Society for
the Advancement
of Socio-Economics

27-29 June 2019

The New School - New York City, USA

2019 – New York

Fathomless Futures: Algorithmic and Imagined

Conference Theme Overview

We all live our lives forward, facing uncertain futures, yet social scientists feel most comfortable explaining the social world through causes rooted in the past or through the constraints and resources lodged in the present. Such explanations omit an important step: both historic and structural forces are refracted through the set of expectations people have about futures they imagine. Those forces are activated by the anticipation of what lies ahead.

We live in a time of rapidly growing predictive technologies, and spectacular prediction failures. Powerful algorithms are predicting and guiding our actions from economic forecasts, stock trading models, consumer research, hiring decisions, welfare administration, risk management, electoral mobilization, and political choices to the most mundane tasks of everyday life, like borrowing money, choosing books and movies, typing messages, filtering spam, and driving cars. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data are refashioning work, markets, governmentality, sociability, identity, and morality in unexpected ways and are redrawing the boundaries of what counts as valuable skills, knowledge, and culture. Their societal effects vary: they democratize access to information, but threaten privacy, help us with everyday chores, yet turn our personal data into a tradeable commodity. Improved efficiencies of prediction may bring great benefits in areas like healthcare and public safety, while trapping many in vicious cycles of accumulating disadvantages.

Just as predictive technologies proliferate, the world is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Our age is one of economic and political volatility that has presented ordinary people and experts alike with a series of great surprises, a heightened sense of uncertainty, and anxiety. With globalization both charging forward and in retreat, democracies in crisis, inequalities growing, institutions fraying, and large populations fleeing poverty and violence, exacerbated by our increasingly unstable natural environment, the future seems exceptionally inscrutable.

As no significant utopian political or economic alternatives are on offer, history appears to resemble a driverless car that is oblivious to our intended destination. The absence of a desirable and credible future in the public imagination makes inequality and injustice even harder to accept, fostering desperate resistance, resignation, or false nostalgia for golden pasts that never existed.

While this conference will feature papers all across topics of traditional concern for socio-economics, we especially welcome submissions addressing these changes in politics, the economy, and society at large. How can we understand the direction in which we are headed? What are the various ways to regulate these processes? How are these changes influencing inequalities, democracy, labor, communities, and the international balance of power? How should we think of time in social life? What role does imagination play in the economy? Will the mechanization of human cognition lead to a mindless social universe? How are identities being reconfigured? What has happened to human expectations, hopes, and predictions? How can we (re)gain control over our collective futures?

Established in 1989, SASE owes its remarkable success to the determination to provide a platform for creative research addressing important social problems. Throughout its three decades, SASE has encouraged and hosted rigorous work of any methodological or theoretical bent from around the world based on the principle that innovative research emerges from paying attention to wider context and connecting knowledge developed in different fields. SASE is committed to diverse membership and lively intellectual debates and encourages panels that include or are likely to include a diverse group of participants. This conference will also be an occasion to celebrate SASE’s 30th anniversary.

Calls for paper proposals and session proposals will open on 6 November 2018 and close on ~~14 January 2019~~ 28 January 2019

President: Akos Rona-Tas (aronatas@ucsd.edu)

Program Committee: Akos Rona-Tas (chair), Jenny Andersson, Jens Beckert, Virag Molnar, and Jackie O’Reilly

Mini-Conference Themes

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 6 May 2019. 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.

Algorithmic Prediction vs. Shared Uncertainty: Social Consequences of Individualized Forecast

detailed info

Organizers

Alberto Cevolini

Elena Esposito

Algorithmic Prediction vs. Shared Uncertainty: Social Consequences of Individualized Forecast

Recent advances in algorithmic forecasting promise to provide a predictive score for individual persons or singular events, thereby introducing a new way to manage the uncertainty of the future. However, knowing the future in advance is not only advantageous. In fact, for our society, uncertainty about the future is also a resource. Since modernity, various social institutions in different domains of social life have developed means of coping with ignorance of the future by starting with the one thing that we all share – uncertainty. With the support of probability calculus, uncertainty, which is shared by everyone because no one can know the future in the present, is treated collectively. The system of insurance, for example, distributes the risk of uncertain future damages over a pool of individuals; medicine treats everyone’s illnesses, not knowing who will need care; public policing manages and controls the widespread and undetermined possibility of criminal acts. The mini-conference will discuss what happens to the stabilized forms of management of the future when their first resource – shared uncertainty – is missing.

We particularly welcome contributions presenting empirical evidence or exploring theoretical aspects about the following issues:

– Solidarity and personalization. What happens to the model of mutualisation of risk and to the established forms of social solidarity when algorithms produce detailed information about individual futures? What are the consequences for high-risk or disadvantaged groups in different social areas?

– Inversion of Information Asymmetry. Could Big Data lead to a condition in which companies and public institutions know more about the citizens than the latter know about themselves? What are the disruptive and positive consequences of this possibility?

– Proactivity of prediction. The availability of precise and accurate forecasts should lead to overcome the reactive attitude and to intervene on possible damages before they happen. Who then is dealing with the present? How does this transformation of prevention activities affect fields such as insurance or policing?

– Is it possible to combine algorithmic prediction with established statistical methods? What experiences are available, for example in finance or in the medical field based on a statistical notion of health and therapeutic efficacy?

– “Right not to know” and “right to be forgotten”. We invite contributions that investigate the consequences of the excess of knowledge due to algorithmic management of information.

– Bias. Algorithms work with Big Data that are inevitably biased in many different ways, and the resulting forecasts risk confirming or reinforcing pre-existing inequalities. We welcome projects exploring the impact of bias when predictive techniques are used to direct preventive measures.

– Communication of intransparency. We are interested in discussing experiences that combine the “right to explanation” of citizens with the efficiency requirements of increasingly obscure algorithms.

Building the Present at the Expense of the Future? Market Liberalization and the Future of Democracy

detailed info

Organizers

Margherita Bussi

Claire Dupuy

Virginie Van Ingelgom

Luis Vila-Henninger

Building the Present at the Expense of the Future? Market Liberalization and the Future of Democracy

What are the implications of market liberalization for the future of democracy? The future consolidation or erosion of western democracies depends in part on the political perceptions, experiences, and participation of ordinary citizens. The goal of this mini-conference, then, is to offer an arena for the (re)appraisal of citizens’ political disaffection as it relates to market liberalization. In particular, this call for papers focuses on understanding democratic disaffection in terms of “democratic linkages”—defined as the various ways in which citizens are connected in a structural and durable way to their political system (Kitschelt and Wilkinson, 2007). This definition includes political trust, political support, loyalty, and formal and informal participation. Questions about the nature and quality of “democratic linkages” are of increasing importance. A central yet often overlooked factor in the literature is the role that economic policy plays in structuring these linkages. From this perspective, then, we are interested in how market liberalization creates and changes structural relationships between citizens and democratic political systems. In particular, we invite papers that aim to explain the evolution of democratic linkages as market liberalization outcomes. This call for papers is organized around three key panels: Neoliberalism and Market Liberalization, Supranationalization and Market Liberalization, and Norms of Market Exchange as Democratic Linkages.

Neoliberalism and Market Liberalization: Changes in public policies in the past three decades have been characterized by neoliberal reform, i.e. “as involving a commitment to certain core principles focused on market competition and a limited state” (Schmidt & Thatcher 2013). This change is particularly relevant for welfare policies that are meant to redistribute resources and empower citizens. We welcome papers that investigate policy changes and the implications for citizens’ democratic linkages—and especially perspectives that seek to bridge the gap between the public policy and mass politics literatures.

Supranationalization and Market Liberalization: Supranationalization—such as European market integration policy—is omnipresent in the political and media spheres. However, the effects of such liberalization differs across national contexts and political elites: discourses may be negative or positive in nature, and may frame each process as being either contingent or inevitable. Both media and political elites tend to convey messages about the lack of citizens’ political agency in the context of supranational market liberalization. We invite contributions exploring how citizens view themselves in the context of such changes.

Norms of Market Exchange as Democratic Linkages: Much research demonstrates the importance of understanding citizens’ market relations from a normative—rather than rational choice—perspective. This literature emphasizes understanding the moral principles in which citizens are embedded and how they use such principles to legitimate their economic behavior and attitudes. By investigating how democratic linkages are shaped by market liberalization, we are led to investigate the normative elements of these linkages. We are interested in papers that explore the normative elements that emerge in contexts of market liberalization, e.g. moral economies.

Digitalization, Geographies of Production and Varieties of Digitized Capitalism

detailed info

Organizers

Florian Butollo

Martin Krzywdzinski

Chun Yang

Digitalization, Geographies of Production and Varieties of Digitized Capitalism

Despite a vibrant public and academic discussion on the impact of digitalization on enterprises and the worlds of work, academic studies on the relationship between digitalization and the transformation of actor relationships and institutional settings in the global economy are still scarce. This mini-conference aims to fill the research gap by focusing on contributions that analyze the relationships between technological change, global value chains (GVCs), and national models of capitalism.

It can be expected that digital technologies affect value chains and capitalist growth models in a number of ways. First, they shift the boundaries of automation by increasing versatility and lowering costs, which makes automation affordable for emerging economies. Second, internet-based coordination technologies and online platforms affect the governance of GVCs with implications for both the hierarchies and the geographies of production. Third, consumer data is used by firms to customize products and logistics chains, which results in an ever more important role for intangible assets in business strategies.

Digital technologies are thus changing the contours of today’s global economy. They affect inter-firm relationships in GVCs and shape national models of capitalism through the emergence of new players, the proliferation of new business models, and institutional innovation. Germany, China, and the US in particular are currently reinventing their agendas for socio-economic development, while the global economy risks slipping into an era of hostile protectionism. The outcome of these developments is still unknown. Digitalization may act as a vehicle for economic upgrading and business model innovation. However, it is also a contested field as each nation puts forward its own competitive digitalization agenda. It creates new winners, such as the platform economy’s leading newcomers, but the benefits are distributed unequally between countries, firms, and employees.

Yet digital technologies are not single-handedly generating socio-economic results. Their implementation is shaped by various actors in specific institutional settings. For instance, it is subject to secular developments such as the consolidation and regionalization of value chains in a context of shifting end markets and the rise of new global players from emerging markets. Rather than representing a consistent stage of economic organization (as implied by the term industry 4.0), digitalization affects industrial sectors in different ways, and institutional systems are adapting in idiosyncratic ways corresponding to government agendas for digitalization in each region.

The aim of this mini-conference is to fill the gap in current academic research on the relationship between digitalization, the transformation of value chains, and national models of capitalism. We invite contributions that analyze the following issues and identify linkages between them:

Analyses of the transformation of national economic growth models, especially with a perspective on the characteristics of emerging varieties of digitalized capitalism;
Analyses of changes in the geographies of manufacturing and services that are related to the implementation of new digital technologies;
Studies of new business models and coordination mechanisms based on digital technologies and their implications for the governance of GVCs and institutional innovation.

