Organizers: Agnieszka Piasna, Juliet Schor, Orla Kelly, David Frayne, Daiga Kamerāde, Jean-Yves Boulin, Brendan Burchell

Reduced working time is likely to be a crucial component of the future of work, as technological change and artificial intelligence disrupt previous labour regimes, and have raised the spectre of widespread unemployment and social upheaval. The climate emergency demands new ways of organising and even thinking about work, while an increasingly diverse workforce challenges a century-old model of the full-time, 5-day, 40-hour week.

The current neoliberal capitalist system promises a redistribution of productivity gains across the workforce in the form of shorter working hours and improved quality of working life, but these promises have rarely been realised and even less so in an equitable way. Corporate financialisation disproportionately reaps the productivity gains and leads to a further concentration of wealth, while casualisation and precarisation of the labour market is spreading rapidly. Changes in the labour process, including in working time, have long been subjected to the neo-liberal logic that puts productivity gains and value creation at the forefront as a precondition for satisfying any workers’ demands. In this context, how can sustainable, fair and equitable solutions be imagined and implemented? Does the reduction of working time require a paradigm shift? How does it affect, and is affected by, the current organisation of society, community and family?

In this mini-conference, we aim to bring together the latest cutting-edge scholarship on worktime reduction. The issue has received increasing attention in recent years from social scientists, including economists, political scientists and sociologists, but there has been little cross-disciplinary exchange and dialogue. There is a need for both practical and empirical evidence, as well as conceptual contributions on the alternatives to current economic models and reforms to implement worktime reduction for greater dignity and sustainability in economic life. 

The panels will provide an opportunity to set out what we already know, how new evidence is affecting scholars’ understanding of work, and what future research agendas should explore. There is also a particular interest in theoretical papers that engage the worktime reduction agenda with critical perspectives such as feminism, intersectionality, de-growth, and the future of work discourse. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, gender studies, geography, economic history, business, and political science, among other fields. Both empirical and theoretical papers are encouraged. 

Possible topics on working time reduction that submissions could explore are:

• Historical perspective: key contributions to the debate on working time reduction in a historical context; the drivers and mechanisms of past working time changes and reductions; their social determinants and consequences.
• Old and new inequalities: differences across workforces in whose hours are reduced and differential impacts; gendered division of labour; differences across industries, regions and countries; inequalities by gender, race, ethnicity, and their intersections in working time practices and needs.
• Sustainability and well-being: the environmental impacts of the four-day week compared to other WTR arrangements (e.g.: 6h/30h;  optional schemes etc.); the productivity/worktime nexus; reduced worktime and the life course; working time, well-being and work-life balance; motivations for shorter hours; working time reduction and community life.
• Economic feasibility: the impacts of shorter hours on organizational performance, viability and sustainability.
• Political economy of working time reduction: analyses of the growing number of legislative and collective bargaining efforts to reduce statutory workweeks; cross-national comparisons in the implementation and effects of worktime reduction; employment effects of worktime reduction; social and political actors driving change.

The future of work: rethinking current economic models and the social contract to achieve sustainable worktime reduction; proposals for policy reforms; the role of technology and digitalization; new emerging employment and working time models; the impact of algorithmic management and artificial intelligence.

Organizers: Neil Fligstein, Steven Vogel

We are at a historical moment where neoliberal thought, which has dominated policymaking for the past 45 years, is under intellectual and political assault. The critiques of neoliberalism are rooted in the failure of those policies to provide a better life for all citizens. If neoliberalism’s project has been globalization, financialization, and consumerism, an alternative would focus on our core economic problems: poverty, inequality, exclusion, insecurity, and sustainability. Political ills such as polarization, the rise of populism, backlashes against globalization and immigration, decline in trust in government, experts, and institutions can all be traced to neoliberal policies. Neoliberals remain influential, particularly in conservative think tanks and many economics departments. But their critics have good empirical proof that such policies have not worked well for the majority of citizens.

