Organizers: Aristea Koukiadaki, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Isabel Tavora

The sovereign debt crisis, which began in Greece in 2010 and then spread to several other Eurozone economies, is having profound consequences for the labour law and industrial relations systems of the debt-affected member states and for the role of social policy at EU level. Driven by the need to initiate a process of ‘internal devaluation’ so as to restore the competitiveness of the national economies, public deficit reduction measures have been coupled in a number of EU Member States with in-depth structural labour market reforms. The latter are not only aimed at ensuring wage moderation but also at amending essential features of the industrial relations systems via changes in employment protection legislation and collective bargaining. Earlier comparative studies have illustrated the positive impact of social dialogue in periods of crisis. However, the majority of research so far has concentrated on the impact of the crisis and less attention has been paid on the specific question of the role of the structural labour market adjustments in reconfiguring the space for the articulation of management and employee interests and the development of social dialogue in a fragmented context. Given that collective bargaining has been one of the key institutional features of the European social model, it is crucial to increase our comparative understanding of the processes, content and outcomes of collective bargaining in different European countries.

Against this context, this mini-conference seeks contributions that examine the following issues from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives such as sociology, economics, employment relations, public policy and law. If bargaining decentralisation takes place, what are the emerging patterns and why do they vary? Are there any procedural guarantees in place so as to avoid the development of a ‘disembedded’ form of capitalism? How is social dialogue understood in such a context of change in different national environments and how do developments in the European economic governance affect this understanding? What is the role of the state in this new reconfiguration in terms of policy and state agencies? Will the approach of employers’ organisations reflect the existence of divergent interests even internally within each country? How will trade unions attempt to maintain their representational capacity and articulate their members’ interests, whilst taking into account increasing inequalities within and between Member States?

Organizers: Joe Deville, Jeanne Lazarus, Mariana Luzzi, José Ossandón

Domesticizing Financial Economies, Part 2 will pursue the discussions started in at the 2014 annual SASE meeting at what has now become Domesticizing Financial Economies, Part 1. We invite papers that look at specific situations of monetary transaction, credit and domestic money management. Our starting point is that the use of even the most sophisticated financial products can be understood in the light of a close empirical description of their contexts of social ties and obligations, ways of calculating, devices and informational infrastructures. The highly specific and often domestic ways that monies circulate about come to matter greatly, including but not limited to the production and reproduction of inequalities and asymmetries of power. Rather than (or as well as) seeking to understand how financial economies are “economized”, to draw on a term used by Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon, we are thus interested in work that explores how monetary transactions are woven into the fabric of the everyday and come to be “domesticized”.

Papers with varied disciplinary backgrounds discussing the following issues are welcome:

• The intimate dimensions of monetary and financial transactions, whether in the moment of exchange itself, or before and after
• Social inequalities rooted in and/or created by the intersection between financial products and the everyday
• The ways in which household finances become entangled with and affected by a range of socio-technical devices
• Emerging financial products and services (e.g. payday loans, credit score management services, department store credit cards, pawn shops and new ways of banking) targeting domestic finance that are re-shaping the financial ecologies faced by consumers
• New transactional technologies and infrastructures (e.g. algorithms, databases, payment cards) and their new ways of sorting, screening and valuing financial consumers
• Domestic financial products and their entanglement with “high” finance and broader economic chains
• Controversies, matters of concern, new affected groups, publics and commercial circuits being co-produced with contemporary domestic financial landscapes

Organizers: Marco Hauptmeier, Edmund Heery, Leon Gooberman

Collective organisation by employers and businesses is both an established and, in certain respects, a growing feature. In many Western countries employers’ associations continue to set industry-wide terms and conditions through collective bargaining with trade unions in a number of sectors. In other sectors, although industry bargaining has collapsed long-established employers’ associations, continue to exist but their function has changed and training initiatives and delivering services have become important focus. Other employer and business organizations continue to lobby governments and political parties with the aim of influencing and shaping policies and economic governance. The past two decades have also seen the emergence of at least two new forms of employers’ organizations. The first are employers’ forums, which are organisations that deal with single issues in the field of equality and diversity. The second are employers’ organizations created to promote Corporate Social Responsibility and ethical employment practices along supply chains.

