For many observers, the activist government responses to the spread of Covid-19 represented a radical break from the dominant paradigms of economic management and the role of the state: neoliberal orthodoxies on ever-expanding markets, limited state intervention and individual self- reliance were jettisoned as policymakers used the power of the state to oversee large social assistance and economic support packages. Academics have pointed to how the failures of neoliberalism—hollowed-out state capacity and widening socio-economic inequalities— exacerbated the impact of the pandemic and thoroughly discredited this policy paradigm, while Financial Times editorials quickly heralded the emergence of a ‘post-neoliberal order’.

This is not the first time that neoliberalism has been pronounced dead or dying. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, there was no shortage of commentary on the imminent collapse of the neoliberal order (e.g., Stiglitz, 2008; Wallerstein, 2008). But over the subsequent decade, social scientists comprehensively documented that this was not the case. For example, the crisis had long-lasting adverse effects on employment, and sparked a renewed assault on state intervention through austerity and privatization. Will this time be different?

This mini-conference seeks to interrogate the shifting ground of ongoing post-neoliberal transformations. In doing so, we do not treat post-neoliberalism as a rigid temporal demarcation signifying the end of the neoliberal era. Instead, we use the term to refer to the ongoing (re)orderings of political economies across the world: this is not necessarily done in opposition to the neoliberal paradigm, but in interaction with it. Given the neoliberal dominance of the past decades, ongoing transformations occur in necessary dialogue with the ideological, political and policy infrastructures of this ‘always mutating’ paradigm (Peck and Theodore, 2019). In the Global North, attempts to enact post-neoliberal policy programs are most advanced, but they have often taken reactionary forms (Davies, 2021) or been co-opted by corporate and financial interests (Braun, 2021). In the Global South, there is diversity of policy responses to the crises of neoliberalism, and ongoing efforts to change the mode of integration into global value chains are eliciting resistance from guardians of economic orthodoxy like the World Bank (Bair et al., 2021). And China does not fit neatly in the neoliberalism/post-neoliberalism spectrum (Slobodian, 2022).

This mini-conference hopes to encourage empirical attempts to capture the broad contours of post-neoliberal transformations, including attention to their intellectual, bureaucratic and political aspects, as well as place them in their broader historical context. How have countries or regions sought to move beyond the neoliberal paradigm, how have they succeeded or failed, and why? How have global processes shaped the possibilities for post-neoliberal alternatives? How do social movements and political forces across the ideological spectrum relate to the neoliberal order and its potential overhaul? What are the intellectual underpinnings of ongoing political-economic transformations? What parallels can be drawn from past attempts at fundamental paradigm change? Submissions that approach these questions through innovative theoretical and empirical work across a range of disciplines (including political science, sociology, history, public policy, geography, and economics) are welcome.

Potential topics on post-neoliberal transformations that submissions could explore are as follows:

• Domestic dimensions: The changing role of central banks in managing global crises; The role of state intervention and industrial policies; Policies to combat climate change and their relationship to neoliberalism; Changes in (post)neoliberal labor practices; The politics of inflation management
• Transnational dimensions: The role of South-South economic relationships, commodity cartels, or return of non-alignment; Precedents for “friendshoring” or repatriation of supply chains; Transnational labor and social movement responses to a changing political economy
• Global governance dimensions: The role of China in the emerging global economic model; The shifting politics of austerity in International Financial Institutions; The emergence of new global organizational actors; The impact of geopolitical tensions on shifting economic models; Reforms to the contemporary international institutional framework; The role of regional blocks and regionalism.

During the last decade, the world order has been undergoing massive transformations across  multiple levels. Those processes of change were manifested in domestic political transformation  as well as in global restructuring of institutions and hierarchies. To make sense of these  developments it is essential to connect the dots between the global and national trends. Our mini-conference seeks to attract cutting-edge contributions that address those linkages. 

The world order is shaped by multi-dimensional dynamics, which are observable at the domestic  and the international levels. On the international level, the world is going through transitions via  rearrangement of international organization structures, institutional and regime changes, as well  as through a reformation of global hierarchies. The changes on the international level influence  domestic processes in the form of economic regime changes, rise of new ideologies and the  formation of new types of political coalitions. At the same time, the transformations at the domestic  level – particularly in large economies and powerful states – can have important repercussions on  the international level via feedback effects. 

For the community of scholars in Socio-Economics, these transitions lead to particular challenges  with regard to the internal structure of the discipline. Primarily, any systematic study of the  economic aspects of a changing world order requires a deeper understanding of the interactions  and linkages between International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy  (CPE). International organizations, institutions, regimes and structures–which are usually studied  by IPE scholars—are affected and shaped by domestic actors; but at the same time, they affect and  shape domestic economic regimes. Therefore, connecting the dots between IPE and CPE is  essential both to understanding the transitional world order and to further our understanding of  comparative capitalism.  

In line with these considerations, this mini-conference will invite theoretical and empirical  contributions that bring together the CPE and IPE approaches to understand contemporary  capitalist societies, global capitalism, and the changes they have been going through. This also  calls for a careful analysis of the transnational relations between national units as well, a crucial  aspect that tends to be forgotten in the often too strict sharing of tasks between the two sub-disciplines that either focus on the intergovernmental/global level or on the comparison of national  models. Correspondingly, we highlight three core study areas to carefully identify the new  contours of the new global economic order: national capitalism, transnational economic relations and global institutions. A more nuanced focus on the complex state of the global economy is  evermore important to understand the novel challenges to the current world order. For example,  overlooking the role of international finance when researching the ‘authoritarian turn’ in many  countries will provide only a partial understanding about this issue. Similarly, the dynamics of  international migration, national capitalist structures, security, and domestic politics cannot be  studied in isolation from one another.