SASE as an organization has always challenged neoliberalism. But with governments now rethinking their economic and social policies, we believe the time is right for us to gather to discuss alternatives in theory and in practice, what we can learn from existing models, and how we might push the discussion forward. Our mini-conference takes up and explores various proposals for alternatives to neoliberalism. We want to take this as an opportunity to engage scholars focused on many specific issues that the other networks cover to consider the broader agenda of challenging neoliberalism as an intellectual paradigm and reforming political economy as it is practiced by governments around the world. We see this as a moment to engage in synthetic rethinking for the next phase of capitalism.

We are interested in contributions from different disciplines and perspectives including but not only law and political economy, economic sociology, neo-Marxist approaches, Regulation school, institutional economics, historical institutionalism, and varieties of capitalism. We are interested in papers that connect our theme of a new political economy to the role of markets and financial institutions, social movements and NGOs, cultural and meaning systems, macro-comparative policy research, technological innovations, and the social organization of science and science policy in political economy. We are also interested in work that tries to connect political economy to issues of social justice including racial capitalism, gender, stratification, and migration. Finally, we hope to attract papers that consider issues like the rise of China, the emergence of the Global South, and the future of global governance.  

Organizers: Lorenza Antonucci, Elena Ayala-Hurtado, Albena Azmanova

“Precarity” and “socioeconomic insecurity” describe more than just employment uncertainty; they are concepts that refer to the micro-experiences of uncertainty in employment and livelihoods shared by working class individuals and the declining middle class (the so-called “squeezed middle”) around the world. Despite the wide use of these concepts in recent sociological and political work, insecurity has been subjected to very little theorization in economic sociology; moreover, there has thus far been no attempt to organize and systemize individual scholarship on insecurity into a generalized body of work. 

We propose a mini-conference focussed around the topic of insecurity to advance the empirical and theoretical understanding of the causes and effects of insecurity worldwide. This topic is closely linked to the theme of next year’s conference for several reasons. Firstly, as illustrated below, insecurity is a concept that focuses on socio-economic lives. Secondly, socioeconomic insecurity allows us to capture the entanglements between the economy and the society and how they are engendered by social structures, power, culture, and, crucially, by emotions. In line with the conference theme, and with emerging literature in insecurity studies, we understand socioeconomic insecurity as having both objective and subjective components and not being limited to objective indicators such as types of contracts or income levels. Thirdly, the shift to digital technology and the changes in global capitalism have fuelled a global rise in economic insecurity. Finally, insecurity is a concept that is attracting growing interest in political sociology, particularly in the explanation of populist and authoritarianism tendencies across the world. As per the conference theme, we are interested in further expanding the understanding of the political effects of the new economic paradigm defined as “precarity capitalism” (Azmanova, 2020).

Despite its growing significance in both sociology and political economy, socioeconomic insecurity and precarity have received limited theoretical conceptualisation and/or dedicated research in ad hoc sessions and special issues. This mini-conference has several aims: first, we would like to foreground an understanding of micro-level experiences and the subjective components behind the widespread feelings of insecurity in economic sociology, beyond a macro-focus on risk in orthodox economics; second, we hope to gather research on insecurity as a conceptual tool to investigate phenomena that are occurring at the global scale in order to directly compare the West to countries of the Global South; finally, we would like to gather research on insecurity to advance the conceptual understanding of the rise of populism, nationally and globally, and as a tool to bridge the apparent – and sometimes contested – opposition between “cultural” and “economic” explanations behind the rising popularity of populist ideas and populist voting.

First, there is an urgent need to expand the conceptualisation of socioeconomic insecurity beyond purely (macro)economic process, in order to include also meso- and micro- manifestations of precarity. Orthodox economic approaches tend to limit the investigation of insecurity to “objective measures” or only to examine macroeconomic processes, thereby neglecting to examine everyday manifestations of precarity. Using an operationalisation of insecurity that employs both objective and subjective indicators, and that entails livelihoods in addition to institutions, can clarify the interplay between macro processes and micro manifestations, as well as bridging the gap between economic and cultural strands in socioeconomic studies.

