Organizers: Alberto Cevolini, Elena Esposito

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Margherita Bussi, Claire Dupuy, Virginie Van Ingelgom, Luis Vila-Henninger

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Florian Butollo, Chun Yang

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Rossella Bozzon, Annalisa Murgia, Agnieszka Piasna

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

1. Changes in the Occupational Structure

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

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

2. Changes in Careers and Employment Relations

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

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

3. Changes in Work Practices and Everyday Life

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

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

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

Organizers: Amitava Krishna Dutt, Simone Polillo, Lyn Spillman

Following up on recent sociological attention to how futures are imagined and how views of the future influence economic and political action, this mini-conference aims to create an interdisciplinary dialog on time horizons presumed or articulated by theorists, professionals, activists, journalists, politicians and others in their public claims-making about economic issues. Questions to be examined may include (but are not limited to):

• How are assumptions about the future embedded in public economic debates?
• Do assumptions about time horizons of knowledge influence public debate?
• How do historical narratives influence views of the future in economic action?
• How do policy narratives vary according to the time horizon of outcomes?
• How are ethical principles embedded in assumptions about time horizons?
• What debates are generated by differing time horizons, and views of the future?

Empirical exploration of these issues regarding such topics as economic governance, inequality, development, discrimination, and socio-economic insecurity is encouraged, We also encourage submissions from all SASE disciplines. Submissions for panels will be open to all scholars on the basis of an extended abstract. Selected participants must submit a completed paper to discussant and organizers by June 1, 2019. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within the mini-conference, it will be forwarded to the most appropriate research network as a regular submission.

Organizers: Nicolas Duvoux, Jonathan Morduch

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

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

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

Organizers: Luciana D’Adderio, Katy Mason, Neil Pollock

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

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

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

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

• Who are the new professional and occupational groups that are emerging? How do actors go about creating future-related knowledge?
• Who (if anyone) checks that planned futures realise their aims? What techniques do they use to value the work of future-makers? How do they hold them accountable? What penalties are there for future-makers found to be wrong?

Organizers: Ian Thomson, Hendrik Vollmer, Ken Weir

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

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

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

Re-imagining the possibility of finance and accounting that is in harmony with nature and society remains an unresolved challenge. Therefore this mini-conference seeks to provoke further debate on the relations between the socio-economic sphere and its planetary ecologies. We welcome contributions that:

• investigate ecological reimaginations of economy and society, whether empirical, theoretical or programmatic.
• present case studies that evaluate attempts to utilise financial practices or reasoning for ecological goals.
• theorise the possibility of an ecological reconstitution of the socio-economic sphere and the place, or lack thereof, for financial practices in any such reconstitution.

Organizers: Charlie Eaton, Neil Fligstein, Adam Goldstein, Jacob Habinek

The mini-conference invites submissions around the following themes:

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Jenny Andersson, Vincent Cardon, Melissa Fisher, Olivier Pilmis

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Matthew Alford, Valentina De Marchi, Gale Raj-Reichert

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

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

1. GVCs and states

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

2. GVCs and environmental sustainability

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

3. GVCs and gender

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

4. GVCs and labour

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

5. GVCs and digitalization

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

Organizers: Anne-Sophie Béliard, Pierre LeQueau, Olivier Zerbib

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

The following issues could be discussed:

Emergence conditions

Makerspaces appeared spontaneously and maintained themselves for a long time. What then makes them arise? Do they continue previous forms of (sociocultural or socioeconomic) organizations? And/or do they express a reaction to new institutional or economic constraints?

This suggests that they can play a significant role in the resilience of inhabitants after a crisis. But that would not explain why they maintain and sometimes even develop themselves then.

Despite contextual elements, past and present, it is therefore necessary to grasp the proper logic of development of these social forms and the way they produce their justifications: from new global hacker culture to local community education or working based learning. Their references also could be very different depending on whatever they produce, recycle or fix.

Public policies now often encourage the creation and development of this kind of third places. In this case, we could then look at what is expected by local authorities.

Ecosystem

Makerspaces develop themselves by forming a dense but diversified network (cluster? scene?) considering the field of activity, location, members, legal forms and actual modes of governance.

We can then try to understand what connects these different experiences, through space and time. People who created and/or animate them certainly play a major role in organizing these networks. We could be interested in examining their trajectory, training course and experiences… Including in other networks, elsewhere. A similar approach of those who participate to their workshops is possible as well.

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

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

Border troubles

The logic of bricolage involves the articulation of heterogeneous materials and know-hows as well as various forms of collaboration and co-working we could describe.