Given the broader focus of our mini-conference on the global level, we believe it is also necessary  to study global capitalism from the perspective of the periphery and the semi-periphery. This  implies that growth models and capitalist systems in the South must not be studied as unsuccessful  attempts to emulate growth strategies in the North, but rather as strategies designed to address their  subordinated position in global capitalism. Therefore, our mini-conference will put a special  emphasis on the late industrialising countries —both middle-income and low-income countries— which have experienced industrialisation and global integration at very different stages but are  increasingly playing a key role in the global political and economic system. This is not only  because of the growing size of their economies, which is the case for most of the BRICS, but also  their crucial place shaping the global movement of goods, services, finance, and people. For  instance, late industrialisers including Turkey, Colombia and Pakistan currently host the largest  number of refugees worldwide, putting these countries in a critical position for not only domestic political relations but also their capitalist structures and transnational relations. 

With this focus, the mini-conference will invite contributions on national capitalism, transnational  political and economic relations, and global institutions to better understand the current and  changing capitalist world order. This can include – but is not limited to – investment, trade, finance  and migration flows, linkages between multilateral institutions and national capitalist systems, and  interactions between different capitalist societies. We are especially welcoming studies that focus  on underrepresented geographic regions in CPE and IPE, and the communities that are increasingly  networked with the Global. More specifically, the papers in this mini-conference will address one  or more of these questions: 

• To what extent do new financial challenges under a changing world order shape economic  growth and inequalities under national capitalist regimes? 
• How do historical differences in the financialization experiences of national capitalist  systems affect current trends in global financial flows? 
• To what extent do varying types of trade and investment agreements, multilateral  institutions and international regimes shape national economic systems? 
• How do variations of national economic systems affect multilateral organisations and/or  international agreements (e.g., in the field of trade and investment)? 
• How are the current global dynamics, such as digitisation and international migration, affecting the national labour institutions, labour markets, and labour movements?
• How do variations in rapidly evolving security conditions affect national capitalist  systems? 
• How do recent challenges to the working of national capitalist systems (e.g. Coronavirus,  supply-chain crisis, war in Ukraine…) affect global security architecture? 
• How do novel challenges to the global flows of goods/services and investment (including  commodity cycles) influence national capitalist systems and vice versa?

Rapid technological innovation and the increasing adoption of digital technologies are transforming  productive sectors, especially manufacturing industries, into smarter production systems. In low- and  middle-income countries, the application of advanced digital technologies is renewing prospects for technological catch-up and sustainable structural transformation. Indeed, digitalisation is an essential  component of green industrialisation and renewable energy. At the same time, these digital  transformations are also creating new divides among firms at the local level and along global value chains.  Digitalisation is indeed highly unequal and poses new developmental challenges. Mounting pressure on  upgrading workers’ skills and new forms of compression on workers and employment are examples.  Understanding these emerging dynamics of transformation and how to govern digitalisation towards  inclusive and sustainable structural transformation is central to this mini-conference. 

In middle-income countries, structural transformation has been stifled by the middle-income trap,  middle-income technology trap, and premature deindustrialisation (Andreoni and Tregenna, 2020). The  modernisation of industrial processes through the application of digital production technologies and  processes is a critical breaking point away from these traps and vicious cycles. The emerging literature  analysing digital production technology adoption in middle-income countries, largely based on firm-level  surveys reveals that the adoption of digital technologies is occurring in firms but at an uneven speed and  scale with only few manufacturing firms and industries integrating advanced technologies and processes  into their production processes (IEL, 2018; Albrieu, et al. 2019; Ferraz et al., 2019; UNIDO, 2019; Ferraz et  al., 2020; Delera et al., 2022; Avenyo et al., 2022; Avenyo and Bell, 2022). In addition, the emerging ‘islands  of success’ are impacting firms, industries, and countries differently (Andreoni, et al., 2021a). The  uncertainty around the immediate benefits and risks associated with advanced digital technologies uptake  is also discouraging aggressive investments (Andreoni, et al., 2021b). Hence, the digital transformation  process and its gains may not lead to the expected disruptive transformation and may even be elusive in  middle-income countries (Ferraz et al., 2019; Delera et al., 2022). 

To advance the adoption of digital technologies and unlock the benefits of digital industrialization  for industrial development, countries require a minimum base of digital skills and capabilities (UNIDO,  2019; Kupfer et al., 2019). That is, firms are required to possess a certain level of foundational capabilities (Andreoni et al., 2021b). The accumulation and the development of foundational capabilities and skills  determine a country’s readiness to embrace digital technologies, and positions firms to exploit the  potential gains and benefits from the digital transformation. The evidence on the adoption and diffusion  of digital technologies and the building of digital skill competencies in middle-income countries remain  limited and anecdotal. The foregoing suggests that several conceptual issues and questions on the  adoption and successful application of advanced digital production technologies and building of  competencies in middle-income countries remain answered.  

The following is a preliminary list of questions that this mini-conference would like contributors to address:

1. What are the key opportunities and challenges firms in middle-income economies face in  adopting and adapting advanced digital technologies? 
2. How do firms and their workers learn to digitalise?  
3. How do digital technologies impact workers? 
4. What digital skill competencies and foundational capabilities are crucial prerequisites for  sustainable and inclusive structural transformation in late industrialising economies?
5. How digital technologies can contribute to green industrialisation in middle-income countries?
6. What policies and institutions are needed to direct and govern digitalisation in middle-income countries? 

These issues are not posed in other related SASE networks. Given that digitalisation is ubiquitous, new  thinking based on firm and industry case studies is needed for evidence-based policy response to these  questions. The SASE 2023 mini-conference is aimed at bringing together and consolidating the scant  research on these issues, particularly from a middle-income point of view. The mini-conference would reflect and discuss issues around what is needed for digital technology- and digital skills-driven industrialisation and structural transformation agenda in middle-income countries. This is critical for  appropriate policy response. The mini-conference will also solicite research covering issues around digital  leadership enablers and how this influences employment creation patterns in middle-income countries;  the emerging differences and consolidation of public policies for digitalisation; role of digitalisation in  enabling countries to mitigate and to reduce carbon footprints as countries aspire to industrialise  sustainably; and finally, set an agenda to develop a research network on digital industrialisation and  economic production and its related issues in middle-income countries. 

