Organizers: Ruth Collier, Martin Kenney, John Zysman, Marion Fourcade

Moral judgments that justify or vilify different economic arrangements on the basis of some final value are extremely common in the social sciences. Since the beginning of political economy, market institutions have elicited strong and rival views across a broad spectrum of positions. Those who marvel at the coordinating power of the invisible hand confront those who revile capitalism’s inherently exploitative nature. The celebration of efficiency faces the condemnation of waste. And democratic interpretations of laissez faire meet the hard reality of growing social inequalities. There is no economy that is not political and moral at the same time.

Social scientists, of course, are not the only ones to judge the economy while living in it. E.P. Thompson famously coined the term “moral economy” to denote the inchoate feelings and obligations that orient workers, and make them see certain courses of action (such as riots) as legitimate or illegitimate. To the extent that individuals and institutions act on them, those judgments help constitute economic lines of action, too.

Social scientists, of course, are not the only ones to judge the economy while living in it. E.P. Thompson famously coined the term “moral economy” to denote the inchoate feelings and obligations that orient workers, and make them see certain courses of action (such as riots) as legitimate or illegitimate. To the extent that individuals and institutions act on them, those judgments help constitute economic lines of action, too.

Organizers: Henry Farrell

How should we understand power, interdependence, expertise, collective identity, and rule-making in the global economy?  Both economic sociologists and political scientists of international relations are generating exciting new perspectives on these issues, yet there has been little dialogue between them.  This mini-conference will bring the two fields together to explore emerging points of convergence and debate in the study of international political economy.  Traditionally, economic sociologists have emphasized the political, cultural, and relational embeddedness of markets, while international relations scholars have analyzed coordination and distributional aspects of trade and investment.  In some instances, analyses in the two fields appear to be evolving toward one another—as with recent work on cultural categories in international political economy or research on trade and standard-setting in economic sociology.  But sustained dialogue on these points of convergence has yet to occur.

Economic sociology was founded on debate with economics, and it soon developed an alliance with comparative politics, especially in the historical institutionalist and “varieties of capitalism” traditions.  It is surprising, then, that economic sociologists have had little dialogue—whether friendly or critical—with research in international political economy or international relations.  Recent lines of research are going beyond the field’s initial emphasis on diffusion to develop different accounts of interdependence.  This includes work on the translation and adaptation of globalizing policy scripts and on the multi-sited production of neoliberalism.  Similarly, distinctive accounts of power, coordination, and change in the global economy are emerging out of research on new production architectures, public and private rule-making within these architectures, and the evolution of philanthropic fields. This work is relevant to political science and sometimes borrows from it, but rarely engages in sustained dialogue.

International political economy and international relations have similarly paid little sustained attention to economic sociology.  Early sociological work on rationalization, including the work of John Meyer and colleagues, influenced international relations scholarship, and constructivist scholars have similarly been interested in sociological insights.  However, with some important exceptions, this interest has not been sustained.  This is unfortunate, especially since some scholars of international political economy are looking to broaden out from the dominant ‘open economy politics’ account, which borrows theories of preference formation and institutions from economics.  They are developing new accounts of interdependence, cross-national identity formation, and power in the international economy; analyzing rise of institutional architectures that reshape domestic economies; and identifying complex relationships between international trade and social rights within nations.  Like economic sociologists, international relations scholars are becoming increasingly interested in global production networks and the standards that govern them, as well as the role of categories and classification in shaping global markets.

We believe that the time is right for a new set of conversations.  We invite papers that make either empirical contributions (i.e., by analyzing phenomena of shared interest in the international political economy) or theoretical/agenda-setting statements.  We are hopeful that this mini-conference will facilitate both long-term dialogue and collaboration and shorter-term outputs, such as the publication of special issues on the intersection between the two fields.

Organizers: Catherine Casey, Juliane Reinecke

Calls for “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) in the actions of powerful corporate firms gain increased public, business, and social scientific attention.  Questions about the role of socio-cultural norms and moral constraints in the regulation of business corporations and the promotion of business ethics have a long history. Current debates on CSR reveal a general confluence of concerns about the effects of firm action in society and at the same time much contestation and ambiguity over what CSR means and who may be its beneficiaries. For many business actors, taking CSR initiatives is normatively the “right thing” to do. Critics contend that CSR is controlled by powerful firms to serve their strategic interests especially to enhance their reputation or brand. On that view, CSR has little or no substantive effect in regulating the firm’s economic rationality and utility maximization.

However, as global production and trading relations expand in complex networks of transnational operations and value chains, CSR has become an extensive domain of corporate voluntary and quasi-mandatory action. Of particular importance is the role of CSR in responding to, or possibly exacerbating, observed weaknesses in the substance, reach and enforcement of mandatory law, notably labour and employment and environmental protection laws in transnational production and trade. Those weaknesses at state-level regulation propose greater legitimation of the corporate firm’s voluntary regulation. Many transnational corporations find themselves engaged in negotiations and alliances with civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in addition to or instead of interlocution with state actors.

The role of CSR in corporate governance, politics and economy, and the public’s interests in the assumed private actions of the firm, invite a sharp spotlight on CSR’s enterprise and raise probing questions. CSR as moral economy and private governance may entail a public role with significant societal effect.