Second, insecurity is a concept that has been used by scholars of the Global South and has been mobilised to describe the social realities in these parts of the world by non-Western scholars (see the recent Worlds of Insecurity by Bardhan, 2022). Through the use of the concept of insecurity, we hope to attract research from different parts of the world, as well as studies that focus on the impact of global dynamics and neoliberalism on individuals.

Third, a number of highly relevant social phenomena are linked to growing insecurity. In particular, our aim is to use the concept of insecurity to further advance the sociological investigation of social status and populism. Indeed a number of studies have referred to how the rise of precarity explains the decline in the social status of individuals which has been associated to the upsurge of populist attitudes and voting in the Western World and in the Global South. This field of research, which is still in its infancy, can be grouped and organised to advance our understanding of how social status, global inequalities and attitudes towards “the other” (migrants, LGBTQI+ individuals etc) interact and how they are channelled into support for populist left and populist right agendas. 

Our mini-conference is concerned with advancing the empirical and theoretical understanding of insecurity and untapping what makes economic lives insecure nationally, regionally and globally. We are particularly interested in gathering research that addresses the following questions, either within individual countries, in comparison between countries or with a global perspective:

• What are the connections between work precarity and insecurity in livelihoods? When do precarious work lives become precarious financial lives?
• What is the relationship between objective and subjective insecurity experienced by individuals? Furthermore, what is the relationship between insecurity and individuals’ attitudes towards meritocracy and redistribution?
• When does work and financial insecurity translate into a loss of subjective social status? We hope to clarify to what extent the changes to social status highlighted by recent sociological research can be explained by insecurity.
• What is the temporal construction of insecurity? In particular, how is current insecurity shaped by past experiences and projections/expectations of future conditions?
• What are the connections between the insecurity experienced by individuals and intersectional inequalities pertaining to class, gender, race/ethnicity and sexual identity?
• What are the manifestations of insecurity nationally and globally in the various spheres of individuals’ lives (e.g. housing, food consumption, debt and finance)?
• What is the role of the state in exacerbating or reducing insecurity? We are particularly interested in the neoliberal welfare state shift, e.g. the impact of Active Labour Market policies and supply-side state interventions on insecurity.
• Are there regimes of precarity across the world or are experiences of insecurity harmonised across countries?
• How is insecurity impacted by the diffusion of digital technologies?
• What are the political effects of insecurity in not choosing to vote or in voting for established or populist parties?
• Can insecurity be transformed into a conscious political identity (the precariat)?

References

Azmanova, A. (2020) Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bardhan, P. (2022) A World Of Insecurity. Democratic disenchantment in rich and poor countries, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Organizers: Ivana Pais, Caroline Murphy, Anna Ilsøe

The challenge posed by this year’s conference theme “For Dignified and Sustainable Economic Lives: Disrupting the Emotions, Politics, and Technologies of Neoliberalism” is highly pertinent to the care sector, in particular long-term care. Achieving sustainable care and sustainable work concurrently is an almost global challenge, but is particularly acute in countries with increasingly ageing populations. A decline in family provided long term care has fuelled increased demand for care and personal services in the home as governments prioritise ageing in place policies.  Neoliberal policy has driven a decline in publicly provided care services, with long term care being increasingly commodified and marketized. The challenges this creates are numerous for those requiring care, funding care and delivering care in a either a formal, informal or familial capacity. Employment in the home care sector is characterized by a high level of informality, a largely female and migrant workforce, with the low visibility of care work within private spaces contributing to weak associational power.  The increased level of privatisation of the sector, informal care, and new actors such as digital platforms offering alternative models of employment has contributed to ever growing fragility of working conditions and social welfare protections for workers. 