Digitalizing and Fragmenting Labor: What Changes for (In)Equality and Diversity?

detailed info

Organizers

Rossella Bozzon

Annalisa Murgia

Agnieszka Piasna

Digitalizing and Fragmenting Labor: What Changes for (In)Equality and Diversity?

This Mini Conference aims to foster a discussion about the mutual entanglement of digitalization and fragmentation to shed new light on the re-production of inequalities and diversities in contemporary and future societies. While much has been said on how technology transforms work, more debate is needed about how these processes interact with social (in)equalities and diversities. Supplementing this general line of questioning, we particularly welcome contributions that explore the following three areas:

1. Changes in the Occupational Structure

Digitalization, automation and technological change have profound structural impact on the labour markets in terms of shifts in the size of occupational categories and evolution of task contents. In this panel, we welcome papers addressing the following key areas of debate:

• What are the consequences of digitalization and fragmentation on labour market sectors and occupations? How do they interact with labour market segregation based on age, gender and ethnicity?
• How is digitalization transforming the task content of jobs? Which groups of workers are more vulnerable to automation and job replacement?

2. Changes in Careers and Employment Relations

Digital economy and algorithmic management techniques are reshaping work trajectories as well as the employment relationship. Emerging job positions and careers might be increasingly shorter, instable and uncertain. In this panel, we are interested in papers that investigate:

• What is the role played by ethnicity, age and gender in job access, labour market attachment and career development?
• How is digitalization challenging labour market regulations and social protection systems? Which social groups are able to secure better working conditions and which are more vulnerable and precarious?
• What are the consequences in terms of collective representation? How can trade unions and other union-like organizations promote equality and diversity in a digitalized economy?

3. Changes in Work Practices and Everyday Life

Digital economy is changing work practices and blurring the boundaries between paid and unpaid work, professional and private life. On the one hand, the use of new technologies is expected to improve work-life balance and increase worker autonomy. On the other, increased surveillance and weakening of workers’ bargaining power can result in unpredictable and long work hours. This panel welcomes contributions that explore the following lines of enquiry:

• How are digitalization and online platforms changing the way work is organized? How do these changes affect different social groups?
• How do digitalization and fragmentation affect job quality, occupational wellbeing, and work-life balance? How are different categories of workers experiencing the blurring boundaries of professional and private times and spaces?
• In a digitalized and fragmented work, what organisational policies are needed to promote equality and diversity at work?

We invite theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions. An intersectional approach is encouraged, acknowledging that age, gender and ethnicity are not distinct and isolated realms of experience. We invite contributions from the global North and South, and across fields of study, that explore how digitalization and fragmentation of work provoke important questions on the nature of inequalities and diversities in the areas of (i) occupational structure, (ii) careers and employment relations, (iii) work practices and everyday life.

Economic Futures in the Public Sphere

detailed info

Organizers

Amitava Krishna Dutt

Simone Polillo

Lyn Spillman

Economic Volatility of Our Age, in Theory and Evidence

detailed info

Organizers

Nicolas Duvoux

Jonathan Morduch

Economic Volatility of Our Age, in Theory and Evidence

The economic volatility of our age—and, with it, heightened uncertainty and anxiety—is partially rooted in fundamental changes in the workplace. Workers today often manage unsteady economic lives, forced to cope with risks that businesses have shifted onto their shoulders, increasingly through the use of algorithms optimized for short-term business profit. For workers paid by the hour, paychecks vary with the number of hours allotted in a week. For workers who rely on tips and commissions, income depends on the level of business activity and the generosity of customers. For workers who supplement “normal” jobs with time in the gig economy, those gigs come and go. Having a steady job is no guarantee of a steady income. At the same time, welfare benefits have been increasingly tied to workforce attachment in most western countries leaving those at the edge of the labor market insecure. With these transformations, poor, near-poor, and working-class households can all be considered as part of a shared condition. Reckoning with this condition requires new analytical and theoretical tools.

The mini-conference will explore these ideas through three panels.

Empirical realities: Economic debates on inequality have focused on the top of the socio-economic ladder and on the dispersion of income and wealth (Piketty, 2013). But insights are emerging from studies using a variety of methods—ethnography, financial diaries, qualitative surveys, and Big Data—which capture views of households with high frequency through the year, replacing static or widely-spaced views (Morduch and Schneider, 2017). The high frequency windows allow risks to be traced by researchers in fine-grain detail and implications to tracked as they play out. The panel will put empirical perspectives and methodologies into conversation, taking what happens in the bottom half of the distribution seriously in the study of inequality dynamics (OECD, 2015). It will question the prevailing poverty measures that do not fully capture the extent to which workers, even in full-time jobs, are at risk (Duvoux and Papuchon, 2018).
Extending theoretical approaches to socio-economic stratification: Concern goes beyond what is generally understood as precarity, ideas usually attached to marginalized groups and those on the edges of the economy. While recognizing the way that framing inequality in terms of insecurity has allowed a more dynamic view on these issues (Western et al., 2012), concern goes beyond the risks of destabilization due to lost jobs, ill health, and the like; instead, understandings must build from the ways that instability and variability have become an ongoing characteristic of economic life. Not only the poor but also large segments of uneducated and less educated are concerned with these detrimental conditions. It has recently been argued that polarization (Kalleberg, 2011) can capture the global dynamics in the labor market. Which theoretical categories and methodologies can be used to investigate and extend notions of economic unsteadiness, insecurity (Hacker, 2006), and precarity?
Roles of governments, markets, and non-state actors: Populations are looking for greater stability, yet this stability is elusive in the current regime of accumulation, production and redistribution. How and why are conditions perpetuated? What are the prospects for change? Can and if so how welfare arrangements can constitute buffers to this widespread economic insecurity?

Click here for detailed information on each session in the Mini-Conference.

Evaluating Futures, Evaluating Future-makers

detailed info

Organizers

Luciana D’Adderio

Katy Mason

Neil Pollock

Evaluating Futures, Evaluating Future-makers

Understanding the future is of utmost concern. In recent years we have seen the proliferation of new kinds of experts with the capacity if not to predict the future then at least to help others operate in and manage the conditions of high uncertainty that surround the world to come. Fine (2007) suggests most societies will establish ‘ritual specialists’ whose responsibility it is to ‘explain what the morrow will bring’. What are we to make of the peculiar form of knowledge? What about the specialists who produce it? Virtually non-existent a few decades earlier, there are now hundreds of occupations and firms oriented towards the management of the future, with the larger of these organisations producing predictions and forecasts on an almost daily basis. Is this dramatic expansion, which has seen the assembling of an entire ‘future industry’, evidence of the growth of some unique form of expertise able to predict the future?

Who are the new actors evaluating the future? We are interested in exploring the growing plurality of future-makers including their different practices and techniques. New kinds of activities (road mapping, envisioning, futuring, etc.) and actors (industry watch bodies, consultants, academics, industry analysts, futurists) are emerging. These include the economic forecasters that produce macroeconomic models predicting the future state of production and consumption; financial analysts selling investment information to speculators in trading markets; industry analysts attempting to calculate the future of the digital world; technology entrepreneurs setting out ‘visions’; innovators planning product roadmaps; strategists getting involved in scenario planning; and so on.

How are the future-makers themselves evaluated? It is widely understood much future-oriented knowledge will fail to live up to expectations. However, who checks? Moreover, how is this knowledge evaluated? Are actors held to future account for the claims they make? It is recognised, as Fine (2007) has identified, how some forecasters produce claims about future events that are checked as a matter of occupational routine. However, in certain areas, the accuracy of a prediction is thought unimportant. In trading markets, argues Knorr Cetina (2010), actors have little or no interest or incentive raking over old claims; they are just looking towards the next piece of information. It is also unlikely that all future-oriented knowledge is accountable in the same way. Longer-term predictions, for instance, may project too far into the future and be couched in too many techno-industry uncertainties for any group to be held responsible for their non-materialization. Conversely, there may be other shorter-term predictions that are subject to more stringent scrutiny (and possibly sanction).

We invite papers discussing the following situations of evaluating futures/evaluating future makers:

-Who are the new professional and occupational groups that are emerging? How do actors go about creating future-related knowledge?

-Who (if anyone) checks that planned futures realise their aims? What techniques do they use to value the work of future-makers? How do they hold them accountable? What penalties are there for future-makers found to be wrong?

Fathomless Ecologies: The Utopia of Green Finance, the Dystopia of a Financialized Planet, and the Re-imagination of the Socio-Economic Sphere

detailed info

Organizers

Ian Thomson

Hendrik Vollmer

Ken Weir

Fathomless Ecologies: The Utopia of Green Finance, the Dystopia of a Financialized Planet, and the Re-imagination of the Socio-Economic Sphere

The future of our planetary existence is uncertain and increasingly precarious. Ecological awareness has grown since the 1970s and given rise to numerous global and regional initiatives to moderate the trajectory of socio-economic development, under the banner of sustainability typified by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The utopia of good and green finance – from social investment to “green” financial products or policies of climate regulation that attempt to harness financial markets to reduce carbon emissions – has reimagined financial expertise, positing it as a force for ecological change to stimulate the much-needed turnaround. The finance and accounting professions have been associated with such initiatives, notably the UN Principles of Responsible Investment, UN Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative.

Scholars in social and environmental accounting, social studies of finance, economic sociology, and related areas, have contributed intermittently to these initiatives through research and, occasionally, active interventions. Since the 1990s, they have become increasingly skeptical of the merits of these engagements. Environmental reporting has often been subsumed by corporate strategies predicated on the exigencies of impression management in avoiding public scrutiny and more heavy-handed forms of political regulation. Concomitantly, critical scholars have re-affirmed the ecological predicament by sketching disastrous trajectories of socio-economic development, whether in terms of full-cost and extinction accounting or by documenting the ineffectiveness of carbon trading. Extending financial reasoning, financialized forms of sustainable intervention and regulation have been criticised as accelerating the process of planetary collapse. The utopia of green finance is reconsidered against a process of financialization that problematically redefines the full scope of our ecological relationships. The fact that finance is taking charge of sustainable development thus reinforces a dystopian view of continuous ecological decline on a progressively financialized planet.

Alongside this research, others have been striving to reimagine socio-economic development in more fundamental ontological and epistemological terms, tracing the roots of our current predicament to the enlightment, the dawn of modernity, or even back to the Neolithic Revolution as the start of the anthropocene. Bruno Latour and others have attempted to reimagine the basis of our constitution as an ecologically challenged collective, often against the nature/society dichotomy central to modern thought.

Re-imagining the possibility of finance and accounting that is in harmony with nature and society remains an unresolved challenge. Therefore this mini-conference seeks to provoke further debate on the relations between the socio-economic sphere and its planetary ecologies. We welcome contributions that:
• investigate ecological reimaginations of economy and society, whether empirical, theoretical or programmatic.
• present case studies that evaluate attempts to utilise financial practices or reasoning for ecological goals.
• theorise the possibility of an ecological reconstitution of the socio-economic sphere and the place, or lack thereof, for financial practices in any such reconstitution.