References 

Albrieu, R., Ferraz, J. C., Rapett, M., Brest Lopez, C., Nogueira de Paiva Britto, J., Kupfer, D. and Torracca, J., (2019). The Adoption  of Digital Technologies in Developing Countries. Vienna: United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Andreoni, A, & Tregenna, F 2020. Escaping the middle-income technology trap: A comparative analysis of industrial policies in  China, Brazil and South Africa. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 54, 324–340. 

Andreoni, A., Barnes, J., Black, A. and Sturgeon, T., (2021a). Digitalization, industrialization, and skills development: Opportunities  and challenges for middle-income countries. : A. Andreoni, P. Mondliwa, S. Roberts & F. Tregenna, Hrsg. Structural  transformation in South Africa, Oxford:Oxford University Press. 

Andreoni, A., Chang, H. J., & Labrunie, M. (2021b). Natura non facit saltus: Challenges and opportunities for digital  industrialisation across developing countries. The European Journal of Development Research, 33(2), 330-370. Avenyo, E.K., Bell, J.F. and Nyamwena, J. (2022). Determinants of digital technologies’ adoption in South African manufacturing:  Evidence from a firm-level survey. CCRED-IDTT Working Paper 2022/02: Johannesburg. 

Avenyo, E.K and Bell, J. (2022). Disruptive Technologies and Manufacturing Performance in South Africa: Firm-Level Evidence. The  African Economic Research Consortium Working Paper 2022/004: Nairobi. 

Delera M, Pietrobelli C, Calza E, Lavopa A. 2022. Does value chain participation facilitate the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies  in developing countries? World Development. 152:105788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105788 Ferraz, J. C., D. Kupfer, J. Torracca, and J. N. P. Britto (2019). ‘Snapshots of a state of flux: how Brazilian industrial firms differ in  

the adoption of digital technologies and policy implications.’ Journal of Economic Policy Reform 23(4): 390–407,  Ferraz, J.C. 2021. Chasing the rainbow: towards an experimental framework for the assessment of digitalisation at firm level. IE UFRJ DISCUSSION PAPER: TD 040; Instituto de Economia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro 

IEL (2018). Indústria 2027: Riscos e oportunidades para o Brasil diante de inovações disruptivas. Brasilia: IEL.  www.portaldaindustria.com.br/cni/canais/industria-2027. 

Kupfer, D., Ferraz, J. C. and Torracca, J., 2019. A Comparative Analysis on Digitalization in Industry in Selected Developing  Countries: Firm Level Data on Industry 4.0. Background paper prepared for the Industrial Development Report 2020.  Vienna: United Nations Industrial Development Organization. 

UNIDO (2019). ‘Industrializing in the digital age.’ Industrial development report. Vienna: UNIDO.

Governance of disruptions and building new resilient models in moments of uncertainty and change entails  recasting the future and formulating new trajectories for social, economic, and political regimes. Moments  of destabilization in which incumbent conceptions of the future are destabilized and new ones proliferate  and compete with one another have been unfolding in the last two decades in cascades. The global financial  crisis of 2008-9, for instance, gave rise to a recomposition and reformulation of financial risks, of the role  of finance in the political economy, and of the scope and legitimacy of central bank action in the economy.  The refugee crisis of 2015-2016 projected spatial encounters and infrastructures around various new  conceptions of future mobility, sovereignty and citizenship. The COVID-19 pandemic, similarly, generated  a variety of projections for global health and health policy (resting in part on new technical imaginaries)  along with various forms of distrust for expert knowledge. Finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has  given rise to complex and tragic imaginaries of risk, destabilization, strategic uncertainty and nuclear and  environmental catastrophe.  

These kinds of transitional states generate alternative paradigms for the future, projections of order and  practice that invariably recompose the relational and institutional world as we know it. The future is the  crucial space of contestation for all of these projections and new imaginings. Learning, experimentation  and failure are central institutions, practices and events in our analytic purview. The mini-conference serves  as an occasion for economic sociologists, political economists and social theorists, and those involved in  critical failure and ignorance studies to come together to explore points of compatibility, complementarity  and difference in the way in which they theorize the construction of relationships between the past, present  and future in the contemporary world. The shared analytical frame is that the future is more than simply a  temporal “not yet”, but instead is understood to be a globally heterogeneous site of projection, contestation,  learning, failure and strategic ignorance.  

The mini-conference is open to a broad array of possible contributions, ranging from highly abstract social  theoretical discussions of action, uncertainty, risk and change, to central problems in economic sociology  and political economy concerning institutional and strategic change, learning, failure, democratic  backsliding and expansion, environmental crisis and identity challenges and struggles of all kinds. We are interested in theoretically unraveling how the future in the transitioning and broadly self-recomposing  world is constituted. What is publicly at stake and what is tacitly put on hold? How are bridges from the  present to the future imagined and constructed? Are futures unitary? Can they ever be “real” or are futures  always narratives of the not yet? Traditionally, the mini-conference has had a strong interest in the  processes that drive economic and political utopias and dystopias. But most broadly we are interested in  the way in which the future emerges in all of its multiplicity of fracture, failure, success, hopefulness and  cynicism.

The current transitions and breakdown of the economic order call for attention to how elites, as engineers and operators of this order, are promoting or responding to the disruptions caused by climate change, economic crises, pandemics and digitalization, notwithstanding their own role in the creating and acceleration of these transformations. 

As democracy is being challenged by both authoritarianism and the hollowing out of democratic institutions, the role played by elites both within and outside these institutions – and the relations between their strategies of action – merits further scholarly scrutiny. As the growth models and the legitimacy behind elite coalitions are challenged, new elite constellations and their responses to legitimacy crises need to be charted. Therefore, the different hegemonic projects of various elites still need to be studied to understand their contribution to the persistence of neoliberalism and to the stability of the socio-economic configurations. 