This mini-conference aims to explore the values, uses and limits of CSR as moral economy in governing the firm. It invites papers of both theoretical and empirical nature that address substantive topics in CSR research. International and comparative studies are especially welcome.  Orienting questions include:

• Does CSR propose socially beneficial constraint or maximize private governance of the firm?
• What are the social risks and benefits of private moral economies?
• Who are the actors and what are the institutional pressures shaping moral economies and firm governance?
• Does the moral economy of a CSR-enacting firm blur the interface between public and private obligation; compliance and ethical initiative?
• Do business ethics shape a moral economy within and beyond the firm? What ethics can effectively inform socially responsible corporate action in global markets?
• Does CSR make a moral, and practical, difference in practice over time, and for whom?
• To what extent is CSR enacted throughout a transnational enterprise and its value chains?
• Does CSR assist or hinder congruence of concerns for labour rights and standards and concerns for environmental and biodiversity degradation?

Organizers: Saskia Freye, Sascha Münnich

This mini-conference aims to explore the analytical power and boundaries of Polanyi’s concept of the countermovement in the era of a globalized capitalism. Intensification of economic integration on a global scale and the increasing financialization and marketization of business, politics and the everyday life has undermined the post-war settlement in many (Western) countries, producing what might be called a “second Polanyian moment”. These developments advance forcefully and (re-)expose ever more parts of society to the market, thereby undermining its social, environmental, and economic preconditions. By re-integrating economy and society, Polanyi’s concept is a powerful tool to analyze social movements and political re-regulation on different levels (from local to cross-national) and in different forms (reactionary, nationalistic, progressive).

The mini-conference is organized alongside three themes:

1)  Inventory and analytical boundaries

The concept of countermovement enables us to look beyond classical social movements and integrate and make sense of phenomena such as spreading religious fundamentalism and nationalism and their ambivalent relation to marketization. While countermovement can take very different forms, we must prevent degrading the concept as a catch-all category and sharpening the conceptual core and its boundaries.

If capitalism is a social order, does this mean that every non-market engagement is part of a countermovement? Which empirical developments and phenomena do we currently observe? How do we distinguish engagements and phenomena as parts of a countermovement from other forms of societal engagement (and which)? How do we explain the lack of countermovement?

2)  Systematization of countermovements

The countermovement is by no means homogenous and relies neither on shared intellectual preconceptions, nor on anti-liberal attitudes. Furthermore, the precarious sharpness of the distinction between market and (non-market) institutional regulation complicates a Polanyian analysis: Liberalism may be part of a countermovement against the status quo of market economies. Social protest may be directed at blocking particular aspects of contemporary market economies while others are very much accepted or even welcomed.

Alongside what aspects can we differentiate forms of engagement that may be subsumed as countermovements? To which degree do movements such as Anti-Globalization, Occupy, the Arab spring movement or the recent European wave of nationalist or racist protests represent Polanyian countermovements? How do different engagements situate themselves in relation to capitalism? What new or re-newed reactionary or conservative forms of protection against marketization do we find? How do they differ from progressive forms? Is there a liberal or rationalistic countermovement against marketization? What normative basis do the different approaches to protect society have today?

3)  Historic advancement, successes and reactions

How does countermovement today differ from the processes analyzed by Polanyi? How successful are different forms of countermovement? How do we explain the cleavages within the counter-countermovement of today’s global neoliberalism? Which role do certain economic sectoral interests play for fostering (or blocking) certain countermovements? Which forms of economic knowledge do countermovements make use of? Are economically based agendas more successful than positions that are rooted in classical political or social philosophy? How does global/today’s capitalist economies “react” to countermovements? Do we see changing “spirits of capitalism” answering critics?

Organizers: Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Thomas Beauvisage, Kevin Mellet, Olivier Pilmis, Marie Trespeuch

In the past two decades, the development of Internet and digital technologies has radically impacted capitalism, by transforming the organization of markets, firms and consumer agencies. All economic sectors are, in one way or another, affected by this transformation. Particularly relevant for socio-economists is the reshaping of many markets through digital platforms, as well as the disruption of industries (music, urban transportation, advertising, media…) by online ‘pure player’. Although the promise of economic efficiency and rationalization of markets – particularly strong during the New Economy bubble – still remains pregnant, more recent expectations associated with digital capitalism include consumer empowerment through online participative devices or the rise of a “sharing” economy explicitly distancing from pure economic rationality. The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together researchers studying digital markets. We will particularly welcome contributions that address the following thematic strands (although contributions exploring other related questions will be considered):

The infrastructure of digital capitalism. Internet and digital technologies provide a turnkey infrastructure of platforms and market intermediaries. These intermediaries support economic coordination between multiple actors, potentially on a large scale, by defining and organizing the economic qualification of goods, pricing and transaction standards, as well as matching modalities. In doing so, they embed and perform conventions and rules that define and stabilize the expectations of economic actors. Digital capitalism produces new coordination instruments, such as judgement and evaluation systems based on consumer participation (online consumer reviews), virtual and alternative currencies, cryptomarkets, “zero-price” business models, scoring algorithms and predictive calculation, etc.. The design of electronic marketplaces and the establishment of digital business models are therefore privileged observation sites for studying the process of internalization of values and moral norms in economic coordination.