Finance after the Financial Crisis

detailed info

Organizers

Charlie Eaton

Neil Fligstein

Adam Goldstein

Jacob Habinek

Finance after the Financial Crisis

The mini-conference invites submissions around the following themes:

Reassessing the Crisis. Ten years after the financial crisis we are still debating questions of causality, culpability, and uneven recovery. We therefore invite papers that shed light on the structural roots of the financial crisis, as well as papers that explore the failure of experts to predict and forestall the crisis as it happened. The crisis of banking was global, but it was unevenly spread across countries and had differential impacts on national economies. Why were these impacts so different? And how were policy responses more or less successful at coping with them?

Ideational Underpinnings of Financial Capitalism. One strand of economic sociology has emphasized the role of economics in creating financial markets. In the wake of the financial crisis, the economics profession initially appeared to take a hit. We are therefore particularly interested in papers that examine the actions of economic experts during the financial crisis and the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of their expertise in its aftermath.

Socio-Technical Infrastructures. The technical aspects of financial innovation have long been a topic of study for economic sociologists. How has the use of securitization, algorithms, and other tools of financial innovation changed since the crisis? Have the continued expansion of algorithmic technologies in financial markets once again set the economy on a path that the titans of finance themselves fail to grasp?

Reconstructing the Global Financial Order. Scholars have shown that finance has been a force re-structuring world exchange. Following the crisis, financial markets underwent a substantial reorganization at the national and transnational level. These changes and their impact on national or international economies for better or worse provide another key theme for the mini-conference. We are interested in changes both to the organization of financial markets and to the place of financial motives and logic beyond the traditional domains of finance. Have policymakers tried to construct new rules to reduce risk or have financial products or have innovations which create risk continued apace? Are regulatory interventions different across countries, and if so, why and how?

Social and Political Consequences. The crisis reshaped the distribution of household wealth and income. Papers that explore the links between finance, financialization, and the growing inequality in wealth and income are welcome. Pundits around the world attribute the rise of populist nationalist governments to the severity of the financial crisis. The most common mechanism cited is the way in which the severity of the crisis differentially affected working class households. These households were disgusted by their government’s support of banks and their disregard for people’s very real suffering. Emerging populist nationalist regimes have successful linked that disgust to anti-immigrant sentiment.

Futures and Visions of Global Orders

detailed info

Organizers

Jenny Andersson

Vincent Cardon

Melissa Fisher

Melissa Fisher

Melissa Fisher is a cultural anthropologist who writes on finance, feminism, and the workplace. Her first book, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006), a co-edited volume, brought together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations were altered by radical economic and technological innovations during the turn of the new millennium. Her second book, Wall Street Women (Duke University Press, 2012), tracks how the first generation of Wall Street women simultaneously built professional careers in finance while constructing market feminisms (1956-2010). She is working on a third book about gender, sexuality, diversity, and inclusion in finance and film. Based on fieldwork in the United States and Europe, it focuses on how social movements (such as Me Too) shape individual careers as well as organizational life and policymaking.

Fisher has given numerous key notes and conference talks nationally and internationally. Her book on Wall Street women received over twenty-five reviews in academic journals. Her research has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The Guardian, The Times of India, CNBC, NPR and the BBC. She has written for publications such as Bloomberg and Bill Moyer’s Group Think. She has appeared on television and was featured in the Emmy nominated 2014 PBS documentary Makers: Women in Business.She also played an advisory role in the first female financial thriller film: Equity, a Sony Classic Pictures release (2016).

Fisher was most recently the Laurits Andersen Professor with Special Responsibilities in Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has also been a faculty member in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She is currently a member of the Women Creating Change Leadership Council at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. As a US Delegate to the Women’s 20 in Argentina (2018) and Japan (2019), she advises on issues such as gender and financial inclusion. Fisher earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University and her B.A. in English at Barnard College.

Visit website

CONTACT

Olivier Pilmis

Futures and Visions of Global Orders

This miniconference aims to explore the role played by predictive instruments such as scenarios, forecasts, or Delphi panels in creating visions of socio economic futures across global space. It seeks, in particular, to understand how predictive technologies are not only performative devices (as shown by STS scholars) but also carry important legacies of global expertise and ambitions of control that extend both in time and space. By integrating arguments from history and economic history, the mini conference seeks to explore the links between the future visions carried by such technologies, and specific forms of globalistic expertise such as global consultants, forecasters and scenario makers. The aim of the mini conference is therefore to tie together emerging strands of thinking from financial sociology and anthropology economic history and sociology, around futures as not only visions and images of coming time, but as highly material expectations and even forms of extension of future interest. Our scope is both theoretical and empirical in aim. Drawing on a range of methods including ethnography and intellectual history, we seek to contextualize and problematize concepts such as expectations, risk and uncertainty, and we seek to show the complex histories and socio economic contexts of predictive tools and their geopolitical agendas. By so doing we seek to reinvest the future with the problem of power and understand future expectations and images as results of power struggles between economic actors, markets, states, culture and interests.

Contributions addressing the following thematic strands are particularly welcome (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered):

The history/histories of scenarios. 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, but most of which also have a very specific history. This history can be traced to new forms of future speculation based on computer powered tools and algorithmic reasoning, but also to efforts to reinvent and extend the scope of planning, and not least to new rationalities of governmentality and management profoundly inspired by global corporations facing uncertainties related to an unpredictable process of globalization from the 1970s on. We encourage papers that explore this situated socio economic and cultural contexts of predictive technologies over time and their link to historic impressions of global space. We are also interested in papers that consider the relationship between the global and local contexts.

Forecasting expertise: Which are the groups and actors that produce and use predictive technologies and is there a particular kind of forecasting or future expert? On what forms of epistemological underpinning is such forecasting expertise created and maintained? How are forms of legitimacy constructed around forms of knowledge that are necessarily of speculative kind, but that can nevertheless be underpinned with complex forms of data and objective representation? The development of foreknowledge (or -guessing) for regulation emphasizes connections between socio-economics and science and technology studies, and leads to an interrogation on the social and cultural under which expertise is regarded as reliable.

Futures of capitalism: Since the 1970s, futurists, futurologists and transhumanists ranging from the expert to the speculative public intellectual, have been profoundly involved in the prediction and envisioning of futures of capitalist development, new economies, new cultural scenarios, new patterns of consumption and production, emergent technologies and new economic and political world orders. Such future visions appear to emanate from specific sites and places, ranging from the World Economic Forum or Wall Street to Silicon Valley. How are claims as to the coming, often projected as dramatically different, capitalist future constructed and projected? How do they reflect socio economic orders and which space do they give to utopian notions of different emergent worlds, be it with regards to technology, to the global division of labour, environment, gender, race and / or power?

Global Value Chains Analysis: Past, Present, and the Future

detailed info

Organizers

Matthew Alford

Valentina De Marchi

Gale Raj-Reichert

Global Value Chains Analysis: Past, Present, and the Future

Global value chain (GVC) analysis has reached a milestone with over twenty years of research. An analytical framework for understanding the global fragmentation of manufacturing and services as key processes of globalization, GVC research has helped us conceptualize and anticipate a variety of im-pacts, opportunities and challenges, posed by global industries on firms, workers, local communities, natural environments and national developmental paths. A series of forthcoming books on GVCs take stock of the breadth of research conducted thus far and consolidates key contributions, laying a basis for future research into the impact of these global processes on our economies, politics, and societies across scales and geographical locations (De Marchi, Di Maria, and Gereffi 2018; Gereffi, Ponte, and Raj-Reichert 2019; Gereffi 2019; Ponte 2019). A key characteristic of analytical progression in the GVC domain is its inter-disciplinary openness to research for example in Economic Geography and International Business, amongst others.

We are interested in papers on the following key themes which are innovative in their scope, methods, and ideas. We are particularly interested in inter-disciplinary contributions. Papers can be cross-cutting in its thematic focus. Submissions related to the themes are also welcomed.

1) GVCs and states

• How do states facilitate industrial policy and innovation in GVCs? And in the context of Indus-try 4.0?
• How does recent national socio-political shockwaves and increased protectionism challenge the state’s regulatory and facilitative roles in GVCs?
• What are the particular governance dynamics of State-Owned Enterprise-driven value chains? For example over social and environmental conditions and the enforcement of standards?
• Considering the role of the state as a buyer in GVCs what are the environmental, economic, social, and/or political implications?

2) GVCs and environmental sustainability

• What impacts does environmental upgrading have on governance structure of GVC industries?
• Which GVC characteristics promote or inhibit corporate wrongdoing?
• What practices support the transmission of environmental practices along GVCs?
• Does improved environmental practices in GVCs achieve better economic and social standards?

3) GVCs and gender

• How can governance modes promote gender-equitable rights and worker well-being in GVCs?
• How do civil society campaigns respond to gender inequalities and the devaluation of women’s paid work in GVCs?
• How does Industry 4.0, automation, and e-retailing impact gendered work in GVCs?

4) GVCs and labour

• How does technology, digitalization, and Industry 4.0 affect work, competences, and working conditions in GVCs?
• Considering research on labour movements, worker agency, and power how do evolving strategies of worker contestations impact working conditions in GVCs?

5) GVCs and digitalization

• How are technological developments changing GVCs sectorally, at the firm level, at the scale of the workplace , and globally/regionally/(sub)nationally?
• How do different types of firms (lead firms or suppliers) gain advantage and influence power rela-tionships through technological advancements within GVCs?
• What opportunities does digitalization and Industry 4.0 offer for improved environmental practices and labour governance in GVCs?

Makers' Worlds: Beyond All the Borders

detailed info

Organizers

Anne-Sophie Béliard

Pierre LeQueau

Olivier Zerbib

Makers' Worlds: Beyond All the Borders

The mini-conference focuses on the new forms that shape the Do-It-Yourself movement nowadays. Makerspaces, hackerspaces, fabLabs, techshops are some of them which, from the markets or their margins, redesign the borders of socioeconomic reality and experiment new ways of making social worlds.

The following issues could be discussed:

Emergence conditions

Makerspaces appeared spontaneously and maintained themselves for a long time. What then makes them arise? Do they continue previous forms of (sociocultural or socioeconomic) organizations? And/or do they express a reaction to new institutional or economic constraints?
This suggests that they can play a significant role in the resilience of inhabitants after a crisis. But that would not explain why they maintain and sometimes even develop themselves then.
Despite contextual elements, past and present, it is therefore necessary to grasp the proper logic of development of these social forms and the way they produce their justifications: from new global hacker culture to local community education or working based learning. Their references also could be very different depending on whatever they produce, recycle or fix.
Public policies now often encourage the creation and development of this kind of third places. In this case, we could then look at what is expected by local authorities.

