Organizers: Matthew Allen, Jared Finnegan, Geoffrey Wood

Climate change and environmental sustainability are significant policy problems facing advanced capitalist democracies, yet comparative political economy has contributed little to research in this area. Organised around two broad themes, this mini-conference brings together scholars working at the intersection of comparative political economy and the environment to address key questions on business and energy and the comparative political economy of climate change policy, and to develop a research network for future collaboration.  We will prioritise contributions with sophisticated, comparative research designs that include innovative, well-developed and testable theory, grounded in the comparative political economy literature. We welcome both pure theoretical and rigorous empirical papers.

Business and energy

We are now in a long energy transition: the proportion of hydrocarbons as a part of the global energy mix is declining. However, fossil fuels still account for a large share of electricity generation.  A new body of work links long energy transitions to national institutions. Two major journals, Journal of International Business Studies and British Journal of Management, are running unprecedented parallel special issues on this question.

Building on this work, we call for submissions to address questions related to the following issues:

• Socio-economic institutions and the switch to renewable resources: how have publicly funded innovation systems influenced the risks associated with developing and deploying fossil-fuel and renewable-energy technologies in different locations?
• The consequences of the use or ‘non-use’ of renewable energy for different socio-economic groups: Does the switch to renewable energy affect the number of ‘decent’ jobs within countries? Does shale gas influence which sectors and firms investors back?
• Developments in energy supplies and the reinforcement of, or reduction in, institutional differences between countries: Does the greater use of shale gas reinforce the role of highly mobile investors and their prioritization of short-term financial rewards? Does switching to renewables complement the role of patient capital?

Comparative political economy of climate change policy

The adoption and stringency of climate change mitigation policies varies considerably across the advanced democracies. What explains this cross-national variation? Why do some countries do much to address climate change while others do little? Surprisingly, we know relatively little about the answers to these questions. We would, therefore, welcome contributions that seek to address the following themes:

• Political and economic institutions. What role do formal institutions play in influencing climate policy adoption and stringency – electoral rules, legislative rules, federalism, corporatism, varieties of capitalism, corporate governance, etc?
• Organised interests. What role do business and labour organisations play? NGOs?
• Politics of the long-term. Which factors influence politicians’ willingness to invest in long-term policies that incur short-term costs on their constituents? Which factors lengthen business leaders’ time horizons?
• Partisanship and the climate. Do parties matter in regards to climate policy?
• Electoral incentives. What effect do electoral competition, electoral accountability and electoral cycles have on climate policy?
• Political economy of policy instrument choice. Why do governments choose one policy instrument over another?
• Public opinion: Does public opinion matter for climate policy? Under what conditions?

Organizers: Karin Knorr Cetina, Alex Preda

We invite contributions that investigate two fundamental dynamics of global finance and markets, and the ways in which these dynamics intersect: the internal, markets- and institution-specific processes and arrangements which support financial transactions, on the one hand, and the “facework” deployed by financial institutions towards external audiences, on the other hand. While more recent approaches, and especially those conducted in the tradition of science and technology studies, have emphasized the role of knowledge, information, and technology in the internal dynamics of markets, the extent to which information and knowledge play a significant role in the  public face of financial markets and institutions is much less clear. At the same time, both dimensions (hidden and public) can be seen as arenas of struggles and contestations, as exemplified, for instance, in the public debates around the value of finance. The extent to which these dimensions influence each other (or not) deserves increased attention.

We particularly welcome contributions that explore the following issues:

The impact of information technologies on financial organizations and markets, and the ways in which these technologies alter the dynamic and scope of financial transactions. Of interest are, among others, contributions investigating dedicated financial infrastructures, the increased use of algorithms and AI, markets in digital currencies, the impact of distributed ledgers, or the organizational challenges brought by FinTech.

The practices and structures of trading, both at the institutional and at the retail level. Of interest are, among others, contributions investigating the microdynamics of trading in relationship to technology, or the constitution and types of trading agency (including its constraints and limitations). What is the interplay between informational and institutional (infra)structures (including here regulation), on the one hand, and transactional practices, on the other hand?