The different types of employers’ organizations have various roles and engage in a range of activities. They offer services and represent the interests of their members, which include providing legal assistance, coordinating and organising joint training initiatives, lobbying government, networking, conducting collective bargaining, providing assistance in implementing government policies, self-regulation of sectors and developing codes of conduct. Other collective employer activities are hidden from the public or even illegal such as the blacklisting of union members in the United Kingdom. Beyond looking at the various activities of employer organizations, this mini-conference will also assess the wider impact of the work of employers’ organizations for stakeholders in society such as employees, labour unions and the government.

Despite the various collective activities of employers and importance in social and economic governance, the role of employers’ organizations and other forms of employer collective action remain somewhat underexplored in various fields of studies. Thus, the overarching goal of this mini-conference is to examine the activities of employers’ organizations and other types of employer collective action. We welcome contributions from a variety of social science disciplines, including political science, employment relations, Human Resource Management, economics, sociology and other fields of studies that are concerned with collective action by employers.

Organizers: Jacqueline O’Reilly, Werner Eichhorst, María González, Andy Hodder, Lefteris Kretsos, Janine Leschke, Christer Hyggen, Jale Tosun

This mini-conference empirically scrutinises youth labour market transitions from a comparative perspective; it examines how policy regimes and patterns of inequality are being reformed or reproduced; and it draws out the theoretical implications of these for institutional theory. How are different actors, within and beyond nation states, defining the ‘problem’ of youth unemployment? How do welfare and employment policy legacies affect the ‘solutions’ being adopted? And what are the long-term consequences of emerging inequalities for global youth? The mini-conference is organised around four themes.

1.     Policy Legacies: Families, Flexibility & Policy Regimes

This panel examines how effectively policy makers are responding to the recent rises in youth unemployment. It examines supply and demand side policies addressing family inequalities, reforms to apprenticeships and active labour market policies for youth, in particular assessing these against the backdrop of the EU youth employment package and the ‘youth guarantee’. Papers can address both the political economy of labour market (de)regulation and the socio-economic consequences of segmented labour markets. They can focus on program design and implementation in different countries or sectors, but also on assessing the effectiveness of such policy innovations.

2.     Youth Voice: Representation at work and beyond

We focus on the representation and voice of young people, inviting papers on union responses to the rise in precarious employment and youth unemployment; union strategies aimed at increasing the recruitment and representation of young people; and alternative forms of voice and representation beyond traditional union structures. It is crucial that young people in the labour market have a voice, and as such, we are interested in receiving national and comparative narratives from around the world.

3.     Youth on the Move: Migration and Mobility

We invite papers analysing youth labour migration and its impacts for receiving and sending countries within the EU, as well as the movement of young workers from the global south to the EU area. Contributors could focus on working and living conditions of migrant workers and returnees and the role of policies and institutions for integrating and excluding young migrants (e.g. social security systems, labour market regulation and migration policies), as well as actors, including labour market intermediaries, trade unions and employers, in shaping migration patterns and labour market outcomes of migrant youth.

4.     Political Futures: Policy & Politics of Multi-level governance

This panel explores policy-makers’ stances on policies to support youth transitions to economic independence and to self-employment. We invite contributions examining programmatic documents (such as election manifestos or coalition agreements) and speeches delivered by policy-makers in parliaments. We aim to understand to what extent policy-makers’ stances on these topics have changed over time in terms of attention to these issues (salience) and their concrete positions (valence). We hope to identify differences across political parties or coalitions, and the effects of different levels of government (European, federal, regional, local).

Organizers: Abigail McKnight, Wiemer Salverda, Daniele Checchi, Ive Marx, Brian Nolan, Herman van de Werfhorst

Inequality in earnings, income and wealth has increased in many countries over the last 30 years but evidence shows that while there are many similarities in trends there is also a great degree of variation both between countries and within countries over time.  The topic of interest in this Mini-Conference is to look beyond documenting trends in inequality to examine drivers of changing inequality, evidence of social and political impacts of changing inequality and the effectiveness of policy on combating inequality and any harmful consequences.  We would also like to include extension to this work focusing on educational inequalities, in particular adult competences, and the distribution of wealth and intergenerational transmission.

This Mini-Conference will enable an evaluation of the results of the 30‐country (25 EU countries, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, and USA) and strongly interdisciplinary Growing Inequalities’ Impacts (GINI) research project, which were recently published in two volumes by Oxford University Press1, and provide a platform for presenting new work elaborating on these results and discussing the options and needs of further research in the same vein.