In short, to address the most pressing problems of the current socio-economic order, we need to know more about the elites who play a pivotal role in it. Therefore, this mini-conference invites scholars who want to contribute in the discussion on how elites compete and cooperate to influence this order, on how they react to pressures and demands from below, how they articulate different publics in support of their projects, and how they address major societal challenges. More specifically, we call for new scholarship interested in researching power elites, that is, groups positioned at the top of key institutional orders (Mills 1956, Bourdieu 1989). In particular, we encourage contributions that investigate elites who play a key role in governing the economy, be that through positions in large corporations, think tanks, or in institutions that shape the rules of the game, like governmental agencies and regulatory bodies. 

The study of elites is already a buoyant research area. Fifteen years ago, Savage and Williams (2008) had stated that elites had been “forgotten in the social sciences”. Yet ever since, a vast literature has become available on economic, professional and cultural elites, and their intersections, in various national settings. This scholarship draws on a variety of methods and forms of data collection, such as prosopographies, archival data on taxes and ownership, analysis of elite networks and interlocks, geometric data analysis of elite groups, ethnography of elites, elite interviews and textual analysis of elite discourses. However, to a large extent this literature remains stuck in descriptions of particular cases, and mostly situated at the national level and/or restricted to the countries of the Global North. While this field has come to be a ‘rich and fast-growing terrain’ it still ‘gives us little capacity to make sense of the ways in which elites are influencing our world’ (Cousin et al., 2018: 226). 

Large scale comparative work on elites has surprisingly slowed since the early 1990s (Higley, Hoffmann-Lange, Kadushin & Moore 1991), with perhaps the exception of work focusing on the study of corporate interlocks (see e.g. Heemskerk et al. 2013, Cárdenas 2012). This means that the relation between different aspects of elites and larger changes in the political economy during the last three decades still remain understudied and under-theorized. This is a surprising lacunae because many heterodox economic perspectives offer ways to productively theorize how elites operate within organizations, how status is reproduced, and how they link up with one another. Furthermore, the availability of large new datasets available to researchers and the development and combinations of new qualitative and quantitative methods make the potential for integration and cross-fertilization of different approaches. While we need to develop both a theoretical frameworks and suitable methodologies to allow for meaningful comparisons, efforts to do so will enable elite research to engage with broader socio-economic scholarship. This includes scholarship linking heterodox economics to the study of elites, studies of gender, race and ethnicity, as well as the innovative use of new methodologies to study elites and elite power. 

The research questions relevant to understand the roles elites play in the current socio-economic order are many. It is important, for example, to examine if the power elites are becoming more integrated or more fragmented; to see how elites interact with experts and engage with expertise through think tanks or other ways to construct persuasive narratives to their claims; to understand the functioning of social institutions such as race and ethnicity among elites; to map out the relationships between established power elites and new political forces of anti-establishment parties; to assess how elites in the Global South and the North migrate and interact; to understand where and how their projects are assembled, how they mobilize social support, and how they fend off attacks on their legitimacy and exorbitant privilege 

This SASE mini-conference aims thus to open the dialogue on the above mentioned issues by inviting scholars to discuss and engage with the work on power elites in order to build a stronger comparative framework with deeper linkages to other research topics in political economy, economic sociology and related fields. We encourage contributions from adjacent fields, such as work on expertise, intellectuals, interest formation and advocacy. We anticipate that participants will present theoretical and empirical work on power elites, but will also be motivated to position their research in a comparative framework, to grasp how elite constellations coalesce into national and international power structures. This could include works addressing the relationship between elites and rising inequality, growing political discontent or the capability to adapt to a more ecologically sustainable economy. 

Furthermore, we hope this mini-conference will enable discussions on the wider scope of elite research, including the questions raised by classical traditions such as Marx, Weber, Mills, or Bourdieu. Specifically, we will enable discussions on the dynamics between elite groups and dominated classes , as well as contemporary contributions on democracy, technocracy, and technoscientific capitalism. Lastly, we hope these discussions can help to lay the ground for the recently initiated World Elite Database project (see Savage & Hjellbrekke 2021).

References: 

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. State Nobility – Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cárdenas, Julián. 2012. “Varieties of Corporate Networks: Network Analysis and FsQCA.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology53 (4): 298–322. 

Cousin, Bruno, Shamus Rahman Khan, and Ashley Mears. 2018. “Theoretical and Methodological Pathways for Research on Elites.” Socio-Economic Review 16 (2): 225–49.

Heemskerk, Eelke M., Fabio Daolio, and Marco Tomassini. 2013. “The Community Structure of the European Network of Interlocking Directorates 2005–2010.”PLoS ONE 8 (7): e68581.

Higley, John, Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, Charles Kadushin, and Gwen Moore. 1991. “Elite Integration in Stable Democracies: A Reconsideration.” European Sociological Review 7 (1): 35–53.

Mills, Charles Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Savage, Mike, and Johs Hjellbrekke. 2021. “The Sociology of Elites: A European Stocktaking and Call for Collaboration.” III Working Paper 58. London: LSE. 

Savage, Mike, and Karel Williams. 2008. “Elites: Remembered in Capitalism and Forgotten by Social Sciences.” The Sociological Review 56: 1–24.

The future of health and wellbeing for individuals and communities is at a turning point. From  pandemics, climate change, and social movements, to a reckoning over the current model of socio economic development: markets and societies around the world are transforming into new socio economic arrangements with profound implications for the future of health. At the same time, policy  actors, activists, and private interests are leading these transformations, prompting renewed urgency  for social scientific empirical analysis and grounded theorizing. For instance, social movements  centered around access to medicines have demanded that equity be the prime consideration in the  distribution of medicines, while activists have called for inclusion of patient perspectives in the  production of knowledge around disease conditions. Likewise, increased scrutiny over the model of  socio-economic development that prioritizes growth above all else has called into question the  marketization of healthcare that has become cost prohibitive to patients. 