The work deployed by financial institutions and markets that targets  external audiences, and the organizational arrangements supporting such “facework.” Of interest here are, among others, contributions investigating the presence of finance beyond the boundaries of trading floors and boardroom, in areas such as popular culture, the media, educational, or other professional institutions, to name but a few. Welcome as well are contributions investigating the constitution and responses of financial publics; the role played by technology, and especially by social media technologies in the interactions between financial institutions and external publics; the consequentiality of this “facework” for the inner dynamics of financial organizations and transactions.

The mini-conference welcomes theoretical, as well as empirical contributions and  diverse methodological approaches.

Organizers: Jean-Michel Bonvin, Francesco Laruffa, Kang-Kook Lee, Keun Lee, Hyeog Ug Kwon

The last three decades have been characterized by rising economic inequalities (in terms of income, wealth and capital vs. labor share) as well as by declining trust in democratic institutions. These processes have been driven by key factors, such as changes in power relations in favor of the wealthy, extended financialization and de-regulated globalization – all features of the neo-liberal ideology. However, since the financial crisis started in 2008, the hegemony of neo-liberalism has begun to be under pressure. Yet, in this process of global reordering, there is no guarantee that the new approaches, though claiming to overcome market fundamentalism and austerity, involve more emancipatory social contexts. Notions such as “inclusive growth” and “social investment” are endorsed by both leading scholars and international organizations (e.g. the OECD, the World Bank and the EU). They have already inspired reforms around the world, including in Europe (e.g. Social Investment Package of the European Commission), in East Asia (especially in Korea and Japan where the “income-led growth strategy” and so-called “Abenomics” are increasingly influential approaches), in Latin America (where “conditional cash transfer programs” have been largely implemented) as well as in Australia and New Zealand. These emerging approaches may well involve a “paradigm shift” away from neo-liberalism but it remains unclear what they are able to deliver in terms of equality, democracy and justice. This new context opens up important normative and empirical challenges. The mini-conference will tackle these challenges in three successive panels:

• Inclusive growth, social investment and neo-liberalism: theoretical and normative issues
  1. Do the inclusive growth and social investment approaches really break with neo-liberalism? Or do they remain linked with an economic rationale, which impedes them to effectively promote equality, democracy and justice?
  2. To what extent are these approaches able to integrate the dimensions of “global justice” and “global citizenship”?
  3. To what extent can they include an eco-social agenda, capable of integrating (intergenerational) social justice, democracy and environmental sustainability?

• The impact of neo-liberalism, inclusive growth and social investment on economic inequality
  1. What role is played by financialization and globalization in the process of increasing inequalities? What are the main socio-economic results of neoliberalism?
  2. What are the consequences of social investment and/or inclusive growth policies on economic inequalities (taking into account class, gender and racial inequalities)? Do they reduce or reinforce existing inequalities?
  3. Are there significant differences across and within world regions?

• The impact of neo-liberalism, inclusive growth and social investment on political inequality
  1. What is the impact of neoliberalism on political equality and the health of democracy?
  2. Do social investment and/or inclusive growth policies actually reinforce democracy? Or do they give more power to technocrats and experts?
  3. Are there significant differences across and within world regions in terms of the impact of these approaches on political participation and democratic involvement?

We encourage submissions that address these and related themes and develop convincing arguments grounded in conceptual or empirical (qualitative and quantitative) studies.

Organizers: Thomas Beauvisage, Jean-Samuel Beuscart, Dave Elder-Vass, Timur Ergen, Anne Jourdain, Sidonie Naulin

Global reordering in the economy is occurring at many levels – between geographical regions, within geographical regions, between economic sectors, between different players in the same sector, and between market and non-market models of economic provisioning. The digital economy is at the forefront of these processes of reordering. For this miniconference we invite papers on all aspects of the socio-economic changes related to marketization and the contemporary digital economy, in all regions and sectors. Topics may include, for example:

Collaborative forms of digital economy

Digital technology has created new spaces for non-market and non-profit forms of economy, whether we call them collaborative, sharing, gift, or collective economies – from Wikipedia to Couchsurfing, from the open source software communities to Freecycle. How are these faring in their continuing competition with market forms? How do they combine or collide with more commercial forms? Are they able to deliver more equal and democratic forms of work and consumption?