Details of the GINI project, including 30 extensive Country Reports and close to 100 Discussion Papers and a new dataset on inequalities since 1980, can be found at www.giniresearch.org.

The Mini-Conference will have three focus points:

1) Social and Political Impacts of Inequality

Convener: Herman van de Werfhorst, Univ. of Amsterdam

This session is particularly interested in contributions that examine the effects of changing inequality on potential outcomes; looking beyond cross country correlations between inequality levels and potential outcomes.  Suggested subjects: effects of inequality in the fields of politics, attitudes, health, crime, social trust, and well‐being.

2) Educational Inequality: Adult Competences, Significance and Relationship with National Institutions

Convener: Daniele Checchi, Univ. of Milan

Educational inequalities remain one of the key drivers of economic inequality despite the fact that educational inequalities have fallen in many countries as earnings and income inequality increased.  In this session we are interested in papers that explore the link between adult competences and labour market outcomes, particularly papers that examine the development, and deterioration, of competencies over the life course.  Suggested subjects: competences and labour market; competence formation along the life course; competences and social participation.

3) Wealth Inequality and Social Mobility

Conveners: Ive Marx, Univ. of Antwerp and CSB, and Brian Nolan, Univ. of Oxford and INET

Established research on poverty and inequality has relied heavily on data measuring people’s income from work or social transfers. This has resulted in a large literature on the patterns of income inequality and the driving forces behind these. Due to data limitations, researchers were for a long time unable to include other financial resources people may rely upon in times of need, such as real estate, savings, inheritances, etc. Due to new data becoming available the study of wealth has gained prominence, with issues of intergenerational transmission and accumulation much at the forefront. This session welcomes papers dealing with these issues.

Organizers: Andrea Hense, Jürgen Kaedtler, René Lehwess-Litzmann, Ortrud Lessmann

The growing debate on the degree of social inequalities stresses the need to achieve a common understanding of the kind of (in)equality in question. Analytical concepts and indicators that are suitable to measure inequalities are the very foundation of comparison: What dimensions, aspects, or aspirations are taken into account, and with what priorities? The discussion on social inequalities evolves both with dif­ferent theoretical and normative choices and corresponding legitimizations and with the evolution of diverse scientific methods and data sources. There seems to be a broad consensus recently that GDP per capita cannot serve (any more?) as a good proxy for well-being on a macro level of society. This has induced a lively discussion on what should replace the outdated metric. This discussion is likely to impact social life in terms of practical policies, as public debate and political decision-making on (in)equalities are framed and informed by social indicators and monitoring systems. Accordingly, there have recently been a number of high-level initiatives from the political sphere which aimed at an improved measurement of human well-being. It stands out that there is still an important gap between the theoretical debate on highly sophisticated concepts of social  (in)equalities on the one side and their effective implementation in (in)equality measurements and social monitoring on the other side. Moreover, the understanding of the emergence of social inequalities requires analyses of its driving forces on the meso and the micro level of society. The Mini-Conference focuses on different met­rics of inequality which are discussed in different disciplines and the political sphere, on their justifi­cation, and on the methodology of implementation.

Invited for the Mini-Conference are theoretical as well as empirical (and potentially interdisciplinary) contributions which deal with one or several of the following questions: What kind of analytical concepts and indicators are suitable to measure social inequalities? How big is the overlap between alternative approaches, and what are their important differences (advantages, disadvantages)? What possibilities are there for combining different approaches? What new approaches are made possible by recent data trends and research methods? What impact have recent political initiatives had on the practice of inequality monitor­ing so far? Are there similar approaches in different countries? How can yardsticks used for the measurement of social inequalities (dimensioning, weighting, thresholds) be jus­tified in practical research? What are the political implications of different concepts of (in)equality and social monitoring?

Organizers: Luigi Burroni, Emmanuele Pavolini, Roberto Pedersini, Francesco Ramella

During recent years a rising attention has been devoted to the analysis of varieties of capitalism others than LMEs and CMEs, and the definition of ‘mixed market economies’ (Molina and Rhodes, 2005) has been fruitfully adopted to gather together models of political economy of countries like Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal, countries characterized by high level of inequality and by a low level of economic competitiveness. These countries share relevant similarities but it is also possible to identify many differences in the production structure, in the regulatory architecture and in the role and strategies of collective actors as well as in the ways in which they are currently facing the crisis.