Such global transformations have implications for all levels of economy and society. In anticipating  and preparing for a future for health, we must examine the international, state, and local level policies,  organizations, and practices that are leading these transformations. For example, we can look at how  policies around open innovation in the regulation and development of medicines help bring down the  costs of healthcare and make life-saving medicines accessible to the broader public. Similarly, we can  examine how health organizations and professions are creating new ways to engage with the  communities that they serve, as well as planning for resiliency for future shocks and disturbances.  Finally, we can also focus on the health practices of individuals and patients, as they strive for a  healthier future. As scholars of socio-economics, political economy and like-minded peers, we too  have a role to play in examining and charting this future for health. 

The MedHealth mini-conference convenes interdisciplinary panels around policies, organizations, and  practices that are impacting the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities amidst broader  social transformations. We will facilitate critical discussion and reflection on participants’ works-in progress. Some potential questions include: 

• Healthcare systems and health policies: Why are some healthcare systems more resilient than  others when facing social and economic shocks? What must be done to bridge the gap in equity  and access between the Global North and the Global South? How can healthcare systems better  prepare for future pandemics? What are some alternative health policies that can aid in the  reduction of healthcare costs?
• Healthcare organizations and professions: How have jurisdictional struggles between  healthcare professions produced alternative arrangements of healthcare? What are some of the  strategies that healthcare organizations have adopted to confront the challenges posed by social  and economic transformations? Why has mistrust in medical expertise increased in recent years,  and what can be done by medical experts to earn trust? 
• Medicines regulation and development: How has open innovation disrupted previous models of drug and treatment development? What alternatives are available for a more just and equitable  distribution of medicines? How can and should we regulate such boundary-spanning products as  probiotics and herbal medicinals? 
• Health practices: How have individuals and communities adapted their health practices in recent  years in response to broader social transformations? What are some strategies that patients and  publics have taken up to adapt to the rising costs of healthcare and medicines? Why have  complementary and alternative medicines become more popular amongst certain patient groups  and patient movements? 

The MedHealth mini-conference encourages submissions of papers exploring emerging frameworks  and theories, as well as empirically rich original data from around the world and at various levels of  analysis (e.g., local community, firm, state, multilateral institution). Scholars at all levels are welcome.  In the spirit of innovation and creativity, the panels will have an interactive workshop format around  discussant feedback and moderated audience participation. 

We will accept and review abstracts, extended abstracts, or full papers by the deadline for the call for  papers. We expect accepted participants to submit full papers by June 15.

This mini-conference, building upon the last three successful mini-conferences of the same name, welcomes papers investigating the fractious connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, and slavery and capitalist expansion and global development. While critical theories and studies of development have existed for decades, starting with Dependency/World-Systems theories and continuing through the “postdevelopment” approaches – manifested in the work of Escobar (1984) and Ferguson (1990) among others – newer “decolonial”, “postcolonial” and “Southern” approaches have emerged in their wake. These alternative paradigms have surfaced in a variety of fields and subfields, including comparative-historical sociology, social theory, political theory and comparative politics. Together they make explicit the Eurocentric, imperial/colonial and often racialized bases of Northern social science and seek critical alternatives, either by reconstructing historical narratives as “entangled” and “connected” or by discovering and critically deploying the knowledge, concepts and theories of postcolonial/Southern thinkers and social movements.

This proposed miniconference will continue to take stock of these recent critical turns and their implications for the study of development. Compared to earlier critical approaches, what if any is the added value of these paradigms for understanding social, political and economic development? What are the limits? What theories, concepts and research follow from the recognition of the decolonial/postcolonial critique of knowledge? Revisiting these questions has become particularly urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated racial inequalities and called into question current models of economic and political organization, control, and capitalist development. Theoretical, programmatic, or empirical papers are welcomed. Topics might include but are not restricted to:

• racial capitalism
• connections between imperialism and/or colonialism and development 
• connecting racialization and developmental projects
• subaltern resistance to Eurocentric development projects and racial capitalism
• the colonial gaze and the imperial episteme in development studies
• contentions within global academic inequality and epistemic inequality
• southern/subaltern knowledges, theories, and concepts
• decolonial developmental practices and knowledges in international organizations
• decolonial methods of research
• “imperial feedback” and the circulation of technologies and knowledges
• global health, COVID and postcolonial theory

This mini-conference would bring together current scholarship on the form and impact of recent socio-economic and political transformations in the configuration, functioning and effects of welfare states in the global south. There is a long and deep literature on advanced capitalist economies that has demonstrated just how critical the development of the welfare state has been in making capitalist economies more inclusive and less unequal. Part of that literature has also shown the ways in which welfare policies can also contribute to promoting long term economic dynamism. The literature has also underscored the highly varied forms and pathways of welfare states formation (and transformation) and how consequential these variations are to promoting justice and equity.

The study of the welfare state in the global south is still under development, in particular with regard to the systematic use of typologies used by the consolidated literature. There are an increasing number of case studies and country-based analyses, but comparative work, especially across continents, remains relatively underdeveloped. What we do know is that over the last two decades or so, many developing countries in East Asia, South Asia, Latin American and Africa have made significant strides in rolling out and expanding a wide variety of social programs and basic public goods, such as the ones highlighted in the literature on the so called Pink Tide in Latin America. These have departed from various historically constructed policy legacies and in many cases produced innovative programs and policies. These transformations are all the more remarkable because they took place in a context of a global neo-liberal economy, increasing precarity and inequalities, deindustrialization and under a wide range of regime types.  In many cases, the expansion of the welfare state has been driven by social movements and has taken the form of right-based claim making, while in others it has reinforced heritages of state corporatism. Similarly, while in some cases national systems enhanced vertical integration with increased social participation, in other cases transformations reinforced political centralization and even authoritarian tendencies. Therefore, it is clear that the forms and depth of the global south welfare state are highly varied.