Marketization processes

On the other hand, many practices previously considered as recreational or domestic are increasingly becoming marketized. Web platforms such as Airbnb.com, Craigslist.org, Etsy.com or Vizeat.com, encourage ordinary people to commodify their personal possessions as well as their common domestic or leisure practices. Human bodies and personal data are becoming commodified. Ordinary people are encouraged to turn themselves into entrepreneurs, changing forms of work-life articulation and generating altered social recognition. What are the causes and effects of these extensions of the market? How do market and domestic orders of worth combine? What are the consequences for the regulation of professions and the new challengers?

The platform economy

Platform sites like Amazon and Alibaba are well established, but the platform model is now breaking into vast new areas, most notoriously through taxi services like Uber and Didi. How do these new intermediaries benefit or harm competitors, states, workers and consumers? How can, and how should, they be regulated? Can those harmed by them find new ways to organize in response? Do the participants in the platform economy bring new values or moral economies to the markets that they impact? How do algorithm-based orderings, filterings and decisions fit with online platforms and their participants?

Digital market processes

The new economic sociology was largely defined by its account of embeddedness. Are digital commodity transactions and business models embedded in the social in different ways? How have the means of qualifying and valuing commodities changed, and who do these changes favour? Does digitalization favour specific forms of industrial organization? How does the massive collection of data on consumers affect the balance of power in and across markets and what risks does this generate? To what extent does digital automation (through algorithms, “artificial intelligence”) redistribute agencies and the balance of power within markets? What are the prospects for a digital transformation of the monetary form of commodity transactions?

Systemic consequences

What is the overall effect of these changes on macrosocial variables such as inequality, governance capacities, systemic risk, environmental change, and political engagement with economic issues? Does digital technology offer a prospect of greater economic and financial inclusion or is it systematically stacked against the poorest and most marginalized?

Organizers: Vincent Cardon, Antoine Bernard de Raymond, Olivier Pilmis

In recent years, socio-economists have studied social actors’ ability to elaborate representations of the future convincing enough to enable present actions when uncertainty prevails. The aim of this mini-conference is to bring together researchers examining how the future is taken into account in economic activities and regulation. Contributions addressing the following thematic strands are particularly welcome:

The technologies of future-related regulation. Present anticipations of the future involve a set of tools and calculative technologies. These techniques not only differ in the way they process “data” but also in the construction of the economic reality they engage. They also depend on the category of actors (institutions, NGOs, firms, individuals, pressure groups etc.) who produces and/or makes use of them. The development of foreknowledge for regulation emphasizes connections between socio-economics and science and technology studies, and leads to an interrogation on the social conditions under which expertise is regarded as reliable.

From planning to preparedness: knowledge of the future and governmentality. Anticipating the future is in tight relation with forms of government. For instance, while central planning drew on the assumption that the future was predictable, some new forms of regulation are based on the hypothesis of the occurrence of unlikely events (e.g. worst-case scenario). This shift questions the appropriate form of economic regulation and projection, conceivably leading to technological or cognitive disruptions.

The temporal orientation of regulation. The regulation of economies requires dealing with the future in the present. Future-guessing widely relies on present knowledge. Socio-technical devices cannot be understood without reference to the specific objective of economic regulation and, to its temporal order (e.g., shorter- or longer-run, trend/pathways or crisis/disruption). The way future economic orientations are designed affects the implementation of regulations in the present. Thus, investigating the relationship between projections about the future and action in the present also requires studying how these projections and calculations are translated into actual and present promises, decisions and guidelines.