The expansion of capitalism? The diffusion of digital technologies has also led to the inclusion of new entities to the market economy. This process of marketization relies on the ‘digitization’ of existing goods and services – mainly those produced by knowledge-intensive and creative industries – and also on the creation and circulation of new commodities such as in-game objects, personal data or online reputation. It is also based on the inclusion of new types of actors into the game of economic exchange: video-sharing websites (Youtube, Vimeo), marketplaces (Ebay, Etsy), lodging websites (AirBnB, Homeaway), micro-task websites (Fiverr, Amazon Mechanical Turk…) have in common to give private individuals means to step into amateur commercial activities. This ongoing process shifts market boundaries and softens the separation between economic and non-economic activities. It has consequently raised many debates and controversies related to the moral dimension of markets: digital labour, contested commodities, online participation, etc.

Market regulation in the digital age. The digital economy challenges existing regulatory frameworks in many ways. First, it tends to weaken existing national or multi-country regulations, because products and services are distributed and made available on a global scale. On various markets such as those for cultural goods, urban transportation, hotel industry, gambling, etc., national regulators are often providing various and loosely coordinated late answers to the challenges posed by new global digital services. Moreover, digital markets share economic characteristics (winner-takes-all dynamics, multi-sided markets, etc.) that make them more difficult to regulate. Secondly, the expansion of digital markets produces contradictions between different orders of worth. Many actors condemn the legal impediments to the development of digital innovation, whereas others focus on the problems of laissez faire (inequalities, monopolies domination…) and wish that the regulator protects specific economic actors (incumbents, national firms, consumers…), by law or tax policy. Different studies about digital markets regulations could bring a valuable input to understand what are the specific economic and moral orders produced on digital markets, and how law and politics aim at translating them in regulation frameworks and instruments.

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

The mini-conference “Domesticizing financial economies, part 3” will pursue the rich and exciting discussions of the first two Domesticizing financial economies mini-conferences, held at Chicago and London at the 2014 and 2015 SASE meetings. Our starting point is that the use of even the most sophisticated financial products can be understood in the light of a close empirical description of their various social and technical contexts, ranging from social ties and obligations, to ways of calculating, to specific devices and informational infrastructures. Rather than (or as well as) seeking to understand how financial economies are “economized”, to draw on a term used by Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon, we are thus interested in work that explores how monetary transactions are woven into the fabric of the everyday and come to be “domesticized”.

The precise ways in which financial economies become domesticized, as recent literature and many of the papers presented at the last two versions of this mini-conference have shown, are deeply morally entangled. Credit evaluation mechanisms, for example, inevitably involve a moral dimension, with debtors being routinely connected, via a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches to collective categories of expected behavior (Deville 2015a, Fourcade & Healy, 2013, Han 2012, Lazarus, 2012, Ossandón 2012, 2014). Such financial instruments are in turn continuously ‘earmarked’ as they pass through domestic settings. Those who participate in monetary interactions cannot but perform what Zelizer calls “relational work” as they delimit the moral frames according to which their transactions are located (Zelizer, 2010; Guérin, Villareal and Morvant-Roux, 2013, Wilkis, 2013). Similar practices can be observed in the extension and creation of new monetary infrastructures (Maurer (2012). Mobile monies in countries in Africa and Central America, for instance, are intimately related with the actions of agencies that explicitly justify their action in moral terms (e.g. the Gates Foundation, most prominently). Meanwhile, governments and multilateral organizations around the world have made the extension of formal banking into a goal that is framed not only in economic but also moral terms. This can be seen in the advancement of goals such as financial inclusion and social and economic development that directly target financial citizens at the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (Elyachar 2012, Langley, 2008, McFall, 2015), or in the global proliferation of financial literacy workshops in which actors from the banking, policy and not-for-profit sectors attempt to educate individuals into becoming ‘financially literate’ (Lazarus, 2016). Such processes do not, however, encounter passive populations: controversies about financial instruments can lead to the development of new moral and political collectives, such as the variety of debtor publics that have emerged in different social and historical contexts (Deville, 2015b, Luzzi, 2012, Ross, 2014).

We invite papers that look at specific situations of monetary transaction and domestic credit and money management. Papers with varied disciplinary backgrounds discussing the following issues are welcome:

• The intimate dimensions of monetary and financial transactions, whether in the moment of exchange itself, or before and after
• Moral boundaries and/or inequalities operating through everyday and domestic settings rooted in and/or created by financial products
• The ways in which household finances become entangled with and affected by a range of socio-technical devices
• Emerging financial products and services targeting domestic finance that are re-shaping the financial ecologies encountered by consumers (e.g. payday loans, credit score management services, department store credit cards, pawn shops, new ways of banking)
• Emerging transactional technologies (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 chains of economic relations
• Controversies, matters of concern, new affected groups, publics and commercial circuits being co-produced with contemporary domestic financial landscapes and/or financial instruments

Organizers: Phil Almond, Peter Fairbrother, María González, Christian Lévesque, Gregor Murray

This mini-conference concerns subnational economic and social governance (regions and industries), with a particular focus on its implications for work and employment. The objective is to develop a better understanding of experimental practices and policies developed by a range of actors and notably those promoting worker and community deliberation, wellbeing and sustainability.

