited statehood, drawing on a range of in-depth case studies on issues of climate change, biodiversity, and health.
Sigrid Quack is Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research and Professor of Comparative Sociology at the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Previously, she was Leader of the Research Group on Institution Building across Borders at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and for many years a Senior Researcher at the WZB Social Science Center Berlin. She has been a visiting fellow at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (SCORE); the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Providence; the École Normal Supérieure Cachan; and St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge.
Sigrid has written widely on globalization and institutional change, transnational governance, professions and expertise, as well as previously on the comparative analysis of capitalism, gender relations, labour markets and employment systems. Among other publications, Sigrid has co-edited two volumes with Marie-Laure Djelic on Transnational Communities (Cambridge University Press) and Globalization and Institutions (Edward Elgar). She has published articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society;Annual Review of Sociology; Cambridge Journal of Economics; Global Policy; Organization Studies; Revista de Administração de Empresas; Review of International Political Economy; Socio-Economic Review and Theory and Society. Her most recent German book (co-edited with Schulz-Schaeffer, Shire and Weiß) explores forms and regulations of transnational work and labour markets (Transnationale Arbeit, VS Springer). Sheis currently working on two major projects: organized creativity and intellectual property rights in pharma and music; and imagined pathways to global cooperation in transnational governance.
Sigrid Quack has been a member of SASE since 2006. She is a co-organizer of Network D: Professions and Professionals in a Globalizing World, has served on the Executive Council since 2014, on the SER Best Prize Committee in 2016 and 2018 and on the Diversity Committee in 2019.
Photo by Georg Lukas / KHK/GCR21
Gale Raj-Reichert is a Lecturer in Economic Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London.
Her research interests are on labour governance in the electronics industry global value chain/global production networks. Gale’s research has focused on the US, EU, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Her current research interests are on how socially responsible public procurement and labour standards in trade agreements affects labour conditions in global value chain/global production networks. She is currently a recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award on a project on ‘Improving Labour Conditions in Global Production Networks through Socially Responsible Public Procurement’. From 2019 to 2020 she will be a Principal Investigator at the Berlin Social Science Center for a project funded by German Research Fund on ‘Labour governance in global production networks: Assessing labour standards in a new generation of public procurement legislation and trade agreements linked to market access in the European Union’.
Sabrina Zajak is associate professor for “globalization conflicts, social movements and labor” at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She works at the Institute for Social Movements on issues of transnational movements and activism; trade unions and NGOs; globalization, governance and labor standards. She is head of the research group “transnational alliances between social movements and trade unions in Europe”. She is a founding member of the Institute for Protest ad Social Movement Research in Berlin. Her most recent book Transnational Activism, Global Labor Governance, and China (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan) investigates how trade unions and labour rights NGOs have mobilized along different pathways while attempting to influence labour standards in Chinese supply chains since 1989. She received her PhD from University of Cologne, Germany as part of the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy.
In the present changing global economy, modes of business, work and working conditions are being increasingly shaped by advances in communication, data, and knowledge sharing through information technology. Global firms are restructuring their production with the help of sophisticated software which for example makes it easier to track the management of vast global value chains. Also, workers in factories have created communication platforms to share information over working conditions and mobilize collectively. We are interested in understanding how these changes influence modes of regulation and governance, as well as methods of resistance and activism within industries in global production systems.
Indeed, digitalization and data sharing can affect global production, transnational governance, and work in multiple and ambiguous ways. For example, demands (through regulation and campaigns) to increase transparency in global supply chains are leading to the creation of on-line tracking tools of materials and suppliers in global value chains. Multinational companies are introducing Industry 4.0 and smart factory programs to digitalize the production and management of their global supply chains. Branded firms are also increasingly tracking working hours in real-time of outsourced factories in distant locations. Trade unions and other civil society organizations are also using new communication technologies and social media in creative and strategic ways in their fight for better working conditions and higher environmental standards. Yet innovation in communication and information sharing also pose new threats as it opens avenues for new techniques of policing and controlling of workers, trade unions, and activists by the state and business alike. Such prospects and challenges remain underexplored and are not yet fully considered in our current theoretical frameworks and ideas of transnational governance, global value chains, labour and environmental governance, institutional theories of regulation, and transnational business governance interactions.
We are interested in papers that examine empirically and theoretically changes in the modes of regulation and governance, and resistance and activism, and the opportunities and challenges they create for positive change:
Find out more about the exceptional scholars giving featured talks at this year’s conference in Lyon.
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society. His books include The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press 2006), which won academic awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the McGannon award for social and ethical relevance in communications. In 2012 he received a lifetime achievement award from Oxford University “in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to the study and public understanding of the Internet and information goods.” His work is socially engaged, winning him the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for 2007, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award in 2006. It is also anchored in the realities of markets, and was cited as “perhaps the best work yet about the fast moving, enthusiast-driven Internet” by the Financial Times and named best business book about the future in 2006 by Strategy and Business. Benkler has advised governments and international organizations on innovation policy and telecommunications, and serves on the boards or advisory boards of several nonprofits engaged in working towards an open society. His work can be freely access at benkler.org.