Organizers: Daniel Mügge, Leonard Seabrooke

Why are economic policies what they are? Scholars in sociology, political science and beyond have demonstrated that ideas and beliefs held by policymakers are both constructed and also crucial to their decisions. Yet, such ideas and beliefs are not floating around freely, waiting to be picked up or not. They are institutionalized in governance apparatuses, written in policy scripts, and reproduced in routinized expert interactions.

This mini-conference seeks to advance this research agenda. It asks not just whether or how “ideas” matter, but how the social configuration and institutionalization of knowledge shapes and reproduces dominant forms of expertise and professional practice in economic policy. The mini-conference will focus on two dimensions of social and political organization that are key to transmitting, stabilizing and codifying economic knowledge: professional networks and economic indicators.

Themes addressed by the contributions to this mini-conference

Ideas and beliefs shape public policy through the individuals that embrace them, and this kind of knowledge is inherently social: it travels through professional and expert networks. Common sense understandings of economic reality are just that: common sense, created and solidified in interactions of individuals who respect the expertise or authority of other members of their networks. Through the contributions to this mini-conference we want to establish

• the shape of relevant professional networks,
• the content of the ideas and knowledge that professionals and experts transmit,
• the effects of these networks on economic policy, and
• the factors that explain variation in such patterns, for example across countries, policy areas, or international organizations.

The second, related strand of our mini-conference concentrates on macroeconomic indicators as highly institutionalized forms of expertise and economic ideas. Indicators such as unemployment rates, consumer price indices or GDP figures embody specific ideas about the operationalization of abstract economic concepts, such as inflation or public debt. Their translation into measurement routines – for example through the IMF’s manual for Government Finance Statistics or the System of National Accounts – anchors them in government policy in ways that go beyond the potentially ephemeral beliefs of policymakers considered in isolation. These indicators exist in a world parallel to those of the first strand in this mini-conference. Contributions could therefore again focus on

• the shape of professional and expert networks that decide how economic indicators are calculated,
• the content of the ideas they transmit,
• the effects of these networks on economic policy, and
• the factors that explain variation in such patterns, for example across countries, policy areas, or international organizations.

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

This mini-conference links to the theme of the conference, “Global Reordering: Prospects for Equality, Democracy and Justice,” by zeroing in on the growing literature on inequality within and across organizational settings. What are organizational conditions that produce more or less equality? 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, which generate more or less within organizational inequality. Few studies can also leverage comparison across country cases and over time to examine the levels and trends in equality/inequality within and across organizations, and how those are impacted by national institutional contexts, and broader trends of financialization and globalization.

We 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. We are particularly interested in relational inequality approaches, but are open to other perspectives. 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 linked employer-employee data are especially encouraged.

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

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

Organizers: Lea Elsässer, Timur Ergen, Daniel Mertens, Martin Seeliger

In the 1980s and 1990s, both Germany and Japan became emblematic of the concepts of nonliberal capitalism and coordinated market economies. Understood as regimes able to reconcile ‘equity and efficiency’ through a distinct set of institutions, they were put in opposition to the liberal, market-based order of Anglophone economies. Although debates about their resilience against global economic pressures never disappeared, the countries seem to have ceased serving as a unified representation in the study of capitalism(s), particularly since the financial crisis. Since scholarly accounts of both countries’ post-crisis trajectories are dealt with in specialized discourses, this mini-conference seeks to re-connect this research and thereby revive the debate around nonliberal capitalism in and after the age of liberalization. The mini-conference therefore invites both conceptual and empirical contributions that aim to explore, though not exclusively, the following issues:

(1) Developmental trajectories and theoretical approaches: Do the recent trajectories of nonliberal political economies offer opportunities to overthink theoretical approaches in Comparative Political Economy? Do the developments of the last two decades reveal ‘the true faces’ of the German and Japanese systems? How well do both countries align around exports and savings in their ‘growth models’?
(2) Labor and liberalization: Under conditions of progressing liberalization, re-commodification of wage labor has shaped economy and society also under nonliberal capitalism. How can we put these trends into the perspective of long-term trajectories, particularly regarding issues of dualization and inequality?
(3) Changes in the domain of industrial production: The financial crisis, the growth of Chinese manu-facturing exports and the digital economy challenge core parts of the production profiles of advanced nonliberal political economies. How have both countries adapted to recent dynamics in the world economy, for example in the fields of the organization of production, corporate strategies, industrial and innovation policies and state–business relationships?
(4) Financialization, banking and corporate control: Both countries have displayed contradictory and uneven processes of financial liberalization over time. How can we make sense of instances of ‘finan-cial dualization’, and how do they relate to the traditional bank-based characterization of Germany’s and Japan’s financial systems?
(5) Mediating the ‘shotgun marriage’: Under conditions of institutional change within political sys-tems, questions arise about new dynamics of public interest formation in relation to the performance of democracy and the welfare state. How do recent transformations in the domain of party politics and interest representation challenge or sustain features of nonliberal capitalism? And how are Germany and Japan faring in the wave of ‘global Trumpism’?

Organizers: Mehmet Asutay, Necati Aydin, Shinsuke Nagaoka

Islamic moral economy has emerged in the post-colonial period to respond to the observed developmentalist failures including socio-economic failures and the failed political process. As a project, Islamic moral economy aims at human-centred development by essentialising social justice, equality, and participatory and sharing society by rescuing and re-defining human as well as land, labour and capital among all other stakeholders. Thus, Islamic moral economy has theorised an alternative way of re-organising economy, society and politics in an interactive and integrative manner to form a participatory and sharing economy and society.

Within this alternative paradigm, Islamic finance has emerged as the initial operational aspect of Islamic moral economy, which has demonstrated an unprecedented growth in asset size and global expansion. However, despite this phenomenal growth in the transactional nature, we are yet to see the transformational impact of Islamic finance such as on social justice, equality (prevention of inequality and poverty), Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as constituting participatory and sharing economy.

This mini-conference aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving sustainable development, social justice, equality (preventing inequality) and participatory society as well as the political economy impact and consequences of the emerging Islamic finance. The conference solicits conceptual, theoretical, and empirical papers to address the following issues within the Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance frame(s):

• Socio-economic Development and Policy-making within the Islamic Moral Economy Paradigm
• Developing alternative models of Islamic economic development;
• Conceptualising and theorising social and economic justice as well as debate on fairness, equality (inequality) and justice;
• The importance of socio-economic justice and its policy implications;
• Islamic social welfare function and social contract;
• Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on Islamic sustainable development;
• The role of Islamic social institutions for sustainable development;
• Capability approach and social justice within Islamic moral economy;
• Indicators for assessing social economic development in Islamic moral economy;
• Comparative and empirical assessment of socio-economic development, equality/inequality in Muslim countries and Islamic moral economy and finance responses.
• Socio-Economic & SDGs Related Performance of Islamic Finance
• The role of Islamic finance in achieving SDGs; and the impact of SDGs on Islamic finance;
• The role of Islamic social finance on socio-economic justice in overcoming inequality and poverty;
• The environmental impact performance of Islamic finance;
• The role of Islamic finance in ending poverty and reducing inequality;
• The state of CSR in Islamic finance and its impact on financial performance;
• The impact of Shari’ah governance process in essentialising SDGs in Islamic financial institutions.
• Political Economy of Islamic Moral Economy & Finance
• Conceptual and theoretical imaginations of Islamic moral economy on constituting a new political economy and social formation in re-organising society and modes of production leading to participatory and sharing economy, and participatory democracy;
• The role of Islamic political economy and Islamic finance in creating a just and participatory society and sharing economy within the interaction between state, society, individual and firms;
• Locating Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance within counter hegemony, double movement and social movement frames;
• The emergence of Islamic economics and finance through New institutional economics and New Institutional Sociology;
• The impact of politics in the evolvement, expansion and performance of Islamic finance;
• Conceptual and empirical studies on the impact of Islamic finance on political structure and regulation.