From conditional cash transfer programs to new social insurance schemes for the informal sector, programs targeted at redressing gender and racial exclusions, experiments with basic income grants, new formats of public housing provision or urban service delivery, how the global south welfare state is developing is becoming a critical social science question. Understanding these new policies, their transformations and their impacts is critical to understanding the prospects for tackling inequality, social exclusion, racial and gender disparities and informality in the global south. This mini-conference is directly inspired by the theme of the conference.  The challenges of contemporary disruptions – climate change and environmental degradation, threats to democracy, challenges to social rights and the displacement of labor by new technologies – are all inextricably tied to the fate of the welfare state and its crucial role in managing disruptions and mediating the relationships between States and their societies.

The conference would focus on three interrelated questions all designed to promote comparative discussion and analysis. First, what form are the global south welfare states, and more broadly Social Protection Systems, taking? Moving beyond the classic categories of Esping-Anderson and later contributions from Southern Europe, how can we typologize the global south welfare state both within and across continents? What groups, sectors or categories do they target and are they driven by logics of poverty reduction, redistribution and/or rights enhancement?   Second, what has driven the expansion and transformation of welfare states?  Are these state driven projects from above, the result of redistributive party-based politics or a response to broad-based movements for social inclusion? What has been the role of politics in its multiple simultaneous levels (local, sub-national and national) in their formation and transformations? Third, what impact did the expansion and recent transformations of welfare states have on a range of possible outcomes including but not limited to inequality, precarity, social exclusion and the possibilities for more effective responses to climate change?  

In bringing together scholars who work on these questions across the global south our hope is that the conference can stimulate more comparative thinking and analysis.

Discussions about science and its role in modern societies were foundational to much of the heterogeneous, diverse, and stimulating community of scholars interested in socioeconomics. Central to these discussions was the role of the state in fostering both human capabilities in science and technology as well as systems of innovation aimed at demonstrable, scalable impacts on the economy and society. These traditions, found in both innovation economics, evolutionary approaches to innovation, institutional scholarship of entrepreneurship, organizational and industrial psychology, and a variety of other subdomains remains relevant until today.

Yet despite this strong history, discussions about the intersections of science, public policy, and the institutions where knowledge is constituted have lost steam. This is particularly true in regions like Latin America where science and technology policies have lost their position in both the academic and political landscape, having become a memory of a past geared towards a particular form of economic development. From Chile and Brazil to Colombia and Mexico, science policies are now under flux, requiring a renewed discussion about their shape, objectives, and limits.

In this mini conference, we seek to bring together scholars from across disciplinary fields to discuss science policies in Latin America. Taking advantage of the location of the conference, we seek to foster a discussion about the current state and future challenges of the science, technology, and innovation sectors in the region. But more than simply taking stock of where we stand, the mini conference seeks to be a space for rethinking some of the possible futures of science in Latin America during a time of ecological collapse, climate crises, and sociopolitical uncertainty. What kind of science do we have? And what kind of science may we need in confronting the challenges of the immediate future? 

We thus invite scholars interested in the following and related topics to contribute to our conversation:

• Science funding and evaluation and their effects on knowledge production
• Scientific careers in the context of austerity and precarity
• Epistemic and evaluative diversity
• Institutional ecologies of knowledge production and dissemination
• Structural constraints of innovation systems in the context of the climate crisis
• Rethinking scientific innovation policies for climate change and economic uncertainty
• Regional cooperation regimes
• Brain-drain and North-South responsibilities in technology transfer

In terms of informal activity, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. The dynamics observed in formal and informal markets differ from those observed in previous economic crises. Often, when formal activity falls, its informal counterpart plays a countercyclical role, and its level increases or at least decreases with less intensity. However, in this crisis, both formal and informal economic activity experienced a pronounced contraction, the latter more intense than the former. Mobility restrictions, a consequence of the sanitary nature of the crisis, prevented the development of informal activities, which are generally nourished by social interaction in population centres. For this reason, informal markets have not served as a corrective tool for the contraction of formal exchanges.  For its part, once the worst moments of the crisis have been overcome, the partial recovery of the economy has been driven by the growth of informality in the regions where this type of activity has a significant presence.

From this perspective, it should also be noted that, within informality, it is women, young people and people with lower qualifications who have been most affected by this contraction, given the unequal impact of the crisis on income and the effects of the economic recession on poverty levels.

To illustrate this global problem, we can use as a prime example the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the regions with the highest levels of informality. In 2020, this region recorded a contraction in the level of economic activity in the order of -7 per cent. This drop is more than double that of the world and is the largest of all regions. Most of the productive sectors dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises felt the impact of the crisis. And, according to ECLAC, no less than two million micro and small enterprises in the region have closed their doors for good. The drastic reduction in the level of activity had an impact on employment with an intensity also unprecedented in the region. The employment rate in 2020 fell by 10 per cent compared to the previous year, a steeper drop than GDP. The fall in the number of people employed at the onset of the economic crisis understates its impact to the extent that there was a simultaneous fall in the number of hours worked by those who remained employed. In some countries of the region, the reduction in hours doubles or triples the fall in employment.

In this scenario, it is necessary, even more than in the past, to adopt a comprehensive, consensual and far-reaching human-centred policy agenda to support the creation of more formal employment, protect micro and small enterprises, and guarantee income and social protection for workers and families in vulnerable conditions. Otherwise, in this perspective, we must take into account that the impacts of the crisis will be prolonged, deeper and longer lasting.

In this mini-conference, we intend to discuss the phenomenon of illegal and informal labor markets from different prisms and dimensions.

On the one hand, moving from the perspective that points to the topic of this XXXIV SASE Conference, an alternative paradigm for a new world order, we will try to interpret the phenomenon of informality, within the developing theoretical field of Socioeconomics. This requires a multidisciplinary effort between different areas of the field of Social Sciences to offer us alternative tools to the conventional models dominant in recent decades, to interpret this widespread phenomenon.