Subnational regions and industries are engaged in a perpetual struggle to ensure jobs and prosperity. Policy makers, corporations, trade unionists and other civil society organizations are seeking to maintain or change institutions to attract capital and engage in skill development, firm upgrading and economic innovation. Institutional actors at this level are often key interlocutors for foreign direct investors and geographically mobile domestic firms attracted to some combination of low- and high-road competitiveness strategies, ranging from low-cost, total flexibility to innovative ecosystems supported by dense institutional networks. Workers and their communities often appear to be excluded from the experimentation under way, but there is increasing consensus that both the traditional institutions regulating work and employment and the neo-liberal narratives that seek to undermine them are failing to produce good results for workers and their communities. This potentially opens up space for alternative moral economies, centred on worker and community wellbeing, sustainability and deliberation and requiring new narratives and new capabilities to engage in institutional experimentation.

Contributions to this mini-conference might include one or more of the following themes.

• Multi-level or comparative analysis of experimentation at the subnational level:  the possibility of combining innovative eco-systems and worker and community voice; the conditions promoting worker well-being, organizational sustainability and greater inclusiveness for those traditionally excluded from institutions for economic governance.
• Shifts in the nature of subnational regulation facing mobile firms, particularly as regards employment, social protection and environmental sustainability; the links with other levels and types of regulation; and how these are being re-ordered or re-combined.
• How governance at the sub-national and industry/sectors levels shapes how actors deal with firm upgrading and insertion into global value chains/production networks, skills training, labour market opportunities, industry and firm restructuring, economic and social development.
• How institutions facilitate or hinder change: the uneven and contested nature of institutional change at subnational levels, the weakening or strengthening of community economic development strategies, the improvement or deterioration of working conditions and economic inequalities, the asymmetries of power between actors, and the implications for being more or less inclusive, democratic and participative.
• How actors take on and combine roles: the transformation of and relationships between and within existing and new actors (employer associations, multinational firms and their supplier networks, trade unions, economic development and labour market agencies, investment funds, new worker investment vehicles, other civil society organizations); and the capabilities and resources they require to engage in experimentation.
• The emergence of and competition between narratives of regional and sectoral development and their implications for work and employment and worker/community voice.

Organizers: Mehmet Asutay, Necati Aydin, Haider Ala Hamoudi, M. Kabir Hassan, Aaron Pitluck, Lena Rethel

This mini-conference invites contributions from across the social sciences and humanities to reflect on the past, present, and contested futures of Islam’s new financial and economic moralities. As part of the Islamic revival of the 1970s and 1980s, social movements worldwide have pursued multiple strategies to imagine and implement an economic system organized around Islamic values such as social justice, reciprocity and the spiritual, moral, intellectual, social, and material well-being of individuals. This includes the US$2.5 trillion Islamic finance industry and US$1.29 trillion halal food market, not to mention Islamic “modest fashion,” halal pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and Islamically-marketed travel, recreation, and lifestyle products.  It also includes philanthropic institutions such as pious foundations (waqf) and charities funded by almsgiving (zakah).  Islamic economic practices range from the morally guided everyday practices of individuals to those of multinational corporations and state elites seeking to enter and advance Islamic markets. With the hindsight of forty years, we can observe heterogeneous and explicitly competing Islamic economic moralities, found at various scales of socio-economic organization.

Three overlapping research projects have emerged as a result of the rapid growth of the Islamic economy. First, it has attracted social scientists seeking to document and interpret the historical and contemporary dynamics of this new socio-economic phenomenon. This strand of scholarship studies the emergence of the Islamic economy either on its own terms, or with reference to its convergence and divergence with other economies, be they explicitly moral or otherwise. Second, it has generated research by academics and practitioners to advance this socio-economic project. In this scholarship, Islamic economy is often conceptualized as part of an emerging alternative modernity that explicitly embraces the morality of economic action. Third, it has also generated scholarship critical of Islamic economic practices, particularly in Islamic banking and finance. Much of this third research stream argues that Islamic finance is excessively focused on efficiency and profitability at the expense of Islamic moral values such as equity, fairness, and individual development. Importantly, it debates the extent to which the Islamic finance industry has diverged from Islamic idea(l)s, investigates alternative aspirations for Islamic finance, and deliberates strategies for transforming its current trajectory.

Embracing all three research streams, the conference aims to (i) (re-)examine the key axioms and moral claims of Islamic economy both in theory and as practiced; (ii) explore the economic, social and political dynamics underpinning the various sectors, scales and sites of the Islamic economy; and (iii) interrogate the extent to which the Islamic economy provides a substantive alternative to mainstream economic activity with a special emphasis on the Islamic finance sector. A provisional list of panel topics and indicative research questions can be accessed at the University of Warwick or University of Durham.  King Saud University is providing a limited number of travel grants for graduate students – read the Conference Submissions and Awards Guildelines for more information.

Organizers: Barbara Brents, Erica Coslor, Brett Crawford, Martin Parker

Intersections between morals and economic forces provide a productive niche to study blurring of cultural factors, economic trends, and values-driven behaviour at the individual, organizational and market level. In the same age as ethical investing, which can be seen as one redefinition of legitimacy, we find an explosion of formerly taboo goods and services elsewhere. From the increasing access to pornography to the newly legal US gay wedding industry, or the exclusion of alcohol and tobacco firms in investing, we see wide redefinition of what is, and what is not, considered acceptable for consumers, firms and society.