Ecosystem

Makerspaces develop themselves by forming a dense but diversified network (cluster? scene?) considering the field of activity, location, members, legal forms and actual modes of governance.
We can then try to understand what connects these different experiences, through space and time. People who created and/or animate them certainly play a major role in organizing these networks. We could be interested in examining their trajectory, training course and experiences… Including in other networks, elsewhere. A similar approach of those who participate to their workshops is possible as well.

Other resources, material and non-material, also circulate between different places. How do these non-monetary markets actually work in terms of exchanges, valuation, etc.? How are they connected to each other, including internationally?

Finally, what do the outcome of the whole system consist in and how evaluate it, individually and collectively. In this regard, we could pay particular attention not only to the transfer of skills to the inhabitants, but their global empowerment.

Border troubles

The logic of bricolage involves the articulation of heterogeneous materials and know-hows as well as various forms of collaboration and co-working we could describe.
Consequently, the DIY movement blurs several traditional boundaries of economic systems. As makers produce items and share competences on their free time without economic benefits, their activities reconfigure links between work and non-work, commercial and non-commercial activities.

Boundaries between institutional and non-institutional frames could also be addressed and different social and political claims as well. For example, some makerspaces add gender concerns to their libertarian identity. Do these processes prevent some makerspaces from becoming more inclusive or do they allow them to evolve towards new definitions of community and democracy?

Papers with varied disciplinary backgrounds discussing these topics or other topics are welcome.

Out of Sync: Disordered Temporalities and Temporal Conflicts in Contemporary Capitalism

detailed info

Organizers

Mateusz Halawa

Marcin Serafin

Lisa Suckert

Out of Sync: Disordered Temporalities and Temporal Conflicts in Contemporary Capitalism

The rise of capitalist modes of production revolutionized the temporal order of traditional societies. The future has emerged as the major temporal reference for social and economic life, becoming ever more open, contingent, and uncertain. Time itself has become an object of commodification, power struggles and new differentiations. However, the emergence of this new temporal order did not mean the disappearance of other cyclical forms of time. The proposed mini-conference takes up these classic concerns of sociology and transposes them to the current phase of capitalism. It is interested in the distorting effects of new capitalist developments for the temporal order of 21st century societies. How do processes of globalization, digitalization, or financialization affect the ways time and the future are conceived? How are these transformations related to the multiple rhythms structuring modern societies? What are the structural temporal conflicts between the economy and other social spheres? And what technologies do actors use to manage these conflicts?

Contributions addressing the following thematic strands (or related perspectives) are particularly welcome:

a) Disrupted temporalities
We invite contributions that explore the multiple ways that new capitalist developments affect the perceptions of time. The assessment of these transformations is of particular importance, as capitalism risks destroying its own temporal foundations. Innovation, entrepreneurship and investment, the backbones of traditional capitalism, all require the confidence in an open future full of opportunities and the capability to envision and project long term perspectives.
How do algorithms and new data-based modes of prediction render futures less open? Is financialization increasing the speed and accelerating social live? Are actors in a globalized, flexibilzed economy still confident they stand to take control of their futures?

b) Desynchronized temporalities
We invite contributions that analyze the frictions between the temporalities of contemporary capitalism and those of other social spheres, like e.g. the state, home, sleep or religion. How do the changing dynamics of capitalism relate to the multiple rhythms structuring modern societies? What are the assonances and dissonances between biographical time of the life course and the cycles of finance? What is the conflict between the short-term profit of financialized capitalism and its long-term externalities, including the deep futures of Anthropocene? How are they adjusted and how do they diverge? How do current developments increase or relax existing desynchronization?

c) Managed temporalities
We invite contributions that look at how temporal conflicts and disorders created by contemporary capitalism are managed and mitigated. How do people cope with divergent rhythms of social life as they try to manage their work-life balance? What role do professionals play in managing temporal conflicts on the individual level (e.g. therapists, sleep coaches, work-life-balance consultants)? By what devices are temporal conflicts reduced at societal level (e.g. logistics, jurisdiction, trade unions, state governance)? Finally, what is the role of different digital technologies (calendars, collaboration software, trading terminals, smartphone applications etc.) in this process of syncing and desyncing of social life?

Possible Worlds: Practice, Ethics, Hope, and Distress

detailed info

Organizers

Gary Herrigel

Adriana Mica

Ann Mische

Possible Worlds: Practice, Ethics, Hope, and Distress

Social action, entrepreneurship and decision-making are increasingly depicted as taking place in a context of possibility, alternatives, and opportunities waiting to be revealed. This discourse is associated with hope, creativity and adventure, and is backed up by contemporary advances in technology, which render the contemplation of possible worlds more and more widespread.

The spectrum of what is possible helps to advance alternative economic activities (sharing or cooperative economies), nonconventional entrepreneurship, original forms of adaptation, social and technological innovations, social movements, and even new types of governance infused with hope. Hence, engaging the possible can be a tool to reduce or, at least, challenge social inequalities. At the same time, however, visions of the possible can generate disappointment regarding less advantageous or unexpected developments. These might include, for instance, claims regarding the failure to anticipate episodes of crisis (financial, migratory etc.) or inaction in responding to crises (ecological etc.). These developments infuse the exploration and transformation of the possible with urgency, pressing policymakers, scientists and citizens to imagine alternative scenarios and push the boundaries of what people consider to be plausible and desirable futures.

The invocation of what is possible can also lead to the reification of future scenarios, and to subsequent fatigue. On the one hand, the “possible” always remains in an indefinite future. On the other hand, it is the subject of political struggles, and thus the reification or transformation of possible futures is always consequential to the present. This reification occurs via the voicing of certitude that certain risks or possibilities will materialize, without preliminary discussion of the extent to which these possible worlds are in fact probable. Examples include the reification of “dark” futures in relation to economic downturns, limits to growth and resources, health and environmental risks, or the “invasion of migrants” in Europe.

The mini-conference invites papers exploring the dynamics of the possible in the contemporary world. We seek to explore the forms of social and political agency triggered by different articulations of the possible, and the range of reactions to these. The intuition guiding this discussion is that there is more than one logic of what is possible. Possible worlds reveal themselves in relation to social structure, economic situation, habitus, power, and politics. This mini-conference aims to explore in what directions the possible is leading us in the contemporary world. We will discuss how it enables or blocks individual and collective action; how it contributes to political struggles; how it provides templates for social policy; and how it re-arranges temporalities across social fields. We will also consider the conditions that lead to the exhaustion of possible futures. Finally, we will discuss the most suitable sociological theories and research methods that scholars can use to investigate possible worlds.

Socio-Economic and Political Transformations in Ibero-America: Where Are We Heading?

detailed info

Organizers

Pedro Cezar Dutra Fonseca

Ricardo Dathein

André Moreira Cunha

Julimar da Silva Bichara

Socio-Economic and Political Transformations in Ibero-America: Where Are We Heading?

Iberian-American countries’ emerging landscape reveals new socio-economic trend and political transformations. Following the economic growth with income distribution and poverty reduction period that characterized in the initial years of the millennium, the Great Recession of 2008 forced most countries in the region into adopting economy austerity measures. Also, a new international economic scenario, with a growing economic protectionism trend, led these countries into an economic, political and social uncertainty.

Thus, the initial economic boom in the first decade of the 21st century have not reduced their structural imbalances and institutional deficiencies. As a result, today’s shortcomings are bringing to surface socio-economic, institutional and political deficiencies, which, in turn, is allowing a view questioning the structural economic transformations and even democracy itself.

At the same time, all those challenges have emerged in the context of change in the information and communication technologies (ICT) and in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). These factors are beginning to have significant effects in all areas of social organizations -such as, production processes, labor-market relations – as well as affecting economic policies determination, the working of institutions and the state itself. Additionally, they are even putting democracy as a reliable political system at risk.

Although it seems clear that Iberian-America countries are undergoing a process of transformation in all the spheres that constitute and regulate socio-economic relations, its main trends are not, at least so far. On the contrary, there is a great uncertainty. This mini conference, within the SASE`s 31^st Annual Meeting call for paper, has, therefore, means to explore possible explanations and, consequently, offering responses to these economic, political and technological challenges that are taking place in the Iberian-American countries.

Particularly, the proposals of this Mini Conference is a call for papers that will deal with the following questions:

What are the main economic-social-political transformations that the region is facing? What are the main forces behind these transformations?
Are the existing institutions capable to offer responses to these transformations?
What role should the State assume?
What is the role of ICT and AI?
What are the implications for democracy and socioeconomic policies?
What kind of State capabilities are required in order to implement an alternative development model?
What is the potential and limits to civil society’s role in ensuring democracy and promoting economic development?

Socio-Economics Revisited: Economic Sociology Meets Heterodox Economics

detailed info

Organizers

Alexander Ebner

Socio-Economics Revisited: Economic Sociology Meets Heterodox Economics

The foundation of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics 30 years ago was stimulated by Amitai Etzioni’s suggestion that socio-economics should combine the specific variables studied by economists with those typically studied by other social sciences such as sociology. Over the years, this transdisciplinary conversation between economics and sociology has been submerged by academic differentiation. Sociology has provided the breeding ground for a new kind of economic sociology that addresses the social fabric of capitalist market economies. Yet its conversation with economics has been hindered by the fact that the mainstream of neoclassical economics resembles a kind of economic physics that tends to eschew the dialogue with sociology.

Revisiting the intellectual project of socio-economics therefore requires a revitalization of the conversation between economic sociology and those non-neoclassical strands of economics that are usually labelled as heterodox, reaching across the theoretical as well as normative and political spectrum from Marxian and Postkeynesian via institutional and evolutionary to Austrian economics. Adding to the rejection of neoclassical equilibrium analyses, their common ground lies in a shared vision of capitalist market economies as shaped by uncertainty, instability, novelty, conflict, and persistent change. Crucially, this vision of economic affairs also characterises the major strands of economic sociology.

The SASE mini-conference “Socio-Economics Revisited: Economic Sociology Meets Heterodox Economics” is meant to promote the conversation between economic sociology and heterodox economics. Key questions to be explored are as follows:

What are the theoretical commonalities as well as specificities of economic sociology compared with major strands of heterodox economics, in particular involving Marxian, Postkeynesian, institutional, evolutionary and Austrian economics?
How do economic sociology and these major strands of heterodox economics theorize commonly shared topics such as uncertainty, instability, novelty, conflict and change in capitalist market economies, among others?
What are the prospects for a theoretical and methodological recombination of economic sociology and the major strands of heterodox economics in a commonly shared analytical framework of socio-economics?