And, on the other hand, expanding the territory of empirical socioeconomic research, at both the micro and macro levels, on a phenomenon with effects as outstanding as they are ignored by the public authorities and conventional science.

Consequently, for the realization of this mini-conference, papers that fall within the following thematic areas will be considered:

1. Interpretative paradigms for socioeconomic informality.
2. Informality as an object of study. Cross-sectional analysis. Impacts of informality: economic, social, political, environmental, etc. Trends and prospects for the future of informality.
3. Trends in informal markets during the COVID-19 crisis. Recovery and uneven behaviour of formal and informal markets.
4. New expressions of informality from Socioeconomics. The emergence of remote work through digital platforms.
5. State-led policies to reduce informality.

* * *

Por su parte, en términos de la actividad informal, nos encontramos en una situación que no cuenta con precedentes. La dinámica observada en mercados formales e informales difiere de la observada en crisis económicas anteriores. Con frecuencia, cuando cae la actividad formal, su contraparte informal tiene un papel contracíclico, y su nivel aumenta o al menos disminuye con menor intensidad. Sin embargo, en esta crisis tanto la actividad económica formal como la informal experimentaron una contracción pronunciada, más intensa la última que la primera. Las restricciones de movilidad, consecuencia de la naturaleza sanitaria de la crisis, impidieron el desarrollo de las actividades informales, que generalmente se nutren de la interacción social en los núcleos de población. Por esta razón, los mercados informales no han servido como herramienta correctora de la contracción de los intercambios formales.  Por su parte, una vez superados los peores momentos de la crisis, la recuperación parcial de la economía ha sido impulsada por el crecimiento de la informalidad en las regiones donde este tipo de actividad tiene una presencia importante.

Desde esta perspectiva, también cabe señalar que, dentro de la informalidad, son las mujeres, los jóvenes y las personas con menor cualificación quienes se han visto afectados de en mayor medida por esta contracción, dados los impactos desiguales de la crisis en los ingresos y por los efectos de la recesión económica sobre los niveles de pobreza.

Para ilustrar este problema global, podemos utilizar como ejemplo principal el caso de América Latina y el Caribe, una de las regiones con mayores niveles de informalidad. En 2020, esta región registró una contracción en el nivel de actividad económica del orden de -7 por ciento. Esta caída es más del doble que la del mundo y es la mayor de todas las regiones. La mayoría de los sectores productivos dominados por pequeñas y medianas empresas sintieron fuertemente los impactos de la crisis. Y, según la CEPAL, nada menos que dos millones de micro y pequeñas empresas de la región han cerrado sus puertas para siempre. La drástica reducción del nivel de actividad tuvo un impacto en el empleo con una intensidad también sin precedentes en la región. La tasa de empleo en 2020 cayó un 10 por ciento en comparación con el año anterior, una caída más pronunciada que el PIB. La caída en el número de personas ocupadas al comienzo de la crisis económica subestima su impacto en la medida en que se produjo simultáneamente una caída en el número de horas trabajadas por quienes permanecieron ocupados. En algunos países de la región, la reducción de horas duplica o triplica la caída del empleo.

Es necesario, en este escenario, incluso más que en el pasado, adoptar una agenda de políticas integrales, consensuadas y de gran alcance, centradas en el ser humano, para apoyar la creación de más empleo formal, proteger a las micro y pequeñas empresas, y garantizar los ingresos y la protección social de los trabajadores y familias en condiciones de vulnerabilidad. De lo contrario, en esa perspectiva, hay que tener en cuenta que los impactos de la crisis se prolongarán y serán más profundos y duraderos.

En esta mini conferencia pretendemos debatir acerca del fenómeno de los mercados ilegales y los mercados informales de trabajo desde distintos prismas y dimensiones.

Por un lado, moviéndonos en la perspectiva que apunta el tópico de esta XXXIV Conferencia de la SASE, un paradigma alternativo para un nuevo orden mundial, trataremos de interpretar el fenómeno de la informalidad, dentro del campo teórico, en desarrollo, de la Socioeconomía. Ello requiere un esfuerzo multidisciplinar entre diferentes áreas del campo de las Ciencias Sociales que nos ofrezca herramientas alternativas a los modelos convencionales dominantes en las últimas décadas, para interpretar este fenómeno tan ampliamente extendido.

Y, de otro lado, ampliando el territorio de la investigación socioeconómica empírica, en el nivel tanto micro como macro, sobre un fenómeno con efectos tan destacadas como ignorados por los poderes público y la ciencia convencional.

En consecuencia, para la realización de esta mini conferencia se considerarán los trabajos que se encuadren en las siguientes áreas temáticas:

1. Paradigmas interpretativos para la informalidad socioeconómica.
2. La informalidad como objeto de estudio. Análisis transversales. Impactos de la informalidad: económicos, sociales, políticos, ambientales, etc. Tendencias y perspectivas hacia el futuro de la informalidad.
3. Tendencias de los mercados informales durante la crisis del COVID 19. Recuperación y comportamiento desigual de los mercados formales e informales.
4. Nuevas expresiones de la informalidad desde la Socioeconomía. Surgimiento del trabajo remoto a través de plataformas digitales.
5. Políticas dirigidas por el Estado para reducir la informalidad.

Building on last year’s mini-conference on economic racism, ethnic chauvinism, and racial capitalism, we welcome papers that examine theories and practices of racial capitalism from diverse perspectives. We especially seek to showcase research that explores connections between race, ethnicity, migration, and the economy during historical and contemporary periods of transition. 