This Mini-Conference seeks contributions that focus on the political economy of Southern European countries, on their recent transformations, on the reforms that have been implemented to cope with the crisis, on the impact of austerity measures and the following popular protest movements. By doing so, it can help to understand why the recent socio-economic crisis has been severe and prolonged in four countries; at the same time, the Mini-Conference can contribute to better specify the main features of the so-called mixed market economies. For this reason, we encourage the submission of papers that analyze Southern-Europen focusing at least on one of the following fields: industrial relations (tripartite negotiations, collective bargaining, etc.), welfare (pensions, social security provisions, etc.), labour market (flexibilisation, labour productivity, etc.), industrial policies (support to R&D activities, incentives to firms, etc.), regional policies (territorial pacts, support to local cluster in traditional and advanced sectors, etc.) and systems of innovation (national, regional and sectoral systems, innovation policy mix, etc.). All papers shall engage with the definition of ‘mixed market economies’ and address the issue of developing an analytical framework for cross-country analysis. With this specification, both single country and comparative papers are welcome.

Organizers: Phil Almond, Tony Edwards, Gregor Murray

This Mini-Conference aims to explore, on a critical basis, how the relations between the multinational firm and societal institutions affect the world of work. We seek studies that seriously explore the “transnational social space” (Morgan, 2001) within and around MNCs, and how actor choices are shaped. Priority will be given to papers which address how the coordination of value creation and exploitation by MNCs shapes structures of inequality, either directly (through wage structures or the international diffusion of managerial norms) or through effects on the institutional structures governing work and employment. We particularly welcome submissions from sectors and geographies which remain underrepresented in the existing literature.

The Mini-Conference is organized into four themes:

• The International Firm as Employment System – Research on employment relations and human resource management in multinationals tends, typically, to examine foreign multinationals in one or more host economies. While there are obvious practical reasons for this, it does mean that the employment systems of multinationals across their international operations (both internal and across value chains) are somewhat underexplored within this literature. This panel therefore seeks work that takes a holistic view in analyzing how multinationals construct international systems for the management of their workforces, taking account of the varied dynamics of integration and differentiation.
• Multinationals and Social Regulation – MNCs’ employment systems interact with formal and informal social regulation at a variety of geographical levels, from the local to the transnational. As there is an extensive literature in this general area, this panel will strongly prioritize papers which analyze specific attempts to create novel, and possibly hybrid, responses to the problem of regulating work and employment in multinational firms. What is the nature of these responses and what is their potential for dealing with the social challenges posed by global firms?
• Regime Shopping, Resource Shopping and Local Responses – This panel explores the ways in which local/national host economy actors seek to build and maintain links to global production networks through attracting and retaining FDI. In particular, it focuses on attempts to foster comparative advantage on the basis of the institutional resources of business and employment systems. Can places find ways of competing for FDI through institutional renewal and experimentation, or do the power resources of multinationals mean such experiments are doomed to failure?
• Actor Globalization and the Negotiation of Norms – This panel probes the processes involved, and capabilities needed, in creating, negotiating or challenging global norms, both within multinationals and across their wider networks of value. In other words, what insight can we develop on the individual, institutional and organizational factors shaping the ability of actors to operate in relation to the complex international systems of the MNC?

Organizers: Kenneth Abbott, Duncan Snidal, David Levi-Faur

Rule-makers and rule-takers often require various forms of assistance and outside resources to accomplish their goals.  To this end, they may engage (or are engaged by) intermediaries which act on behalf of them, or in conjunction with them, to achieve their goals. These intermediaries – their function, interests, successes and failures stand at the center of our  conceptualization of regulation and the regulatory process as a three-way game. Intermediaries can be private actors such as for-profit accreditation agencies or accounting firms; they can be civil society groups (NGOs) that have an interest in the issue at hand; or they can be other governmental bodies such as international organizations. Intermediaries may play various roles ranging from providing expertise and feedback to facilitating compliance and building communities of compliance.  Focusing attention on intermediaries expands the scope of regulatory analysis beyond rule-makers and rule-takers to include key agents (who sometimes turns principals).  It further emphasizes that regulation often operates indirectly and provides a way for regulators and rule-takers to expand their capacities.  In the spirit of this program section, attention to intermediaries takes regulatory analysis beyond “the institutional confines of the state and legalistic policy mechanisms” and across the national-international regulatory divide.  Of special interest are the relative effectiveness of different regulatory arrangements, the autonomy of intermediaries, and how intermediaries shape the regulatory dialog and affect power relations among regulatory actors.