To explore these and related questions, papers that present original and unpublished content are invited for submission. Particularly welcome are papers which take on a comparative theoretical perspective that is rooted in contemporary theorising or in the history of ideas. In addition to that, also contributions concerned with comparative methodological discussions are invited for submission. Furthermore, papers which shed light on the above questions by utilising empirical material or historical reasoning are of course also welcome as contributions. Crucially, the SASE mini-conference “Socio-Economics Revisited: Economic Sociology Meets Heterodox Economics” is conceived as an open and inclusive forum for debating the relationship between economic sociology and heterodox economics – with a view on the actual prospects of the intellectual project of socio-economics.

The Future of Algorithmic Inequalities and Organizational Dynamics

detailed info

Organizers

Gina Neff

Laura Sartori

The Future of Algorithmic Inequalities and Organizational Dynamics

Computational techniques including machine learning, big data analysis and artificial intelligence are disrupting established methods of data collection and analysis in the social sciences. Researchers are also questioning the social, cultural and political impacts of data-driven technologies in hiring and employment, medicine, finance, and criminal justice, among many other areas of social life.

On one hand, algorithms represent new data-intensive mechanisms for coping and counterbalancing unequal structures of opportunities and power. On the other side, new data tools could exacerbate existing social, economic and political hierarchies under a guise of technocratic neutrality. Society could potentially derive enormous benefits from new kinds of data, but challenges persist. For example, in healthcare algorithmic and AI systems could also lock-in existing accumulated advantages, open new divides, such as privacy or security, and create new patterns of privilege or exploitation.

This SASE mini-conference will focus on the organizational dynamics of algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence. We welcome submissions presenting empirical evidence or developing theoretical reflections on the intersection of socio-technical systems and organizational realities. Contributions are invited on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to the following:

– Traditional sources of social inequalities such as gender, race and class origin are embedded and encoded into algorithmic systems and may lead towards even more subtle forms of discrimination, far from the promise of neutral and efficient data-driven decisions. What socio-economic mechanisms contribute to the power of algorithms to reproduce and reinforce inequality and bias? Are there organizational processes or structures that mitigate or exacerbate algorithmic inequality?

– How do users engage in and solve trust issues in algorithmic settings? What new digital competences arise as different actors and stakeholders articulate their power and influence within algorithmic organizational settings?

– How do algorithms and AI change the social and organizational dynamics of authority, agency and voice? There is a potential for reconfiguration in power practices due to AI and algorithms promised capacity to substitute human experience, judgment and expertise, as organizational and social institutions try to adjust. What emerging evidence do we have as these systems diffuse from the technology sector into more kinds of work, organizations and industries?

– Do algorithmic and AI systems support or hinder the processes of organizational innovation? What do scholars need to understand to build algorithmic systems to encourage creativity and collaboration among workers?

– How does organizational analysis help illuminate the “dark side” of algorithms? How do different actors in an organization understand and use algorithms differently? How do they adapt their daily practices in algorithmic settings and how do they modify, push back or resist algorithmic logics?

– How can socio-economic and organizational analysis contribute to showing how fairness, transparency and accountability can best be built into the design, deployment and use of algorithmic and AI systems.

– Many studies of algorithmic systems and AI have focused on the US and Europe. What cross-country empirical evidence helps scholars to understand the emerging dynamics of these systems in a wider array of settings?

Veblen Seen Anew: Power, Social Class, and the New Economy

detailed info

Organizers

Teresa Ghilarducci

William Milberg

Alondra Nelson

Veblen Seen Anew: Power, Social Class, and the New Economy

The New School will celebrate the 100^th anniversary of its founding in 2019. Thorstein Veblen was one of the founding faculty members of The New School in 1919. Veblen was a major social thinker at the time, having authored The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Higher Learning in America (1918), and The Place of Science in Modern Civilazation and Other Essays (1919). Veblen’s relevance has again become clear today, as many of the issues that concerned him – consumerism and debt, social class formation, technology and power in the workings of the modern industrial enterprise — have resurfaced in the 21^st century as pressing issues. The purpose of this mini-conference will be to revisit Veblen’s contribution and to reformulate his approach to power, consumerism, industrial enterprise, democracy and capitalist development in light of the current moment in the US. How does consumerism create status today? What is the relation between contemporary consumerism and labor market conditions in the era of the platform economy? What is the role of debt in the formation of social class and in the determination of economic growth? What does the re-emergence of monopoly power by a few firms mean for economic policy and economic democracy? How has the rise in income and wealth inequality changed the role of consumption and status in the way class is constructed and narrated? How can neuroscience, macroeconomic modeling, ethnography, critical race theory and other modern approaches help us to gain new insights into the issues that Veblen explored in the first part of the twentieth century.

One driver of the current levels of debt accumulation was wage stagnation, which prompted less affluent households to borrow to finance consumption expenditures. Another was the social imitation central to Thorsten Veblen’s emphasis on emulation effects in consumption behaviour. This results in less affluent households aspiring to higher levels of consumption in order to “keep up with the Joneses”. Veblen’s emulation effects contribute to a potentially unsustainable process of debt accumulation that makes the entire economy prone to a “sudden stop” of credit-financed consumption spending. As the Great Recession demonstrated, crises of this nature can create near-depression conditions even in the event of massive policy interventions – frightening testimony to Thorsten Veblen’s relevance today.

Work and the Feeling of the Future

detailed info

Organizers

Ariel Ducey

Karen Gregory

Elizabeth Wissinger

Find out more about the exceptional scholars giving featured talks at our 30th annual conference in New York.

Marie-Laure Salles-Djelic

Virginia Eubanks

Jonathan Haskel

Nancy Fraser

Cathy O’Neil

Networks

Research networks provide a stable spine of research at the SASE conference. Submissions to the SASE conference must be made through one of the research networks (or through a mini-conference).

Click here for descriptions of each of SASE’s research networks and links to bios and contact information for SASE’s network organizers..

Author Meets Critics

A great selection of ‘Author meets Critics’ sessions are being organized for SASE/NYC 2019, see the growing list of books and discussants below.

FEATURED AUTHOR-MEETS-CRITICS SESSIONS

The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination – Jenny Andersson

Oxford University Press, 2018

Discussants: Mathias Hein Jessen (chair) / Timur Ergen / Melissa Fisher

08:30 AM – 10:00 AM – Thursday, June 27, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Disembedded Markets: Economic Theology and Global Capitalism – Christoph Deutschmann

Routledge, 2019

Discussants: Jens Beckert / Elena Esposito / Greta Krippner

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM – Friday, June 28, University Center (Bldg U) – UL104

NETWORK AUTHOR-MEETS-CRITICS SESSIONS

Network B: Globalization and Socio-Economic Development

Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess – Darius Ornston

Cornell University Press, 2018

Discussants: Matthew Allen / Richard Doner / Douglas B Fuller / Basak Kus / Henry Yeung

02:00 PM – 03:30 PM – Thursday, June 27, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Network E: Political Economy of Industrial Relations and Welfare States

Social Democratic Capitalism – Lane Kenworthy

Oxford University Press, 2019 (forthcoming)

Discussants: Suzanne Berger / Peter Hall / Sean O Riain

03:45 PM – 05:15 PM – Friday, June 28, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (Bldg B) – B500

Network E: Political Economy of Industrial Relations and Welfare States

Strong Governments, Precarious Workers: Labor Market Policy in the Era of Liberalization – Philip Rathgeb

Cornell University Press, 2018

Discussants: Christian Lyhne Ibsen / Valeria Pulignano

08:30 AM – 10:00 AM – Thursday, June 27, 2019, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (Bldg B) – B500

Network H: Markets, Firms, and Institutions

Collaborative Capitalism in American Cities: Reforming Urban Market Regulations – Rashmi Dyal-Chand

Cambridge University Press, 2018

Discussants: Jason Jackson / Debbie Becher / Josh Pacewicz / Josh Whitford

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM – Friday, June 28, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (Bldg B) – B259

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

Documentary Screening and Discussion

Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti – Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler

The Alternatives to Capitalism Research Network cordially invites you to a special screening of a new documentary by Dario Azzellini (Cornell) and Oliver Ressler, titled Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti (2018, 34 min.).
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Dario Azzellini.

Moderator: Torsten Geelan

12:30 PM – 02:00 PM – Thursday, June 27, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D910

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

Capitalism. A Conversation in Critical Theory – Nancy Fraser

Polity Press, 2018

Moderator: Lara Monticelli

Discussants: TBC

03:45 PM – 05:15 PM – Friday, June 28, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality – Bhaskar Sunkara

Basic Books, 2019

Moderator: Torsten Geelan

Discussants: TBC

02:00 PM – 03:30 PM – Friday, June 28, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Network J: Digital Economy

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor – Virginia Eubanks

St. Martin’s Press, 2018

Discussants: Jenny Andersson / Marion Fourcade / Mikell Hyman / Donald MacKenzie

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM – Friday, June 28, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Network N: Finance and Society

The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich – Cristobal Young

Stanford University Press, 2017

Discussants: Bruce Carruthers / Josh Pacewicz / Sarah Quinn

03:45 PM – 05:15 PM – Thursday, June 27, 2019, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Network N: Finance and Society

Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats? – Ekaterina Svetlova

Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018

Discussants: Yuval Millo / Neil Pollock / Zsuzsanna Vargha

08:30 AM – 10:00 AM – Friday, June 28, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1107

Network O: Global Value Chains

Global Value Chains and Development: Redefining the Contours of 21st Century Capitalism – Gary Gereffi

Cambridge University Press, 2018

Discussants: Rory Horner / William Milberg / Florence Palpacuer / Eric Thun

02:00 PM – 03:30 PM – Thursday, June 27, University Center (Bldg U) – U104

Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff – Edward Balleisen

Princeton University Press, 2017

Discussants: Neil Fligstein / Marc J. Schneiberg / Camilo Leslie

09:00 AM – 10:30 AM – Saturday, June 29, University Center (Bldg U) – U601

Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

Finance at Work – ed. Valérie Boussard

Routledge, 2017

Discussants: Felix Bühlmann / Alex Preda / Natascha van der Zwan

Moderator: Matthew Soener

02:00 PM – 03:30 PM – Thursday, June 27, 2019, University Center (Bldg U) – U601

Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

Economic Transplants: On Lawmaking for Corporations and Capital Markets – Katja Langenbucher

Cambridge University Press, 2017

Discussants: Reuven Avi-Yonah / John Cioffi / Matthias Thiemann

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM – Friday, June 28, University Center (Bldg U) – U601

Network Q: Asian Capitalisms

Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia – Kathryn Ibata-Arens

Stanford University Press, 2019

Discussants: Katherine Chen / Reo Matsuzaki / Michael Sharpe / Cornelia Storz / Tobias ten Brink

08:30 AM – 10:00 AM – Friday, June 28, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1103

Network Q: Asian Capitalisms

China’s Capitalism. A Paradoxical Route to Economic Prosperity – Tobias ten Brink

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Moderator: Florian Butollo

Discussants: Robert Boyer / Nana De Graaff / Gary Herrigel / Ho-fung Hung / Kathryn Ibata-Arens

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM – Thursday, June 27, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (Bldg B) – B500

Accommodations

Looking to stay just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the conference? Check out a selection of hotel options below.