In recent years, there has been an explosion in literature drawing on racial capitalism as an analytic across a wide range of disciplines and subfields including historical sociology, political theory, economic history, labor economics, law, human geography, American Studies, and Black Studies. Much of this conversation has been linked to contemporary concerns around racial violence and the crisis of capitalism and wealth inequality in the United States. Scholars studying non-US contexts too are engaging – even if critically – with the key tenets of the racial capitalism literature, while migration scholars are exploring how economic crisis, global patterns of accumulation, and racial structures direct and stymie migrant flows across the planet. In this mini-conference we seek to take stock of these conversations to collectively reflect on what theorizations of racial capitalism bring to some of the urgent questions that confront us today. How does a reconsideration of slavery, race, and capitalism from beyond the Atlantic shift our ability to tackle the truly global scale of the multiple crises – wars, pandemic, climate change, authoritarianism, economic stagnation – that confront us? How have the interactions between race, ethnicity, migration, and capitalism contributed to the shifting of extant paradigms in the past and present and how have they been reshaped by such transitional periods?

We invite submissions that build on a body of work in race, gender and sexualities, racialized organizations, the racial wealth gap, racialized property regimes, the historic relationship between race and capitalism in different geographic contexts, colonial and ongoing extraction of labor from the Global South, and work that highlights alternative genres of social difference (gender, caste, kinship, et cetera), among others. Papers using global and transnational perspectives and de/post/anticolonial and intersectional approaches are welcome. Submissions that explicitly link to the SASE 2023 theme “Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order,” are encouraged.

An explicit goal of this mini-conference is to showcase contributions from scholars from diverse backgrounds, from across disciplines and who use various empirical settings and methodological and theoretical approaches to advance an expansive – but also more precise – understanding of racial capitalism.

Social change, disruption and crisis situations are fertile soil for the emergence of illegal  markets. Inflation, war, political turmoil and far-reaching technological innovations have  typically provided the conditions for different actors—not only “organized criminals”—to  mobilize resources for illegal transactions. 

The proposed mini-conference seeks to shed light on the phenomenon of power in illegal  markets. From a sociological perspective to illegal markets, the focus lies on the sources of  power as the elements different actors can mobilize to exercise power to conduct illegal  transactions. Illegal market actors such as organized criminals, consumers, brokers, corrupt  government and state actors extract power from different sources. For instance, different  criminal groups have gained legitimacy among poor populations and territories, offering them  both material resources extracted from illegal markets and a matrix of discursive justifications  for accepting or tolerating criminal governance. In different territories in Latin America, Africa  and Asia, the power of criminal organizations coexists with state sovereignty and different  levels of social acceptance.  

Drawing on the concept of illegal markets as arenas of exchange of goods or services whose  production, distribution or consumption is legally banned (Beckert and Dewey 2017), we  argue that economic exchanges can effectively take place if the actors involved mobilize various sources of power. The illegal accumulation of capital within illegal markets is now  transnational and can be residual in some national economies but represent a good share of  GDP in poorer countries. Actors that control the accumulation of resources could also become relevant political actors. 

Our mini-conference’s topic refers to the sources of power that enable market actors to  effectively carry out unlawful exchanges. The organizers have identified four sources of power  in illegal markets: 1) regulations and enforcement, 2) technology, 3) morality (social  perceptions, ideologies, values) and 4) the unequal distribution of resources including capital and the use of force.  

Regulations and enforcement: actors in illegal markets manipulate regulations and enforcement in order to camouflage their actions and/or protect themselves or others. On the one hand,  actors in illegal markets take strategically advantage of both prohibitions and gaps in  regulations. Similarly, they take advantage of enforcement mechanisms, for example, bribing  state officials, evading checks, being attentive to police’s tolerance, etc. to protect themselves  or others. On the other hand, governments and state actors can also manipulate the  enforcement to sell protection to criminals i.e., commodifying enforcement, eliminate some  market actors, etc. 

Technology and infrastructures: actors in illegal markets can use technology to make illegal  economic exchanges possible. There are different technologies that actors can mobilize to  pursue their ends. There are well-known physical technology devices or infrastructures such  as the container, cellphones, or postal service that actors use to make transactions. Now, digital technologies and infrastructures have brought illegal markets to a new level. Social  media and messaging apps enable the creation of semi- and full-private marketplaces, digital  payment services facilitate quick and anonymous transfers of money, and food delivery apps  make distribution easier.  

Morality and social perceptions: morality and people’s perception about commodities and the  side-effects of their exchange are elements that can be used for the justification of illegal  exchanges. Counterfeited products are a good example: generally speaking, compared to  other markets such as hard drugs or child pornography, they are quite accepted, and that  social acceptance is used by people to justify and keep consuming this type of products. Equally  important is ignorance or the perception that one is acting lawfully. This type of perceptions  is crucial to understand the workings of markets such as the one for stolen auto parts where  knowledge is scarce and fragmented.  

Unequal distribution of resources: actors can take advantage of the unequal distribution of  resources to create illegal markets. Crises and war situations are good examples of this: some  actors with access to scarce goods are in an excellent position to satisfy people in need, for  instance, of food stuff or medicines. Durable inequalities (Tilly 1998) have also created the  conditions for the emergence of illegal markets, a situation intensified by a lacking sense of belonging of vulnerable groups. Profound economic inequality, therefore, can be exploited by  groups capable of producing wealth in illegal markets and become de facto rulers of marginal  populations. In consequence, the hybridization of political orders based on unequal resources  for force and accumulation seems to be a trend in several highly developed criminal contexts  (Steputtat 2013, Arias and Barnes 2013, Feltran 2020). 

This mini-conference aims to address all of these sources of power within and around the  rapidly changing illegal global markets. We expect a min-conference that showcases a wide  variety of illegal markets. 

References

Arias, E. Desmond, and Barnes, Nicholas. 2017. “Crime and plural orders in Rio de Janeiro,  Brazil”. Current Sociology, 65(3), 448–465. 

Beckert, Jens and Matias Dewey. 2017. The Architecture of Illegal Markets. Toward an Economic  Sociology of Illegality in the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Feltran Gabriel de Santis. 2020. The Entangled City: Crime as Urban Fabric in Sao Paulo.  Manchester: Manchester University Press. 

Stepputat, Finn. 2013. Contemporary Governscapes: Sovereign Practice and Hybrid Orders Beyond the  Center. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Tilly Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.