Organizers: Yasushi Asami, Sophie Baudet-Michel, Sophie Buhnik, Peter Matanle, Allan Popelard

This mini-conference welcomes contributions that help illuminate current shifts in planning practices and discourses, as well as in local politics under an age of austerity, with a focus on economically depleted cities and regions.

Since the 2000s, scholars working in the fields of planning, urban sociology, or urban political economy in particular, have observed a significant increase in studies about shrinking cities : i.e., formerly thriving cities or densely occupied regions that experience decline of their economic and social bases, with negative effects on their landscapes and prospects for maintenance of infrastructures. Once seemingly confined to industrial cities undergoing shifts from manufacturing to a service-oriented economy, a phenomenon of deprivation seems ever present in non-metropolitan regions that have difficulties to resist to inter-urban competition and the concentration of wealth in a selective network of global cities, in both developed and developing countries. Moreover, the usual symptoms of urban decline (job losses, housing vacancy…) have been strengthened by the enforcement of a neoliberal-oriented rationale among the actors of urban policy making, especially since the Wall Street crash of 2008.  According to this rationale, it is necessary, for instance, to respond to market conditions with urban entrepreneurialism, austerity budgeting in the public sector or reduced central-local transfers towards unattractive territories.

In this context, more and more municipalities are trying to replace growth-oriented planning paradigms with ‘rightsizing’, ‘downsizing’ or ‘compact city’ measures, whose main goal is to achieve greater environmental efficiency and social equity by restructuring urban fabrics around mixed-use clusters. However, it seems that actualized rightsizing can produce oucomes that contradict the progressive ideals of rightsizing theories, like disinvestment from poor neighborhoods and attempts at rekindling growth through gentrification. In this respect, is the propagation of ‘rightsizing’ initiatives a way to accommodate and even legitimize an ‘austerity urbanism’ ? Or how can it pave the way to alternative, more progressive urban policies despite regimes of austerity ?

Submitted papers can address, but are not limited to, the following issues :

1/ Analysis of the impacts of austerity urbanism, using quantitative or qualitative datasets. Although critical analyses of the urbanisation of neoliberalism originated in US/UK case-based studies, the urban political economy framework can be applied to explain the effects of State restructurings on countries with diverse planning cultures, such as France or Japan. How does it translate into income disparities at several scales (inter-regional, intra-urban, etc.) or into country-specific distribution of devitalization ?

2/ Interscalar conflicts or arrangements revealed through the application of downsizing projects in declining areas : who are the national or local coalitions behind the enforcement of downsizing principles and what are their objectives ?

3/ Transversal or sectoral approaches to the concrete implementation of downsizing measures in declining areas, like planned demolition/reconstruction in the housing sector. How do we describe the cases where said measures have resulted in greater or – on the contrary – lesser spatial justice ?

4/ The realities of citizen involvement in city downsizing : what is the extent of their participation to greening or equity-oriented initiatives ?

References (selection)

Bernt, M., 2016, “The Limits of Shrinkage: Conceptual Pitfalls and Alternatives in the Discussion of Urban Population Loss”  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40: 441–450.

Brenner N., 2004, New State Spaces. Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Buhnik S., 2017, “The dynamics of urban de-growth in Japanese metropolitan areas: What are the outcomes of urban recentralisation strategies ?”, Town Planning Review, 88 (1), pp.79-92.

Edsall, T.B., 2012, The Age of Austerity, New York: Doubleday.

Forrest R. and Hirayama Y., 2009, “The Uneven Impact of Neoliberalism on Housing Opportunities” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33: 998–1013.

Hackworth J., 2015, “Rightsizing as spatial austerity in the American Rust Belt” Environmental and Planning A, 47: 766-782.

Harvey D., 2007, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610(1): 21-44.