Panels will examine both conceptual and theoretical issues regarding intermediaries and the use of intermediaries in a wide range of regulatory settings.  Of special interest are the different roles of intermediaries in principal-agent delegation versus orchestration and at the transnational versus domestic level.  This is a continuation of on-going research into the role of intermediaries in domestic, international and transnational regulation.  It will be organized around a draft framework paper by the organizers (available January 31, 2015) that refines the concept of intermediary and proposes a set of hypotheses.

Papers for these panels will be guided by the framework to

• Clearly identify the intermediaries in their analysis and their relationships with rule-makers and rule-takers.
• Consider how intermediaries shape the regulatory dialog and affect power relations among regulatory actors.
• Analyse how intermediaries affect the content and effectiveness of regulation

Individual papers are asked to evaluate the hypothesis as they apply to their case or area of analysis.  The goal is to develop systematic knowledge regarding the impact of intermediaries and perhaps to collect revised versions of some papers into an edited volume.

Organizers: Nina Bandelj, Andrew Penner, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

This Mini-Conference takes advantage of the growing literature on inequality in organizational settings. Most studies of inequality focus on the national distribution of income across households or earners, but neglect the organizational production and distribution of respect and rewards. We are particularly interested in relational inequality approaches, but are open to any papers that stress the central role of organizational processes, the relative power and status of actors, and institutional contexts in the generation of inequality. All methodological approaches are welcome and we hope to highlight the complementarity of ethnographic, historical, and quantitative approaches to inequality dynamics. We are particularly interested in papers that are comparative across organizations, countries, or time. Papers using longitudinal employer-employee data are especially encouraged and we hope to have a session to discuss the development of a comparative inequality project using such data.

The eventual organization of sessions will reflect the papers submitted, but potential sessions topics might include:

• The juncture of interaction and organizational practices in the production of inequalities
• Institutional influences on organizational inequality regimes
• Citizenship, gender, race/ethnicity, and class intersections in organizational context
• The production and distribution of economic value in workplaces
• The role of organizational inequality in national inequality trends
• Relational inequality theorizing

Submissions for panels will be open to all scholars on the basis of an extended abstract, which needs to be uploaded via a regular SASE submission system by SASE deadline. Selected participants must submit a completed paper to discussant and organizers by June 1, 2015. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within the mini-conference, it will be forwarded to the most appropriate research network as a regular submission.

Organizers: Bruno Amable, Hideko Magara

Most non-liberal varieties of capitalism have experienced neoliberal structural reforms which have transformed them to various extents over the past few decades. These reforms have been met with varying degrees of social and political opposition, but in most cases, the socio-political coalitions which supported the previously existing institutional architectures have been unable to prevent the evolution towards neoliberal capitalism. In some countries, the transition has led to major transformation of the social and political landscape (number and identities of political parties, trade unions’ structure, political coalitions…) as well as important economic structural change; in others, the transformations have been less drastic. The Great Recession, originally held to be the final crisis of neoliberal capitalism, has not questioned this evolution in a significant way, and in some cases even accelerated it.

This Mini-Conference will address the issue of the transformation of non-liberal political economies in relation with the socio-political coalitions that either support or oppose the evolution towards neoliberal capitalism. It welcomes contributions from economics, political economy, political science, economic history or sociology.

The following themes could be addressed:

• How have the dominant social and political compromises evolved over the past few decades? Has the Great Recession had an impact?
• Are there emerging models of capitalism which are hybridisations of neoliberal and non-liberal capitalism?
• What transformations in the social (class or cross-class) coalitions that support the emerging models?
• Are these coalitions stable, do they represent a social and political equilibrium?
• Internal evolution vs. pressures from the external environment: how do international relations and external constraints influence the evolution of national political economies?