Care has been on policymakers’ agendas for some time (e.g the Better Jobs, Better Care Act, European Care Strategy), yet the impact of such policy discussions has not yet been widely felt, particularly by the most vulnerable workers. Employment in the home care sector continues to be classed as low skilled domestic work, despite the fact that the relational nature of work often demands a wide breadth and depth of skills.  High levels of informality exist in the sector (one third of workers in Europe estimated to be undeclared, Godino 2021), with the implementation of the ILO Convention 189 on Domestic Worker being limited.  Global care chains and the movement of migrant workers to developed countries contributes to a  growing continuing care drain (Hochchild, 2002) in less developed countries. 

Lack of affordable care, and lack of publicly provided supports for family carers have in part driven informality and undeclared work and a proliferation of live in care. The emergence of digital platforms in many sectors has been favoured by their constitutive flexible and agile character (Schüßler et al., 2021; Rodríguez-Modroño et al, 2022).  Digital platforms hold the potential to formalise this hitherto very informal sector and to and to stimulate new mutualistic forms of governance Yet, we still lack evidence that this potential will lead to improved wages and working conditions.  Furthermore, the extent to which the digital platform model, based on short term relationships and worker fungibility, is appropriate in care remains in question.  

The mini conference is designed to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds with a focus on aspects of the long-term care work. We welcome papers and presentations on the following or related topics: 

• New forms of work in long term care (digital platforms, worker cooperatives)
• Digitalisation in the care sector 
• Formalising informal care work
• The role of the state as provider and regulator of care provision (new funding models of care, labour rights enforcement.
• Privatisation of publicly provided care services 
• Worker organising and power, trade unions and new forms of worker organising  
• The intersection of familial and formal care 
• Migration and global care chains

Organizers: Gary Herrigel, Adriana Mica, Ann Mische

Failures and dilemmas constitute major sources of disruption in the emotions, politics and technologies of neoliberalism. They can open spaces of radical change and learning, yet they can also generate new forms of privilege and exploitation born of crisis and recession. We seek to understand the expectations and contestations that emerge in contemporary forms of failure, as well as the dilemmas posed by political, economic and social interventions. Attention to these dynamics is essential for spotting emerging innovation economies, alternative cultural regimes and new imaginaries, allowing us to grasp their revolutionary potential, as well as their historical conditionalities and socio-economic entanglements. We will explore what is creative about failures and dilemmas in the contemporary world, as well as what is oppressive due to political and policy contexts that reflect unequal power relations at local and global levels.
Contemporary failures and global dilemmas, such as migrant crises, reproductive rights struggles, economic declines, war conflicts, and threats to global health, can raise awareness about structural vulnerabilities and mechanisms of privilege and  institutional bias. Posing problems in terms of dilemmas entails consideration of  tensions between multiple possible futures. This includes narrating possibilities for radical transformation and system collapse, as well as imagining continuity and constraint in prevailing patterns of growth, redistribution, regulation, and governance. Dilemmas and failures can be framed as ways of challenging taken for granted assumptions about rules and regimes, but they themselves can also be normalized as mechanism of social control. Such frames can be intentionally deployed by political
leaders, activists and entrepreneurs to manufacture opportunities for change and materialize revolutionary or repressive alternatives.
At the same time, however, these disruptive interventions and events are often highly contested. Failures become “unfailures”. Crises become “so-called crises”. Dilemmas can be imaginatively resolved. And black swans turn into totally predictable events, if not political scams even. Retrospective forms of anticipation and globally embedded projections mean that the disruptions of neoliberalism can have exploitative and
resourceful components. This raises interesting questions regarding the dynamics of these framing projects and their impacts in relation to emerging risks, elusive  opportunities and hesitant publics.
The mini-conference serves as an occasion for economic sociologists, political economists and social theorists to come together to explore points of compatibility, complementarity and difference in the way in which they theorize the construction of relationships between policy failures, global dilemmas and disruptions of neoliberalism. Our shared orienting questions will be the following: how do failures and dilemmas go beyond mere disruptions, but also contribute to social, political or economic recomposition of some sort? How does the framing of failures and dilemmas affect, instigate, or block social change? Do they contribute to new neoliberal  entanglements, or do they look beyond neoliberalism toward alternatives not dominated by commodification and contract? We seek a dynamic dialogue between
papers that explore these questions from different disciplinary and substantive perspectives.