Hotel	Address	Distance from Campus
Walker Hotel	52 West 13th Street	0.2 miles/Greenwich Village
W New York – Union Square	201 Park Avenue South	0.6 miles/Union Square
Chelsea Inn	46 West 17th Street	0.8 miles/Chelsea
Hotel 17	225 East 17th Street	0.8 miles/Union Square
Gramercy Park Hotel	2 Lexington Avenue	1 mile/Gramercy
Maritime Hotel	363 West 16th Street	1 mile/Chelsea
Mercer Hotel	147 Mercer Street	1 mile/SoHo
American Dream Hostel	168 East 24th Street	1.1 miles/Gramercy
Comfort Inn	18 West 25th Street	1.1 miles/Gramercy
Hampton Inn – New York	108 West 24th Street	1.1 miles/Gramercy
Chelsea Center Hostel	313 West 29th Street	1.4 miles/Chelsea
The Evelyn	7 East 27th Street	1.2 miles/Gramercy
Off SoHo Suites	11 Rivington Street	1.4 miles/Nolita
Hampton Inn Manhattan	54 Watts Street	1.5 miles/Tribeca
SoHo Grand Hotel	310 West Broadway	1.7 miles/Tribeca
Affinia Shelburne	303 Lexington Avenue	1.8 miles/Murray Hill
Homewood Suites by Hilton	312 West 37th Street	1.8 miles/Garment District
Marriott Marquis	1535 Broadway	2.1 miles/Midtown
Millennium Hilton	55 Church Street	2.2 miles/Financial District
Hampton Inn	320 Pearl Street	2.3 miles/South Seaport
Waldorf Astoria, Waldorf Towers	100 East 50th Street	2.3 miles/Midtown East
The Out Hotel	510 West 42nd Street	2.4 miles/Garment District
Gild Hall	15 Gold Street	2.4 miles/Financial District
Ritz-Carlton NY, Central Park	50 Central Park South	2.5 miles/Midtown
YOTEL New York	570 10th Avenue	2.6 miles/Midtown West
JW Marriott Essex House New York	160 Central Park South	2.6 miles/Midtown
New York Marriott Downtown	85 West Street	2.6 miles/Battery Park
St. Regis New York	2 East 55th Street	2.7 miles/Midtown East
Wall St. Inn	9 South William Street	2.8 miles/Financial District
Renaissance Hotel 57	130 East 57th Street	2.7 miles/Midtown East
Q&A Hotel	70 Pine Street	2.7 miles/Wall Street
Ritz-Carlton NY, Battery Park	2 West Street	3 miles/Battery Park
The Plaza	768 Fifth Avenue	3.5 miles/Upper East Side
Freehand Hotels	23 Lexington Avenue	Flatiron District

Special Event - Social Sciences for the Real World

A wave of rampant anti-intellectualism has surged around the globe; from the US to Hungary, from the UK to Russia via Turkey. The “fake news” and “people have had enough of experts!” ideas constitute a genuine threat to scientific knowledge and reasoned argumentation – and therefore democracy and freedom.

Loading…

The social sciences are particularly under attack for both political reasons (level-headed, fact-based argumentation is not in the interest of those politicians whose success depends on emotions such as hate and fear) and pecuniary ones (the output of social sciences research appears more difficult to commodify than the output of STEM subjects). Yet, social scientists and their work play a key role in what constitutes the modern societies in which we live. Democracy, constitutions, human rights, and capitalism were the result of complex processes of co-evolution of intellectual ideas and empirical realities. Intellectual ideas and theories have played a crucial role in shaping the world we live in and in defining what we take for granted realities. Their role in maintaining civilized and free societies is vastly underestimated. This is a dangerous development that we should fight back against.

This challenge will be taken up at the 2019 annual SASE meeting through two exceptional panels grouped under the heading “Social Sciences for the Real World”, to take place shortly after the main conference program ends in the Starr Foundation Hall (room UL102, University Center).

In the topical panels, we seek to help nurture the vital conversation between social scientists and members of the public in order to foster mutual understanding.

Two hot topics of immense interest to citizens and academics alike will be tackled at this event:

Session 1: The Digitalization and Automatization of Work and Its Implications for Working People (2-3pm)

Speakers: Giancarlo Crocetti (Boehringer Ingelheim), Gina Neff (University of Oxford), Mari Sako (University of Oxford), Pavlina Tcherneva (Bard College)

Chair: Imran Chowdhury (Pace University)

Session 2: The Rise of Populism and Authoritarianism and Its Impact on Freedom (3:30-4:30pm)

Speakers: Sheri Berman (Barnard College), Koray Caliskan (The New School), Stephen Macedo (Princeton University), Sanjay Pinto (Workers Institute, Cornell / 1199SEIU Training and Employment Funds)

Chair: Anna Skarpelis (Harvard University)

Each session will bring together a panel of academics and interested members of the public to engage in a constructive debate about these crucial issues, and about how social scientists and people in the “real world” perceive them. The sessions will use innovative dialogue techniques to provide an opportunity to discuss what we can jointly contribute to solve these problems.

The sessions will be held consecutively on the afternoon of Saturday, 29 June 2019 (2-3pm and 3:30-4:30pm respectively) at the New School in New York City.

We hope you can stay in the city on Saturday afternoon to help make a difference in the world. Please sign up using the form on this page if you are interested in attending one or both sessions.

For questions please contact the organizers:

Imran Chowdhury, Pace University, NYC, ichowdhury@pace.edu

Isabelle Ferreras, FNRS/University of Louvain, isabelle.ferreras@uclouvain.be

Gerhard Schnyder, Loughborough University London, G.Schnyder@lboro.ac.uk

Anna K. Skarpelis, Harvard University, askarpelis@fas.harvard.edu [/full_width]

Women and Gender Forum

Established in November 2017 by a group of female social science scholars, the Women and Gender Forum (WAG) of SASE is an interest group of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).

WAG has three objectives: 1. to improve senior representation of women in academia, 2. to provide a networking space for female scholars, and 3. to stimulate discussions about important issues, such as “challenges of publishing,” “work-life balance,” “leadership roles,” or “career progression.”

The 2018 Kyoto kick-off event of the Women and Gender Forum was very successful. We had over 80 participants discussing issues related to publishing, career progression and work-life balance, followed by a networking lunch.

As a result of the WAG Forum’s activities, in 2018 SASE has set up a ‘Diversity Committee’ within the Executive Council to monitor and support diversity within the organisation and supported our initiative to allocate a special keynote speaker for the WAG Forum at the Annual conferences.

Every year we come together at the SASE Annual conference in a dedicated session to discuss research, share information, network with each other and welcome our junior colleagues.

This year’s event will take place from 12:10pm-1:45pm on Thursday, June 27th in the adjoining rooms of the Starr Foundation Hall and Event Café (rooms UL102 and UL103) of the University Center building (63 5th Ave). As lunch will not be provided, we advise you to bring a sandwich lunch from one of the myriad restaurants and shops in the area, which you can get during the break between conference sessions and the beginning of the Women and Gender Forum (i.e., between 11:45am and 12:10pm).

In the 2019 Annual Meeting in New York we have organized:

A peer-to-peer discussion session, organized as themed round-tables
A networking session and
A keynote lecture from Professor Nancy Fraser.

Membership is open to all female SASE members and those who identify as women in a way that is significant to them.

If you would like to become a member, please fill out the form on this page.

If you would like to get in touch, please e-mail: D.Sallai@lse.ac.uk

WAG Committee

Founding Chair – Dorottya Sallai

Committee members –Sarah Ashwin, Chiara Benassi, Virginia L Doellgast, Jacqueline O’Reilly, and Caroline Ruiner.

Loading…

At-A-Glance Calendar

SASE 2019 At-A-Glance Calendar

Visiting NYC

What’s on tap for the Big Apple’s Year of Pride

You can look forward to these and many more events in NYC while you’re in town!

Presidential Panels

SASE at 30: Looking to the Future with Past SASE Presidents

10:15 AM – 11:45 AM – Thursday, June 27, University Center (Bldg U) – UL104

Chair: Akos Ronas-Tas

Presidents: Amitai Etzioni, Wolfgang Streeck, Bruce Carruthers, and Marion Fourcade

SASE Founder, President 1988-1990

Amitai Etzioni

SASE Founder, President 1988-1990

After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, Dr. Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University for 20 years; part of that time as the Chairman of the department. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978 before serving as a Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979-1980. In 1980, Dr. Etzioni was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. From 1987-1989, he served as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School.

Dr. Etzioni served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1994-95, and in 1989-90 was the founding president of the international Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 1990, he founded the Communitarian Network, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to shoring up the moral, social and political foundations of society. He was the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, the organization’s quarterly journal, from 1991-2004. In 1991, the press began referring to Dr. Etzioni as the ‘guru’ of the communitarian movement.

Dr. Etzioni is the author of over thirty books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), The New Golden Rule (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 1997 Tolerance Book Award, The Spirit of Community (New York: Crown Books, 1993), and The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (New York: Free Press, 1988). His most recent books are My Brother’s Keeper: A Memoir and a Message (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), How Patriotic is the Patriot Act?: Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism (Routledge, 2004), and Seurity First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2007).

Outside of academia, Dr. Etzioni’s voice is frequently heard in the media. He appears often on radio and television programs, and is regularly consulted by print media as well.

In 2001, he was named by Richard Posner as being among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations.

Also in 2001, Dr. Etzioni was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences as well as the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also the recipient of the Seventh James Wilbur Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the Appreciation and Advancement of Human Values by the Conference on Value Inquiry, as well as the Sociological Practice Association’s Outstanding Contribution Award.

Book Review:
Law and society in a populist age: balancing individual rights and the common good

Brexit: Taking Back or Losing Control

02:00 PM – 03:30 PM – Friday, June 28, University Center (Bldg U) – UL104

Chair: Daniel Mügge

Discussants: Suzanne Berger, Jonathan Haskel, Jacqueline O’Reilly, Jonathan Zeitlin

University of Sussex

Jacqueline O’Reilly

SASE President Elect 2020-2021

Jacqueline O’Reilly is full Professor of Comparative HRM at the University of Sussex Business School and Co-Director for the ESRC £8 million investment in the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (digit-research.org) (2020-24).

She is the UK lead on the Horizon 2020 EUROSHIP project on social protection in Europe (euroship-research.eu) (2020-23). Previously, she coordinated EU STYLE: Strategic Transitions for Youth Labour in Europe (www.style-research.eu) (2014-17) and was UK lead on the EU NEGOTIATE project (www.negotiate-research.eu) (2015-18).

Her most recent research focuses on the digital transformation of work, labour market policy and international comparisons of gender, ethnicity and labour market transitions across the life course.