Organizers: Ewald Engelen, Julie Froud, Angelo Salento, Karel Williams

There is growing interest in the foundational economy which produces mundane goods and services like health, transport, utilities and food. Necessary to everyday life, these are consumed regardless of income and distributed through branches and networks; they employ 30-40% of the workforce in high income economies. Citizens’ material well-being and cultural participation depend on accessible foundational goods and services. Moreover, the identity, condition and capacity of regions depends on how well foundational organisations are grounded in their territories.

Foundational activities are increasingly mismanaged in financialized economies: by public companies, private equity or government agencies.  Mismanagement takes the form of ‘point value’ transactions at a node, managing for most profit or least cost regardless of social consequences for other stakeholders. Blocking financialization and reorganising foundational sectors could provide a way to lever improved outcomes.

This justifies practical experiments in providing foundational goods and services in ways that generate more benefit for local communities. But it also resumes intellectual work on reconceptualising the heterogeneity of the economy. This is classically represented by  Braudel’s insight that there were ‘not one but several economies’ from the 15th-18th century; the present day economy is not singular and includes several  zones with different logics. The idea of a foundational zone is thus associated with a re-valuation of the mundane and its importance in the lives of citizens.

The Mini-Conference panels will explore such themes, drawing on a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary resources, including those of economic sociology, geography, political economy, development studies and management. The organisers welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Papers that explore issues of definition and measurement around the foundational economy, relating to heterodox concepts of the economy which emphasise territoriality, informality and the mundane, including the commons and the civil economy. Or, use official statistics and other data to develop innovative kinds of measurement.
• National and sector case studies are relevant because they engage activity specifics and incidentally undermine ideas about generic fixes (like competition).  Comparative work could consider the difference between (high and low income) countries in areas like utilities and food distribution. While experiments in economic and social provision in food, micro-finance and energy et al. offer insights into different ways of organising, financing and delivering foundational goods and services.
• Studies based on conceptualisation and framing using the history of economic and political thought about economies of  heterogeneous zones and the imposition of new logics, as in the work of  Polanyi and other theorists of capitalism. Political experiments raise questions about the identity of actors and the balance between centralisation and the sub-national, national and supra-national levels.
• Papers about how this reframing raises challenges about the role of academics as observers of change, partners in experiments and, in some cases, as activists. Here the science and technology understanding of experiment may be as important as mainstream political science.

Organizers: Lucy Barnes, Tim Hicks

The dramatic increases in income inequality and attention to it highlighted by the theme of the 2015 SASE meetings have major political ramifications. Indeed, in the early decades of the 21st century, the study of economic inequality has permeated the discipline of political science as well as the discourse of politicians. But what tools are available to policy makers who would seek to fight rising inequality? How is policy shaped by the electoral constraints and voter preferences? Do traditional policies and structures of political competition still allow for the articulation of egalitarian – or anti-egalitarian – goals in politics? What kind of role can domestic politics play in combating inequalities resulting from global processes?

This mini-conference seeks to provide a specific, political focus in the context of the broader interdisciplinary dialogue on inequality provided by the conference. We invite papers addressing the political determinants of inequality and policy responses to it. We welcome submissions using a variety of methodological approaches, including experimental, statistical or qualitative comparisons oriented towards causal explanations; as well as historical, statistical and qualitative empirical descriptions.

We particularly encourage submissions centred on the following themes:

• Information. What do voters know about government efforts to reduce inequality? Are some voters more informed about redistribution than others, and why? How do the media affect voters’ information and perceptions of egalitarian policy?
• Preferences. How do voters think about government efforts to reduce inequality? What kinds of policy interventions garner popular support? What are the electoral implications of these popular attitudes? (How) do these vary across countries?
• Pre-distribution. What influence can governments have on the distribution of market (‘pre-fisc’) incomes? What kinds of policies– aside from tax and transfer redistribution– can reduce inequality?
• Partisan politics. How does partisan politics shape distributive policy, and vice versa? Under what conditions, and in which policy areas is there scope for partisan discretion? Conversely, what effects does increasing inequality have on partisan politics?
• International Issues. What effects do international dynamics– war, globalisation, international institutions and processes of competition and diffusion– have on government efforts to combat inequality? How should issues of inter-country inequalities inform policy and scholarship on income inequalities?