Hollander J. and Nemeth J., 2011, “The bounds of smart decline: a foudational theory for planning shriking cities” Housing Policy Debate, 21: 349-367.

Hollander J., Pallagst K., Schwarz T. and Popper F., 2009, “Planning shrinking cities” Progress in Planning, 72: 223-232.

Martinez-Fernandez, C., Audirac, I., Fol, S. and Cunningham-Sabot, E., 2012, “Shrinking Cities: Urban Challenges of Globalization” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36: 213–225.

Matanle P., Rausch A.S. and the Shrinking Regions Research Group (eds), 2011,  Japan’s Shrinking Regions in the 21st Century : Contemporary Responses to Depopulation and Socioeconomic Decline, NY : Cambria Press.

Morange M. and Fol S., 2014, “City, neoliberalisation and justice”, Spatial Justice 6 [online journal].

Pallagst K., Wiechmann T. and Martinez-Fernandez C. (eds.), 2013, Shrinking Cities: International Perspectives and Policy Implications,  New York: Routledge.

Park B.-G., Hill R.C. and Saito A. (eds), 2012, Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia. Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental States, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Peck J., 2012, “Austerity urbanism: American economies under extreme economy” City 16: 626-655.

Peck J., Theodore N. and Brenner N., 2013, “Neoliberal Urbanism Redux ? ” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(3): 1091-1099.

Rousseau M., 2014, “Urban redevelopment and social (in)justice: neoliberal stratégies for ‘moving upmarket’ in shrinking cities” Spatial Justice 6 [online journal].

Sorensen A., Okata J. and Fujii S., 2010, “Urban Renaissance as Intensification: Building Regulation and the Rescaling of Place Governance in Tokyo’s High-rise Manshon Boom” Urban Studies 47 (3): 556-583.

Tsukamoto T., 2012, “Neolibralization of the Developmental State: Tokyo’s Bottom-Up Politics and State Rescaling in Japan”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(1): 71-89.

Organizers: Ursula Mense-Petermann, Karen Shire

Notwithstanding two decades of intensive economic globalization, the vast majority of labour market research today still applies a national frame of reference, and investigates specific national labour markets. It is, however, questionable if this research focus is able to sufficiently account for current labour related phenomena in a globalizing world. While national labour markets have never been entirely closed, the current period of globalization has led to a situation in which companies seek globally for locations for investment in new production facilities, partly in order to tap into foreign labour forces (mobility of capital). Employees, in turn, may prospect job offers far away from their place of living and their home country (mobility of labour force), on a voluntary basis or on the basis of economic pressures, or even war and violence threatening lives in the case of refugees. These developments also raise questions whether and to which extent the institutions governing the employer-employee relationship have become transnational as well.

This mini-conference, therefore, aims at scrutinizing the complex configuration and inter-relations of the transnational mobility of labour and/or capital, the multi-faceted and multi-layered institutional settings in which these mobilities are embedded, and the different types of (collective) actors that contribute to ‘make’ transnational labour markets. A special focus will be on newly emerging actors, institutions and policies and, thus, on recent processes of reordering the structures of labour markets at a global scale.

The contributions to the mini-conference may address but are not confined to the following questions:

• How do forms of intermediated exchange and organizationally embedded forms of cross-border labour contribute to the social construction of transnational labour markets at various scales of analysis? Here, for example, contributions could focus on the roles of (1) intermediary organizations on external labour markets, such as temporary agencies, trafficking chains, recruitment and brokering agents; (2) MNC-internal labour markets and Global Value Chains; and (3) States and their role in creating transnational labour markets.
• What types of institutions and conventions emerge to govern the coordination problems of placement/matching, valuation and cooperation in transnational labour markets?
• What forms and at what different scales (global, regional, national) can institution-building be observed?
• How are institutional market orders negotiated, and which (collective) actors are engaging in their set-up?
• How do cross-border and transnational networks of labour migrants shape the structures of emerging transnational labour markets?
• Which theoretical categories, methodologies, and empirical methods can be used to investigate transnational labour markets?