She completed her doctorate at Nuffield College, University of Oxford on an Anglo-French comparison of employment practices in the banking sector. She worked for ten years at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB), Germany, and at Sciences Politiques in Paris, London, Manchester and Brighton Universities in the UK.

In 2000 she was awarded a Jean Monnet Research Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. She is a visiting research fellow at the Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Sciences Politiques, Paris, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Wirthschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftes Institut (WSI), Dusseldorf.

She has served on the editorial board of the BJIR, Socio-Economic Review, and Work, Employment and Society where she was also Chair of the editorial board. She was elected twice to the Executive Council of SASE. In 2019 she was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences for her distinguished contribution to the field of interdisciplinary research.

She has been consulted by HM Treasury, Full Employment Team and the UK Cabinet Office Open Innovation Unit on equal pay and youth employment. She is an Evaluation Rapporteur for the European Commission Horizon 2020 research programme, was invited as an advisor to the ILO Work4Youth programme funded by The MasterCard Foundation, and was an evaluator on two occasions for the German Excellence Initiative of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (€151 million investment).

She lives in Hove, UK with her two teenage sons where she enjoys living by the sea, watching Nordic Noir and discovering whether youth music today is better than that of the 1980s.

Researchgate.net: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacqueline_Oreilly
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6223-154X

Meet SER: A Panel with SER Editors

02:00 PM – 03:30 PM – Friday, June 28, Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Bldg D) – D1107

Chair: Gregory Jackson

Discussants: Nina Bandelj, Julia Lynch

Diversity and Performance: Experimental Research

09:00 AM – 10:30 AM – Saturday, June 29, University Center (Bldg U) – UL105

Discussant: Katherine Phillips

Columbia Business School

Katherine Phillips

Professor Katherine W. Phillips joined the faculty at Columbia Business School as the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics in Fall of 2011. She is currently the Reuben Mark Professor of Organizational Character and the Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. Before joining Columbia, she was Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and Co-Director and Founder of Northwestern’s Center on the Science of Diversity. She has also been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. Professor Phillips received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her Bachelors degree is in Psychology from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Phillips research addresses the main questions of what is the value of diversity and what are the barriers that prevent society, organizations and especially work teams from capturing the knowledge, perspectives and unique backgrounds of every member? As organizations and society become increasingly diverse, developing a more sophisticated understanding of intergroup relations and the myriad of processes that interfere with capturing the value that diversity can bring to the table, is essential for the continued growth of organizations. Professor Phillips’ theoretical and empirical work has focused mainly on the small group processes and performance that are affected by diversity, but more recently her work has expanded to assessments of worth and status that intertwine with group composition to affect interpersonal and group outcomes. You can find insights in Prof. Phillips’ research regarding issues of information sharing, diversity, status, minority influence, decision-making, and performance in work groups. Recent interests tackle issues around the intersection of race and gender stereotypes, the relationship between diversity and perceptions of morality, and insights on how homogeneity affects group processes just as much as diversity itself. Professor Phillips is the recipient of numerous professional awards, including top awards and recognition from the International Association of Conflict Management, the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management, the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Excellence in Work-Family Research Award, and the Gender, Diversity and Organizations Division of the Academy of Management. Prof. Phillips is a member of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her review of diversity research published in Research in Organizational Behavior (under the name Williams) is a leading source of information for scholars across many disciplines including psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, lawyers, and doctors. More of her award-winning work can be found in scholarly outlets such as Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Organization Science and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Prof. Phillips teaches numerous topics including leadership, leading and managing teams, decision making, negotiations, organizational change, and motivation. Professor Phillips’ research has been featured in numerous media outlets including the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine.com, Fortune.com, Working Women, The Globe and Mail, and The Mint. In 2011 Poets and Quants named Professor Phillips one of the Top 40 Business School Professors Under the Age of 40. Students say “Professor Katherine Phillips has an inclusive style that fosters continuous participation in class. She has a way of involving students in the discussion of cutting-edge concepts from her research and expertise that makes you feel like you are being part of something novel and unique. She was the best introduction I could possibly have to business school.”

Papers: “Heterogeneity or Minority Representation? Perceptions of Racial/Ethnic Diversity”

“Without Inclusion, Racial Bias Blocks Learning”

Columbia University

David Stark

David Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University where he directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He is also Professor of Social Science at the University of Warwick. Stark uses a variety of methods to study problems of valuation, innovation, and observation.

Stark is currently directing a major research project on Diversity and Performance: Networks of Cognition in Markets and Teams supported by a five-year Advanced Career Award from the European Research Council. The project studies the network properties of cognition as organizations face three challenges of detecting error, allocating attention, and organizing innovation. Stark also directs a series of international workshops on Performances of Value: Competition and Competitions Inside and Outside Markets supported by a grant from The Leverhulme Trust.

In his book, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton University Press, 2009), Stark carried out ethnographic research in three distinct settings to study how organizations and their members search for what is valuable. Dissonance – disagreement about the principles of worth – can lead to discovery. He recently co-edited Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance (Oxford University Press, 2015).

With continuous support from the National Sciences Foundation since 2000, Stark and his collaborators are contributing to the field of economic sociology. With Balazs Vedres he has published papers on historical and cultural network analysis in the American Journal of Sociology 2006, 2010, and 2015) and the American Sociological Review 2012). With ethnographer Daniel Beunza he has contributed to the social studies of finance. With Co-PI Matteo Prato, Stark is working at the intersection of observation theory and network analysis to study how valuation is shaped by networks of attention.

With Sheen Levine, he used experimental methods for a study, “Ethnic Diversity Deflates Price Bubbles” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and “Diversity Makes you Brighter” (an OpEd piece in the New York Times).

Stark collaborated with art photographer Nancy Warner to publish This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Stark was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the École normale supérieure de Cachan in 2013. He has been a visiting fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto; the Institute for Advanced Study in Hangzhou, China; the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne; the Copenhagen Business School; the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study; the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City; the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, UK; the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; the European University Institute in Florence; the Institute for Advanced Study/Collegium Budapest; the Center for the Social Sciences in Berlin; and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

“The Importance of Gender Congruence in Corporate Social Responsibility: Field Experimental Evidence of Applicant Interest”

“Paying to Cross the Gender Gap”

Columbia University

David Stark

Stark collaborated with art photographer Nancy Warner to publish This Place, These People: Life and Shadow on the Great Plains (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Events in the Networks

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

Author Meet Critics: Capitalism. A Conversation in Critical Theory by Nancy Fraser

Author: Nancy Fraser

Moderator: Lara Monticelli

Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti (Documentary screening and discussion)

The alternatives to capitalism research network cordially invites you to a special screening of a new documentary by Dario Azzellini (Cornell) and Oliver Ressler, titled Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti (2018, 34 min.).<The screening will be followed by a discussion with Dario Azzellini

Filmmakers: Dario Azzellini, Oliver Ressler

Cornell University

Dario Azzellini

Dario Azzellini holds a PhD in political science from the Goethe University Frankfurt and a PhD in sociology from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico). His research focuses on worker’s self-management and local self-administration, social movements and commons, with a special focus on Latin America and Europe. He was assistant professor for development sociology and political sociology at Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria, and visiting fellow at the CUNY graduate center, the CUNY Murphy Institute and at the ILR School, Cornell University. He has published several books, book chapters and journal articles on workers’ self-management. He authored Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill 2017). He also co-authored They Can’t Represent Us. Reinventing Democracy From Greece to Occupy (Verso 2014). He is co-editor of The Class Strikes Back. Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century (Brill 2018) and Ours to Master and to Own: Worker Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011), and the editor of An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy (Zed Books 2015). As documentary filmmaker he has been filming in Latin America and Europe. Together with Oliver Ressler he is producing Occupy, Resist, Produce, a series of documentaries on recuperated factories under workers control in Europe.

My overarching research program is comprised of three interconnected areas: a) new forms of workers’ self-organization and collective responses to precarious work conditions including self-management and control; b) local self-government, participatory and direct democracy; and c) new social movements. I consider these three areas to be closely interrelated practices of non-state-centered social transformation. My research in these areas deals with democracy, ecology, labor processes, social justice, the commons, local development, utopia and other relevant subjects in this context of social transformation. Geographically my focus has been Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe; I am, however, expanding my research globally. I describe my work as critical political economy, in the sense that I adopt a materialist conception of history. I collaborate with researchers and actors from across the social and natural sciences, as well as with artists and social movements. Methodologically, I combine theory and empirical evidence with extensive field research, in which I employ a variety of sociological, anthropological and ethnographic research methods. My goal as a researcher is to provide rigorous and complex scholarly analysis that can have an impact both in academia and in public debate.

I pursue an approach that can broadly be defined as public sociology. I disseminate my research findings beyond the academic community in an effort to inform policy and problem-solving strategies. This manifests through: 1) sharing research findings with the groups, sectors and countries that are immediately affected by them and publishing in the relevant language (e.g. workers, social movements and communities); 2) I disseminate my research findings through articles and books accessible to the general public and, especially, through documentary films (which are shown internationally); 3) I collaborate with and provide consulting to institutions, policymakers, political organizations, NGOs and social movements. Also, in cooperation with researchers and activists around the globe, I maintain a multilingual public website on workers’ self-management.

Moderator: Torsten Geelan

Innovating Community: Connections via the Arts and Economic Exchanges: Perspectives from NYC Practitioners

Moderator: Joseph van der Naald

Presenters: Ian Campbell, David Koren, Gytis Simaitis, Greg Stanger, and Ariel Willmott

Worker Cooperatives and the Labor Movement: A Co-op Development Initiative in the Nation’s Largest Union Local – Roundtable

Discussants: Sanjay Pinto, Shaywaal Amin, Yvonne Armstrong, Janice Dabney, Alethia Jones, Mike Shay, and J. Phillip Thompson

NYC Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives

J. Phillip Thompson

Appointed Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives in February 2018, Deputy Mayor Thompson is responsible for spearheading a diverse collection of priority initiatives.

He oversees New York City’s signature Pre-K for All program, which provides free, high-quality pre-kindergarten to 70,000 four-year olds each year, and the continued expansion of the nation’s first-ever 3-K for All. He will also ensure the continued success of the Community Schools and Young Men’s Initiatives and ThriveNYC, the nation’s most comprehensive approach to mental health.

Additionally, the Deputy Mayor has been charged with expanding the city’s investment in minority and women-owned businesses, leading the Mayor’s comprehensive strategy to encourage greater voter participation and improve the way the city carries out elections, DemocracyNYC.

Deputy Mayor Thompson’s agency portfolio includes the Department of Youth and Community Development; the Department of Small Business Services; the Commission on Human Rights; the Department of Veterans’ Services; the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs; the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities; the NYC Public Engagement Unit; and the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development.