This theme welcomes empirical papers that focus on redefinition and movement of moral and ethical lines, and the factors that influence these shifts, from culture to regulation to potential profits. For example, neoliberal promotion of free markets fosters a culture of consumption promoting individual freedom and self-management. This paradoxically seems to promote conservative gender and sexual norms, while mainstreaming the growing sex industry. More widely, moral and political boundaries impact producers, conditions of production and consumers. Selling sex toys is legal, selling sex often isn’t, and selling other people for sex is usually illegal, yet we find a $870 m. market for transnational organized crime. Morals and categories are seen in calculative practices from non-interest Islamic mortgages to museums that avoid valuing sacred and human remains. We also welcome organizational-level work, given how contemporary corporations are expected to pursue morality while providing financial returns, such as Starbucks’ anti-gun/ pro equality stance.

Papers for this session could address questions such as the following:

• Cultural Dimensions of Taboo Markets
  1. What are the cultural dimensions behind the growing market for taboo goods and services?
  2. Does neoliberal culture foster increasing boundaries around the taboo?  Or are those boundaries more fluid and flexible?
  3. Do a culture’s moral values overlay market dynamics?  Or does the market create its own morality?

• Moral and immoral valuation, quantification and provenance
  1. What calculative practices are deemed moral or immoral and why? When do we see alternative systems vs. calculation itself being opposed?
  2. What are the implications of tainted provenance for valuation? Can controversy both add and take away value?

• Quantifying the growing markets for stigmatized goods and services
  1. Do new social investing methods change the evaluation of sin stocks, gun markets and tobacco?
  2. How can we evaluate interactions between screening socially undesirable products vs. potential revenue losses from divestiture from profitable, but undesirable areas?

• Blurring legitimate and illegitimate market boundaries
  1. By what mechanisms do moral and political boundaries become blurred markets?
  2. How do blurring moral and political boundaries impact what is produced, who produces, conditions of production and consumer impacts?

• Corporations as Actors with Morality
  1. How has actorhood emphasizing moral values affected the corporate model?
  2. How have corporate values and wealthy employees reshaped financial markets?

Organizers: Dean Curran, Dave Elder-Vass, Elisa Oreglia, Nikos Sotirakopoulos, Janaki Srinivasan

Digital technologies have opened up new opportunities for novel forms of economic practice and for the economic empowerment of individuals and communities. But what happens when they encounter the mesh of pre-existing social, cultural, and economic relations within which they are deployed in practice? We invite papers that explore the moral economies underpinning the use of digital technologies, and examine how they encourage or constrain the use of technologies to renegotiate existing power structures and economic practices. We are particularly interested in the following themes:

1. How do existing moral economies shape digital economies?

1. The moral economy of digital economic forms. To what extent do new digital economic forms draw on consciously ethical practice and does this open up awareness of different approaches to the economy? Do they offer promising alternatives to mainstream market capitalism or are we already witnessing a gradual subordination of digital gift practices to the accumulation of capital?
2. Explaining new digital economic forms. Between nakedly capitalistic market-oriented models at one extreme, and the almost purely gift economy model of Wikipedia at the other, there lies a continuum of innovative and often hybridised forms of economic practices. Can sociology, oriented to practices, explain how these economic forms operate, how they develop, and how they hybridise, where economics, oriented to markets, cannot?
3. Gender and the moral economy of digital technologies. How do the moral economies of the family, of the community, and of the workplace influence notions of the ‘appropriate’ engagement of men and women with digital technologies, and how does this vary between the Global North and Global South?

2. How are moral economies reworked in the digital world?

1. Encounters between the ‘new’ sharing economy and the moral economy of the communities they work in. Are companies such as Uber and AirBnB a new type of moral economy? Do they re-create space for community enterprise or merely seek to evade forms of regulation that have long protected consumers?
2. Subaltern communities and the moral economy of digital technologies in the Global South. What processes and circumstances allow digital technologies to be incorporated successfully (or not) into the moral economies of subaltern communities?
3. The digital public sphere. In what way are the power relations and social practices associated with digital economies affecting contemporary public and private spheres?
4. How do value propositions associated with the introduction of digital technologies, such as disintermediation, or the death of distance, play out in practice?

Organizers: Christopher Steele, Klaus Weber

Morality in markets has traditionally been cast as a matter of ethical decision-making by individuals, or perhaps of cultural mores and dispositions. Focusing predominantly on these aspects of market moralities, however, downplays the many ways in which economic behaviour is embedded in material infrastructures. These infrastructures encompass a variety of devices, technologies, and objects that generate, regulate, discipline, or automate market behaviour. Historically, one can think of the importance of physical marketplaces in shaping economic activity, or of the role of calculative devices such as double-entry bookkeeping, or spreadsheet models of investing. More recently, new online sites for market activities have emerged, such as crowd-sourcing platforms that are reshaping the representation of economic and social enterprises to their various audiences. Analytic technologies, such as algorithmic trading in financial markets and computer-generated purchasing suggestions and feedback opportunities in consumer markets, potentially put decision-making and market behaviour on a different foundation. Such material infrastructures have moral assumptions built into them: they influence who can be admitted as a qualified market participant, the information deemed relevant for attaching value to goods, and the types of relationships and market behaviours that are deemed appropriate.