Tim Jordan is Professor of Digital Cultures and Head of School of Media, Film and Music. His current project is working on new economic practices in digital contexts, for which he will be examining a range of case studies, including Google/Baidu and search, Facebook and social media, Uber/AirBnB and regulatory disintermediation, free and open source software production, and the maker movement among others.
Jordan has been involved in analysis of the social and cultural meaning of the internet and cyberspace since the mid-1990s. His most recent book is Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society, which is about the politics of information. He has also been working with colleagues on the idea of ‘being in the zone’ among surfers and computer programmers which should appear as a collected edition Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity: Being in the Zone that he co-edited with Professor Kath Woodward and Dr Brigid McClure.
Prior to this, Jordan’s research has been about communication and the internet, published in Internet, Society, Culture: Communicative Practices Before and After the Internet (Bloomsbury 2013) in which he compares letters from 1832-1857 to Australia with communication in online games. He has also had a longstanding interest in hacking and hacktivism and has previously published: Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism (Polity 2008), Cyberpower (Routledge 1999) and, with Paul Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyberwars (Routledge 2004).
He also played a role in analyzing social movements and popular protest with publications including Activism!: Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society (Reaktion 2002), as co-editor of Storming the Millennium (Lawrence and Wishart1999, with Adam Lent) and he was a founding editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Social Movement Studies.
In addition to his books on social movements and internet cultures, Jordan has published on Pokemon, surfing, and technology and cultural theory. He began at the University of Sussex in 2014. Prior to this he worked at King’s College London for three years and at Sociology at the Open University for eleven years, contributing there widely to teaching and co-editing the books Security: Sociology and the Making of Social Worlds (Manchester University Press 2008, with Simon Carter and Sophie Watson) and Social Change (Blackwell 2002, with Steve Pile).
He has been Head of the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and of the Department of Sociology at the Open University.
Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her eight books include Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010). Her research has been published in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as studies of values embodied in design, search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.
Recipient of the 2014 Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association, Prof. Nissenbaum has contributed to privacy-enhancing software, including TrackMeNot (for protecting against profiling based on Web search) and AdNauseam (protecting against profiling based on ad clicks). Both are free and freely available.
Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Juliet Schor is an economist and Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Schor’s research focuses on work, consumption, and climate change. She has been studying working time since the 1980s. In 1992 she published The Overworked American: the unexpected decline of leisure, which became a national best-seller. Since 2021 she has been a lead researcher for Four Day Week Global’s worktime reduction trials. She is particularly interested in barriers to worktime reduction, the connections between working hours and carbon emissions, the well-being impacts of worktime reduction, and how companies are implementing four day weeks. Schor can be found @JulietSchor.
For SASE Lyon 2017 a great selection of ‘Author meets Critics’ sessions have been organized, see the list of books and discussants
FEATURED AUTHOR-MEETS-CRITICS SESSIONS
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SASE and the Université Claude Bernard – Lyon I have secured special rates for a number of hotels in Lyon.
Hôtel Résidence Odalys Bioparc
64 avenue Rockefeller, 69008 Lyon
Special rates:
Single room: 80 € (1 breakfast included)
Double room: 80 € (1 breakfast included)
2 rooms suite (1 to 4 persons) : 100 € (1 breakfast included)
City tax: 1.65 €/person/night
Additional breakfast : 12 €/person/night
Make your reservation by email at bioparc@odalys-vacances.com by indicating the code ‘CCL1’ and the name of the congress.
The recent hotel complex, which is built in a modern architectural style, is set right at the heart of the Bioparc complex, in the 8th district of Lyon. Located in a quiet residential area, the Hotel Residence Bioparc offers free unlimited internet access in bedrooms and is a 5-minute walk from the Laënnec metro station (Line D), 10 min walk from the metro station Grange Blanche (Line D) and the Amboise PARE tram station (Line T2).
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Click the link below to choose your hotel and book a reservation:
Please note: The default dates proposed when you click the link to reserve are June 28-June 30. You can (and should!) change the dates to suit your schedule, and the SASE discount will still apply so long as your stay is between June 27th and July 2nd. If you would like to stay for longer on either end, you can contact the hotel in question.
There will be fewer rooms available after April 27th, and none left after May 27th.
We took advantage of the SASE/Lyon 2017 meeting to interview some lively SASE scholars. Here is the first in the series.
Akos Rona-Tas, SASE treasurer and Gary Herrigel, SASE President talk about amongst other things SASE’s first meeting in Asia in June 2018, whether it’s a good time to become a social scientist, and SASE’s early career workshop.