Organizers: Christian Lévesque, Peter Fairbrother, Marc-Antonin Hennebert

Over the last two decades the balance of power between capital and labor has significantly shifted in favour of the former. Through their integrated processes of production and distribution and their subcontracting arrangements, MNCs are able to shift production across the global landscape and to extract value added activity in many locations. They are active in shaping globalization not only through the control of global value chains but also through their capacity to frame the agenda of economic and social development. In this process, governments have embraced neo-liberal agenda which both provide an opportunity for these developments as well as shaping and influencing outcomes. These developments raise pressing questions for trade unions and workers, notably with regards to their capacity to shape the world of work and employment.

This Mini-Conference is concerned with understanding the spatial extension of trade union action, in particular the development of new forms of collective mobilization and network-building to increase the resources and capabilities of local actors. It seeks to understand how transnational trade unionism and MNCs policies and strategies interact with and impact on the capacity of local actors to contribute to the enhancement of equity, democracy and distributive justice.

Transnational trade union action has expanded significantly over the past decades, and has taken a variety of shapes and trajectories. It is shaped by a variety of actors differentiated among functional and territorial lines within and between different sites of regulation. It is a top-down as well as a bottom-up process. It may involve the internalization of international issues and conflicts into the domestic arena or the spatial extension of specific practices and patterns of national influence into international context. In either case the result is a multilevel structure where the necessity to operate upward and downward scale shifting is a crucial ingredient for effective transnational action.

We invite papers that seek to deepen our understanding of the connections between trade union action at international, national and local levels and assess the impact of transnational trade union action on inequality. We welcome abstract and paper submissions from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives that address the following themes:

• The shape, forms and logics of action of transnational trade union across different sectors and regions, such as Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America.
• The relationships between trade union actors within the various forms of transnational trade union action.
• The policies and strategies of MNCs towards transnational trade union action and their impact on the patterns of employment relations within MNCs.
• The way different forms of transnational unions provide various outcomes in terms of reducing inequalities in working conditions or asymmetries in the power resources and capabilities of local actors within and across firms and regions.
• The conditions that enhance or limit the capacity of transnational trade unionism to create effective outcomes for workers and their community.

Organizers: Jens Beckert, Richard Bronk

The central role of future orientation in contemporary economies is self-evident. Investments are made on the basis of expected future returns. Financial investors speculate on the future development of security prices. Product innovations seek to anticipate future technological or market developments but often create unanticipated novelties. Consumer purchases are based on the imagined future satisfaction of wants.

In many circumstances the future is inherently uncertain, not least because of the innovations, novelties and complex feedback loops that characterize modern capitalist economies. This raises the question of how economic actors form expectations or strategies, assess the likely outcome of their decisions, and learn to exploit the indeterminate future to their advantage. How do actors actually come to the assessments of future developments on which they rely to make their consequential decisions?

Economics usually assumes that expectations conform to certain canons of rationality and are based on probability calculations and the market elimination of systematic errors. In its behavioral variant, economics explores the psychological construction of regular biases in our assessments of the future. By contrast, sociology focuses on social structures, cultural templates, institutions and power to explain economic outcomes but largely ignores the role played by actors’ expectations of the future. In neither discipline has there to date been much systematic investigation into how actors assess or navigate the future when faced with radical uncertainty. For example, how do economic actors make decisions when the future is indeterminate because it has yet to be created by the innovations they and others will make? What is the relative importance of imaginaries, emotion or social narrative versus calculation in guiding behavior?

The mini-conference invites submissions of empirical and theoretical work on how – in conditions of uncertainty – actors form expectations regarding economic futures, and how these expectations then influence economic outcomes and policies. Submissions are invited from a range of disciplines and can include both qualitative and quantitative studies. Sessions will focus on the following areas:

• How do agents form expectations and make decisions in uncertain market conditions relating to consumption, investment, finance and innovation?
• How far is the future constructed (rather than predicted) through use of such instruments as economic forecasting, economic theories, risk modeling, accounting technologies, business plans or other market narratives? Do the narratives and models of certain market players have disproportionate impact on future outturns?
• How important to the stability of markets and the efficacy of economic policy making is the social, institutional and historical anchoring of expectations?

Other topics related to how we visualize the future and form future-oriented strategies in dynamic capitalist systems are possible.

Selection of the papers for the mini-conference will be made based on 1000 words abstracts. Authors selected for presentation of their research at the SASE conference will have to submit a full paper on June 1, 2015. There will be commentators for each paper.