Materialized moralities influence market behaviour, and cognition; frequently in ways unrecognized by participants, and in line with principles to which participants might not subscribe. In some cases, deliberate moral decision-making may take place in the design of material objects and infrastructures, rather than during everyday market activity – which may be relatively unreflective, if not automated. In other instances, morality is smuggled into material infrastructures by the unaware. Market moralities that are materially embedded can be shaped by elite actors that control their design; yet sometimes even the designers do not see the moral assumptions in their work. Increased attention to materiality should uncover the multiple loci and forms of moral decision-making regarding markets, and some of the ways by which particular market moralities extend their jurisdiction and influence over space and time.

For this mini-conference theme, we call for work that explores the intersection of materiality and morality in market contexts – whether in contemporary or historical markets. An important goal of the mini conference theme is to facilitate conversations between researchers that study materiality from different traditions. The following examples of related questions are not exhaustive:

• When and how do market devices, technologies and objects become infused with moral purpose or intentionality?
• How do humans interact with material infrastructures, in everyday market settings? And what are the consequences for their moral decision-making?
• When and how do material objects and infrastructures create affordances or effectively entrench a morality within a given market (i.e. when do we see ‘moral performativity’)?
• When and how do market objects, technologies, and infrastructures create unintended moral consequences?
• What form does resistance take? When are underlying moral assumptions noticed? How and when can such assumptions be contested?
• How malleable are the moralities of material objects and infrastructures over time? How can material dimensions of markets be subverted or re-appropriated for new moral purposes?
• And, in general: how might a socio-material lens help us rethink the role of moral deliberation and intentionality in the design, emergence, and operations of markets?

Organizers: Brice Laurent, Benjamin Lemoine, Roi Livne

New forms of international regulation and increasing global flows of capital, people, and knowledge are transforming the economic roles states assume, as well as the very essence of statehood. We invite papers from diverse disciplines, which examine how new patterns of economic exchange, valuation, and operation configure new sovereign ontologies (i.e. what states are), moral and normative discussions of statehood (what states should be), and states’ relationship to populations, economies, territories, resources, and global institutions. Participants can explore the co-production of sovereignty, state methodologies and technologies, objects of state sovereignty (e.g. the economy, the environment, welfare, education), and moral orders (e.g. judgments of state actions’ legitimacy, definitions of the “public good.”)

This mini-conference has four themes:

1. “State Metrologies” and Governance over States. Credit-rating agencies and global institutions (e.g. the World Bank and IMF) have immense influence on states’ policymaking. First, they regularly coerce states into adopting policies; second, they apply symbolic violence, which states internalize—what Fourcade calls “state metrologies”: rankings of states’ financial performance, policies, and economic prospects. State metrologies subject states to standards of wealth and success: they govern states by defining statehood. Papers in this theme may explore questions about the formation of metrologies, challenges and resistance to metrologies, controversies over the modes of control exercised over states, the impact financial crises (and reactions to them) have on sovereignty, etc.
2. Postcolonial Sovereignties. The economic sovereignty of former colonies is conditioned by multiple international powers, including global corporations, global institutions, and enduring ties to former colonial states. Sovereign operations—e.g. natural resource utilization, global trade and local market organization, and development policies—are embedded in these power relations. We seek papers that explore struggles over post-colonial states’ ownership of natural resources; negotiations of independence and autonomy as they take place in local and global markets and in relation to international powers; new forms of economic sovereignty that emerge in postcolonial situations; and the role states assume in mediating between global actors and local populations.
3. The (Re)formation of National Economies. Scholars have identified the formation of national economies as an essential part of state-building projects: economies emerge as discrete and intelligible objects, which state professionals and policymakers can measure and manage, fix and ruin, and analyze and evaluate. Economy formation involves claims for professional jurisdictions, as well as reformulations of state capacity and legitimate role.  We invite papers that explore the historical processes by which national economies emerge, become contested, and undergo redefinitions. Examples include state support of industrial sectors, market regulation, and handling of public finances.
4. States and Economic Lives. States lurk behind virtually any economic interaction, as economic regulators, mediators, and architects. We invite empirical accounts of states’ concrete operations in day-to-day economic life. Papers may explore, for example, how states manifest in everyday economic interactions; the actions states take in configuring economic relations; the operations of economic actors that state regulation empowers; the state effect as it emerges from its multifarious practices; and how resource allocation by states performs markets and economies.

Organizers: Francesca Forno, Torsten Geelan, Paolo Graziano, Lara Monticelli

The recent and yet unresolved Great Recession has revealed all the limitations and flaws of the ‘economic moralities’ embedded in neoliberalism which have been guiding the functioning of economic and political institutions in numerous countries. In tandem with the rise of new social movements and the success of radical political parties, every day economic practices of production and consumption are also being questioned and challenged by a growing number of ‘critical’ citizens. These attempts often take the form of local, horizontal and collaborative initiatives such as consumer-producer networks, cooperatives, ethical banking, co-working spaces, and the like.