Prior to joining the de Blasio administration, the Deputy Mayor was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His courses – which married his real-world experience and cutting-edge research – covered a wide range of subject matter, including housing and economic development, urban politics, post-disaster planning, social movements, and race and ethnicity in American Politics, among many other areas. Deputy Mayor Thompson is the author of Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Struggle for Deep Democracy published in 2006 by Oxford University Press. He has also written and worked expansively on community health planning, the future of labor unions, race and community development, social capital in public housing, and the politics of black economic advancement.

Deputy Mayor Thompson has an extensive background in New York City Government. In 2003 and 2010 he served as an expert on the NYC Charter Revision Commission, and before that served in the Dinkins Administration as the Deputy General Manager for Operations and Development, where his portfolio included the New York City Housing Authority. Before that he had roles as the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing Coordination as well as the Mayor’s Liaison to the NYC Districting Commission. He also served previously in the Manhattan Borough President’s Office as an advisor and assistant to the chief of staff.

The Deputy Mayor’s policy experience is not limited to local and regional government – he has worked on a number of global projects to promote peace, reduce inequality, and build greater environmental sustainability. In support of the Colombian peace process, he worked closely with Colombian Ministry of Environment and local stakeholders to create sustainable environmental and community development programs. In 2010, he also worked with the Haitian government on post-earthquake housing planning and design. Before that he worked with the City of New Orleans on their post-disaster training and the City of Cleveland on innovative economic development solutions.

Deputy Mayor Thompson received a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University in 1977, a Masters in Urban Planning from Hunter College in 1986, and a PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1990.

**Author Meet Critics: The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara**

Author: Bhaskar Sunkara

Moderator: Torsten Geelan

Critics: TBC

Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

Network Conference on Regulatory Arbitrage

Regulatory Arbitrage (I): Law, Finance, and Shadow Banking

Moderator: Reuven Avi-Yonah

Paper Presenters: Vincenzo Bavoso, Camelia Bogdan, Katja Langenbucher, Evgenia Ralli, and Catalin Stanescu

University of Florida

Camelia Bogdan

Camelia Bogdan is an experienced Bucharest Court of Appeals judge who specializes in countering economic crime and asset recovery. In her capacity as expert of the European Commission, she has participated in more than 40 international conferences or training sessions of the law enforcement agents, and has been invited or recommended by international institutions such as the World Bank, the European Commission, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (formerly known as the European Office for Harmonizing the Internal Market).

She is also associated researcher with the Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Humaines et Sociales de Bucarest (CEREFREA–Villa Noël), representing her fellows in the Scientific Council. The results of her academic activity include 2 monographs, one PhD thesis, two guides for the Romanian magistrates on countering money laundering and financial investigations of transnational organized crime activities, more than 100 judicial studies published in law reviews and papers presented at conferences and colloquiums. In 2009, Camelia Bogdan was awarded a PhD in Criminal Law from the Bucharest University, Faculty of Law, for her thesis titled “Countering Money Laundering of the Proceeds Derived from Organized Crime Activities, in the light of Domestic and International Regulations.” She is currently working towards a new PhD under joint supervision by Bucharest University and Strasbourg University. Her thesis title is “AssetRecovery of the Proceeds of Crime in French and Romanian Criminal Trial.” Camelia Bogdan also graduated the European College of Financial Investigations and Analysis of Financial Crimes (C.E.I.FA.C.) third training session and as a result of that, she holds an LLM from Strasbourg University for her dissertation “Judicial Investigations During Trial.”

Between December 2016 and January 2018, Camelia Bogdan has been a visiting fellow affiliated with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London and the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law from Lausanne. In 2018, she received the Fulbright Senior Award for Visiting Scholars and she is currently affiliated with the Center for International Financial Crimes at the Levin College of Law, University of Florida. Her research focuses on Fostering Efficacy in the Asset Recovery of Proceeds of Transnational Corruption. In 2019, she received the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award, which aims to support individuals around the world who are working on behalf of democracy as activists or intellectuals, whether they are in exile from repressive regimes or operating within emerging democracies.

Camelia Bogdan was twice expelled from the Romanian judiciary. First, on 8 February 2017, the Judicial Section of the Superior Council of the Judiciary accused her of cumulating functions and conflict of interest. She won at the Supreme Court, but the C5 panel decided that she should be removed for 6 months at Târgu Mureș Court of Appeal, in order to serve a disciplinary sanction, beginning on 15 January, 2018. She was expelled for the second time in April 2018, allegedly because she would have infringed the principle of repartition aleatoire. Her case is currently pending at the Supreme Court.

Regulatory Arbitrage (II): Accounting, Law, and Leases

Discussant: Shyam Sunder

Paper Presenters: Jan Friedrich, Tessa Kunkel, Shyam Sunder, and Matthias Thiemann

Maps

Sessions this year will take place over four buildings:

University Center (Building U), located at 63 5th Ave. (east side of 5^th, between E. 13^thSt. and E. 14^thSt.)
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (Building B), located at 65 W 11th St. (north side of E. 11^th, between 5^th and 6^thAve.)
Albert and Vera List Academic Center (Building D), located at 6 E 16th St. (south side of E. 16^th, between 5^thAve. and Union Square West)
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall (Building A), located at 66 W 12th St. (south side of W. 12^th, between 5^thAve. and 6^thAve.)

Gala Reception at Columbia University

This year’s Gala Soirée is generously hosted by the Columbia Univeristy Department of Sociology on Friday, June 28^th. In order to get to the Gala, located in the Roone Arledge Auditorium of Alfred Lerner Hall (2920 Broadway, between W 114^thSt. and W 115^thSt.) from The New School, take the 1 train from the 14^thSt. Station on 7^thAvenue uptown to the 116^thSt. station.

Online Program

The online program is available to be consulted, here.

While you are on this page, please take note of the important information below:

SASE has gone fully digital this year! There will be no print programs available. Instead, you can find the conference program:
- - At sase.org (In PDF format here – SASE New York Program (2019) and SASE Addendum New York)
  - At https://sase.confex.com/sase/2019/meetingapp.cgi (as a searchable online program, linked above)
  - And as a mobile app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play (by searching SASE 2019).
Please note that you must bring your own laptop if you plan on using a PowerPoint presentation (MAC users should also bring a standard VGA converter and PC users should bring a VGA to HDMI converter if needed for your computer).
Of the three buildings in which sessions will be taking place, two have rather small and slow elevators. We strongly suggest that you factor in the likelihood of elevator traffic when calculating your travel time between sessions.

The New School Art Tour

SASE is honored and delighted to have The New School offer art tours with Silvia Rocciolo, the University Art Collection Curator. She will give SASE conference attendees a 75-minute tour of the art collection at The New School. There will be 2 tours – one on Thursday, June 27 at 12 noon and one on Friday, June 28 at 12 noon. There will be a maximum of 25 persons accepted in each group, which will be on a first come basis. If you would like to participate, come to the registration desk to meet up with Silvia. Further information regarding the art collection here: https://www.newschool.edu/university-art-collection/

2019 – New York

Fathomless Futures: Algorithmic and Imagined

Mini-Conference Themes

Algorithmic Prediction vs. Shared Uncertainty: Social Consequences of Individualized Forecast

Building the Present at the Expense of the Future? Market Liberalization and the Future of Democracy

Digitalization, Geographies of Production and Varieties of Digitized Capitalism

Digitalizing and Fragmenting Labor: What Changes for (In)Equality and Diversity?

Economic Futures in the Public Sphere

Economic Volatility of Our Age, in Theory and Evidence

Evaluating Futures, Evaluating Future-makers

Fathomless Ecologies: The Utopia of Green Finance, the Dystopia of a Financialized Planet, and the Re-imagination of the Socio-Economic Sphere

Finance after the Financial Crisis

Futures and Visions of Global Orders

Global Value Chains Analysis: Past, Present, and the Future

O: Global Value Chains

Network O

Makers' Worlds: Beyond All the Borders

Out of Sync: Disordered Temporalities and Temporal Conflicts in Contemporary Capitalism

Possible Worlds: Practice, Ethics, Hope, and Distress

Socio-Economic and Political Transformations in Ibero-America: Where Are We Heading?

M: the Spanish Language Network

Socio-Economics Revisited: Economic Sociology Meets Heterodox Economics

The Future of Algorithmic Inequalities and Organizational Dynamics

Veblen Seen Anew: Power, Social Class, and the New Economy

Work and the Feeling of the Future

Networks

Author Meets Critics

FEATURED AUTHOR-MEETS-CRITICS SESSIONS

The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination – Jenny Andersson

Oxford University Press, 2018

Disembedded Markets: Economic Theology and Global Capitalism – Christoph Deutschmann

Routledge, 2019

NETWORK AUTHOR-MEETS-CRITICS SESSIONS

Network B: Globalization and Socio-Economic Development

Good Governance Gone Bad: How Nordic Adaptability Leads to Excess – Darius Ornston

Cornell University Press, 2018

Network E: Political Economy of Industrial Relations and Welfare States

Social Democratic Capitalism – Lane Kenworthy

Oxford University Press, 2019 (forthcoming)

Network E: Political Economy of Industrial Relations and Welfare States

Strong Governments, Precarious Workers: Labor Market Policy in the Era of Liberalization – Philip Rathgeb

Cornell University Press, 2018

Network H: Markets, Firms, and Institutions

Collaborative Capitalism in American Cities: Reforming Urban Market Regulations – Rashmi Dyal-Chand

Cambridge University Press, 2018

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

Documentary Screening and Discussion

Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti – Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler

The Alternatives to Capitalism Research Network cordially invites you to a special screening of a new documentary by Dario Azzellini (Cornell) and Oliver Ressler, titled Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti (2018, 34 min.). The screening will be followed by a discussion with Dario Azzellini.

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

Capitalism. A Conversation in Critical Theory – Nancy Fraser

Polity Press, 2018

Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality – Bhaskar Sunkara

Basic Books, 2019

Network J: Digital Economy

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor – Virginia Eubanks

St. Martin’s Press, 2018

Network N: Finance and Society

The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich – Cristobal Young

Stanford University Press, 2017

Network N: Finance and Society

Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats? – Ekaterina Svetlova

Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018

Network O: Global Value Chains

Global Value Chains and Development: Redefining the Contours of 21st Century Capitalism – Gary Gereffi

Cambridge University Press, 2018

Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff – Edward Balleisen

Princeton University Press, 2017

Routledge, 2017

Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law

Economic Transplants: On Lawmaking for Corporations and Capital Markets – Katja Langenbucher

Cambridge University Press, 2017

Network Q: Asian Capitalisms

Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia – Kathryn Ibata-Arens

Stanford University Press, 2019

Network Q: Asian Capitalisms

China’s Capitalism. A Paradoxical Route to Economic Prosperity – Tobias ten Brink

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

The Alternatives to Capitalism Research Network cordially invites you to a special screening of a new documentary by Dario Azzellini (Cornell) and Oliver Ressler, titled Occupy, Resist, Produce – Scop Ti (2018, 34 min.).
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Dario Azzellini.