Consequently, the DIY movement blurs several traditional boundaries of economic systems. As makers produce items and share competences on their free time without economic benefits, their activities reconfigure links between work and non-work, commercial and non-commercial activities.

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

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

Organizers: Mateusz Halawa, Marcin Serafin, Lisa Suckert

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

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

a) Disrupted temporalities

We invite contributions that explore the multiple ways that new capitalist developments affect the perceptions of time. The assessment of these transformations is of particular importance, as capitalism risks destroying its own temporal foundations. Innovation, entrepreneurship and investment, the backbones of traditional capitalism, all require the confidence in an open future full of opportunities and the capability to envision and project long term perspectives.

How do algorithms and new data-based modes of prediction render futures less open? Is financialization increasing the speed and accelerating social live? Are actors in a globalized, flexibilzed economy still confident they stand to take control of their futures?

b) Desynchronized temporalities

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

c) Managed temporalities

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

Organizers: Gary Herrigel, Adriana Mica, Ann Mische

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Pedro Cezar Dutra Fonseca, Ricardo Dathein, André Moreira Cunha, Julimar da Silva Bichara

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organizer: Alexander Ebner

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Gina Neff, Laura Sartori

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

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

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

• Traditional sources of social inequalities such as gender, race and class origin are embedded and encoded into algorithmic systems and may lead towards even more subtle forms of discrimination, far from the promise of neutral and efficient data-driven decisions. What socio-economic mechanisms contribute to the power of algorithms to reproduce and reinforce inequality and bias? Are there organizational processes or structures that mitigate or exacerbate algorithmic inequality?
• How do users engage in and solve trust issues in algorithmic settings? What new digital competences arise as different actors and stakeholders articulate their power and influence within algorithmic organizational settings?
• How do algorithms and AI change the social and organizational dynamics of authority, agency and voice? There is a potential for reconfiguration in power practices due to AI and algorithms promised capacity to substitute human experience, judgment and expertise, as organizational and social institutions try to adjust. What emerging evidence do we have as these systems diffuse from the technology sector into more kinds of work, organizations and industries?
• Do algorithmic and AI systems support or hinder the processes of organizational innovation? What do scholars need to understand to build algorithmic systems to encourage creativity and collaboration among workers?
• How does organizational analysis help illuminate the “dark side” of algorithms? How do different actors in an organization understand and use algorithms differently? How do they adapt their daily practices in algorithmic settings and how do they modify, push back or resist algorithmic logics?
• How can socio-economic and organizational analysis contribute to showing how fairness, transparency and accountability can best be built into the design, deployment and use of algorithmic and AI systems.
• Many studies of algorithmic systems and AI have focused on the US and Europe. What cross-country empirical evidence helps scholars to understand the emerging dynamics of these systems in a wider array of settings?

Organizers: Teresa Ghilarducci, William Milberg, Alondra Nelson

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

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

Organizers: Ariel Ducey, Karen Gregory, Elizabeth Wissinger

What cannot be fathomed may be felt. This panel will focus on how the nature of what the future holds may be enfolded in the present in registers that cannot necessarily or completely be articulated: the registers of bodies, emotions, affect, sensations, spaces, capacities, and the virtual. We are interested in bringing together scholars whose work examines the way in which the feeling of the future exists in the work and labor of the present. This includes especially how the feeling of the future defines and reconfigures inequalities, along the lines of class, gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity, or along other lines, and thereby impacts what is experienced as possible/not possible and for whom, and what solidarities are formed/not formed.

All methodological and conceptual approaches are welcome. We hope to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines who share a common interest in the areas of what may be felt, to consider how our training and trajectories as researchers may lead to differing conceptualizations of these topics, but also to see what kinds of overlaps and compatibilities are generated by a more concrete concern with issues of work and labor.

Eventual organization of sessions will reflect the papers submitted, but potential themes for panels and papers include:

• Ways in which the future may be felt but not fathomed in work and labor
• The effects of digital technologies and platforms on learning to labor, especially embodied and emotional aspects of labor
• The effects of digital technologies and platforms on what embodied labor is
• New forms of division and segmentation in labor markets on the basis of what is and can be felt, or affected, or embodied
• Imaginaries or creative/artistic visions of alternatives to work or the rejection of work
• The effects of politics and programs of austerity on the feelings of work (in any area, but notably including work in universities)
• The meaning and impact of movements such as #MeToo in relation to workplace cultures and the organization of work