All these practices share a steadfast belief in the idea of ‘social sustainability’, and a desire to move towards a society which promotes not just environmentalism but also values of equality, diversity, and social cohesion. Such economic practices and ideas have the potential to gradually disrupt the economic moralities underlying many capitalist modes of production and the ways in which we consume goods and services.

This Mini Conference welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions from around the world and across the social sciences (sociology, political science, development studies, economics, anthropology, business, and philosophy) that touch on the following three themes:

1) New Modes of Production 

The social economy refers to economic activity that is directly organized and controlled through the exercise of some form of social power – rooted in the voluntary association of people in civil society, and based on the capacity to organize people for collective action of various sorts.

The range of economic activities that can be organized through the social economy is very broad and includes recycling, childcare, housing, healthcare, disaster relief and web applications.

This stream welcomes contributions that:

• Critique existing modes of production in the social economy;
• Provide empirical examples and theoretical accounts of how the social economy could be further enhanced through institutional design;
• Identify and explore cases of organizing economic activity through the social economy in hitherto unexamined countries, economic sectors, and geographical levels (local, regional, national, and supranational).

2) Critical Consumption

Over the past years, new social movements (Sustainable Community Movement Organizations) have emerged, going beyond more traditional forms of mobilization and of contentious politics. SCMOs are focused on exploiting alternative forms of consumption as a political tool: organizations and movements such as community food networks, community sustained agriculture and fair trade, are all examples of SCMOs which have gained increasing relevance globally. The crisis has provided further space for such organizations which have helped to build new social relationships and resistance.

Many of the studies on the topic, however, have analyzed this phenomenon mainly from the individual consumer perspective while less attention has been paid to the role of social movements promoting collective political actions.

This second stream welcomes contributions discussing theoretical challenges posed by SCMOs and/or empirical illustrations in both the Global North and the Global South.

3) Alternative Lifestyles

In our final stream we will discuss theoretical and empirical (academic and/or activist based) research on all those, increasingly diffused, everyday practices that are based not (or not only) on monetary transactions but on trust, interchange and reciprocity. Examples range from daily ‘sharing economy’ practices – such as car sharing, couch-surfing, house swapping, co-working – to more radical and explicitly anti-capitalistic ones like eco-villages or intentional communities.

We welcome papers that address:

• The extent to which these practices constitute (or not) ‘coping mechanisms’ for socio-economic exclusion;
• The way through which these practices manage to provide not just material goods but services outside a ‘market’ logic;
• The extent to which these practices succeed (or fail) in introducing societal values and norms (reciprocity, exchange, mutual help) that are an alternative to neoliberal ideology, and help foster a ‘new imaginary’ for progressive social change.

Organizers: Lane Kenworthy, Ive Marx, Brian Nolan, Wiemer Salverda

The postwar period brought strong economic growth to the rich democracies of the West. During the first few decades, the fruits of that growth were relatively widely shared. This is no longer the case. What it worse, it is starting to look like this relatively brief episode of growing affluence and declining inequality was a historical exception. Poverty has remained stubbornly high throughout the rich world in recent decades, even when times were good, and social progress on other fronts has stalled. The rewards of economic progress these days end up in fewer and fewer hands. Economic inequality has taken center stage in the political debate. It is now even seen as threatening economic progress itself.

Many studies and conferences have addressed the causes of rising inequality. This mini-conference is about what can be done.

We face an uphill battle to sustain the egalitarian ideals many of us hold dearly. But many influential scholars believe that uphill battles can be won. In a just published book, the doyen of inequality research, Tony Atkinson, sets set out concrete policy proposals that could bring about a genuine shift in the distribution of income towards less inequality. He identifies ambitious new policies in five areas: technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital, and taxation.  Likewise, in Social Democratic America Lane Kenworthy puts forward very concrete proposals to bring about more equal and just societies, especially in America. Everywhere there are vibrant debates on the living wage, top income taxation, taxation of wealth and intergenerational transfers, on the reform of income protection policies, on social investment, on seeking to direct technological advance in socially useful directions, and more.

The aim of this mini-conference is to discuss such proposals from a range of disciplinary angles. Papers can take an ethical or theoretical perspective, or be mostly empirical, including building on such techniques as microsimulation.

We have in mind three streams: Employment and wages; Capital and wealth: Taxation, social protection and welfare state.

Organizers: Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Eunmi Mun

This mini-conference will focus on research that explains the role of organizations in the growing inequality across many countries. Attempts to understand mechanisms growing inequality have been mostly focused on two fronts. Comparative capitalism scholarship has provided insight into the macro-level processes that contribute to the increase of inequality, such as the shrinking welfare states and the rise of the free market ideology of the liberal economy. On the other hand, stratification research has documented an extremely unequal distribution of resources, such as income and housing, at the individual and household levels. But how did the macro-level forces produce these micro-level inequalities? We are prioritizing research on organizations where the distributional action takes place. We attempt to understand how organizations mediate these two levels; they respond to the pressures to adopt liberal-market practices, implement or obstruct government social and economic policies, alter the distribution of resources among internal members, and eventually produce and sustain inequalities based on gender, race/ethnicity, class and citizenship. We are particularly interested in papers that are comparative across organizations, countries or time. We are also interested in eclectic methodological approaches, which combine multiple research methods and collect innovative data. Papers using longitudinal employer-employee data are especially encouraged and we hope to discuss the development of a comparative inequality project using such data. The eventual organization of sessions will reflect the papers submitted, but potential sessions topics might include:

1. The role of organizations in the growing inequality across national institutional contexts

2. Interaction between organizations and the state policies

3. Patterns of relational inequality within organizations

4. Theories of organizational inequality regimes

5. Citizenship, gender, race/ethnicity, and class intersections in organizational context

Organizers: Anne Jourdain, Sidonie Naulin

With the expansion of web platforms such as Airbnb.com, Craigslist.org, Etsy.com or Vizeat.com, people are encouraged to commodify their personal possessions as well as their domestic or leisure practices. More generally, this Mini-Conference scrutinizes the marketization of practices previously considered as recreational or domestic, such as cooking, doing handicrafts, blogging, taking care, raising pets, carrying a child, etc. The commodification of the attributes of the self – human body, personal data… – is also in the scope of this issue. The moral dimensions of marketization will be of special interest: what moral changes favor the commodification of previously non commodified activities? How do market and domestic orders of worth combine? Are markets used to achieve non-economic ends? What about the distinction between legal activities and grey economy in such emerging markets? The main goal of the Mini-Conference is to improve our understanding of the causes and effects – at individual and collective levels – of the extension of the market.

The following topics could be addressed:

1)  Becoming an entrepreneur

By commodifying their domestic or leisure practices, amateurs or ordinary people turn themselves into entrepreneurs. They become concerned by financial investments, by the need to promote their products or services, and they must learn how to engage in economic transactions as sellers. Such investments are expected to alter work-life articulation and to transform the meaning of their activity. Actually, different kinds of commitment in marketization, different profiles and finally different career paths can be identified in each domain.

2)  Online platforms as new marketplaces

The marketization of everyday life is strongly supported by the development of technological devices that play a crucial role as market intermediaries by enabling ordinary people to reach a large audience of potential “consumers”. Those platforms also allow people who share similar interests to locate each other and build communities of interest. They bring values that can be either close to the traditional market values or seemingly of a new kind (community building, resource sharing…). Online platforms are thus interesting places to study in order to understand the transformations of contemporary capitalism.

3)  The social and moral status of newly commodified practices

Market rules are often considered as opposed to social and moral values. However, marketization could also be perceived as a means to improve social recognition, at individual and collective levels, since transactions are also providers of social relationships. Simultaneously, the marketization of specific practices could favor their social upgrading. These questions could be particularly scrutinized in a gender perspective, as they especially concern traditionally depreciated feminine activities.

4)  Market regulation

The marketization of domestic and leisure activities blurs the boundaries between amateurs and professionals. Leisure and work are less and less differentiated. For example, bloggers tend to compete with journalists, private drivers with taxi drivers and so on. The public reactions of well-established professions towards the rise of new “competitors” express the disrupting effect of the commodification of domestic or leisure practices. This phenomenon therefore questions the existing regulation of professions.

Organizers: Cecilia Manzo, Ivana Pais, Francesco Ramella

The transformations that have occurred in the aftermath of the economic crisis, together with the diffusion of technological innovations and new cultural sensibilities, have determined the emergence of a new logic of integration of the economic into the social, based upon collaboration and sharing, something which was framed in the public debate under the term “sharing economy”.

Premised upon the principle of accessing resources rather than owning them, in a context where social relations are increasingly being mediated through online digital platforms, the sharing economy has determined the emergence of new forms of organization.

Examples of such organizations, born around software development and the “open source movement”, can now be found in finance, with crowdfunding and social lending; in education, with new platforms of social learning; within mobility, with car sharing and car pooling services; within work, with the diffusion of co-working, maker spaces and fab labs, together with online platforms of contracting and ‘digital work’; in public administration, with new models of governance of the ‘commons’; in the new supply chains of rural entrepreneurship and hospitality, based on house exchange and couch-surfing.

The sharing economy, however, is a multi-faceted concept that presents a number of critical aspects. This mini-conference will gather both theoretical and empirical contributions that deal with the analysis of the collaborative and sharing economy from a plurality of perspectives, focusing on three main topics:

• The transformation of work: the sharing economy challenges the boundaries between work and leisure time, paid and unpaid services, professionalism and amateurism. It suggests the rethinking of traditional models and organizational arrangements, according to a collaborative logic founded upon ‘commons-based production’ but also potentially enacts new forms of conflict.

• The local development: the “collaborative public spaces” where the new forms of work are developed within the sharing economy (fab labs, makerspaces etc) can be considered local collective goods that generate external economies, both tangible and intangible, and are useful for local development. These new collective goods of the sharing economy are in part different to the traditional ones that have been explored in the literature on local development, and are mostly associated with the action of public institutions (authority) or interest organizations (association). In this case, we can observe interesting novelties with reference to the generating mechanisms and dynamics of public goods.

• The social construction of innovation: knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer forms of collaboration are transforming the dynamics of invention and innovation. In the last decades, systems of innovation (national, regional and sectoral systems) have been deeply influenced by a process of pluralization and decentralization of knowledge that make them more open and collaborative than in the past. Not only are economic innovations often the product of joint efforts involving a plurality of actors – driven both by market and non-market incentives – but they are also widely shaped by the contributions of lead-users and open innovation communities.