Organizers: Fulya Apaydin, Arie Krampf, Andreas Nölke, Merve Sancak

This year the “Connecting the Dots” Mini-Conference is proposing to invite contributions about how our core theme about the linkage between global and national capitalism can help to understand this year’s focus, namely the disruptions of and disruptions to neoliberalism, and the alternatives developed to it. We especially welcome proposals that explore the intricate relationship between these aspects, shedding light on how recent disruptions neoliberalism have influenced and, in turn, been impacted by the dynamics of global and national capitalisms. 

During the last decade, global capitalism has been undergoing massive transformations across multiple levels. Since the global financial crisis and the corona pandemic, the economy is in a transition phase that moves it away from neoliberalism into a new period, which does not yet have a name or a title. On the international level, the world is going through further transitions via rearrangement of international organisation structures, institutional and regime changes, as well as through a reformation of global hierarchies, which are argued to be post-neoliberal by many scholars. The changes at the international level influence domestic processes in the form of economic regime changes, rise of new ideologies and the formation of new types of political coalitions. At the same time, the transformations at the domestic level – particularly in large economies and powerful states – can have important repercussions on the international level via feedback effects.

The newly emerging epoch, while currently lacking a formal designation, represents a significant departure from the principles that have guided economic policies for decades. Notably, the rise of China and India as major global economic players has been a hallmark of this transformative period. According to some observers, these economies pose new challenges to the hegemony of the United States and its dollar-centric financial system. In addition, ongoing debates surrounding the supremacy of the US dollar were coupled with tensions in global supply chains including the “chip wars”, serving as vivid illustrations of the disruptions currently unfolding. Such dynamics provide new opportunities to re-open old questions, regarding the global existence of the neoliberal regime (in distinction from neoliberalism as national model), as well as the question of global drivers of change, in addition to domestic drivers. The emergence of alternative economic powers, coupled with the re-evaluation of technological supremacy underscore the complexity and dynamism of the contemporary global economic landscape. The post-neoliberal disruptions also bring to the fore crucial normative questions regarding the need to address simultaneously, the rise of populism and nationalism, the challenge of social inequality and the climate change. 

For the community of scholars in Socio-Economics, these transitions lead to particular challenges with regard to the internal structure of the discipline. Primarily, any systematic study of the economic aspects of a changing world order requires a deeper understanding of the interactions and linkages between International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE). International organizations, institutions, regimes, and structures–which are usually studied by IPE scholars—are affected and shaped by domestic actors; but at the same time, they affect and shape domestic economic regimes. Therefore, connecting the dots between IPE and CPE is essential both to understanding the neoliberalism, the problems caused by it, and the alternatives that are being developed to it. Similarly, engaging in these debates calls for an approach that connects the dots between micro, meso and macro levels of analysis for a comprehensive understanding about these disruptions and the alternatives that are emerging in due course. 

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

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

With this focus, the mini-conference will invite contributions on national capitalism, transnational political and economic relations, and global institutions to better understand the social transformations, ruptures and crisis within neoliberalism, and the alternatives developed to it. This can include – but is not limited to – investment, trade, finance and migration flows, industrialisation and de-industrialisation, linkages between multilateral institutions and national capitalist systems, and interactions between different capitalist societies. We are especially welcoming studies that focus on underrepresented geographic regions in CPE and IPE, and the communities that are increasingly networked with the Global.

Organizers: Christoph Houman Ellersgaard, Elisa Reis, Thierry Rossier, Elisa Klüger, Bruno Cousin, André Vereta-Nahoum, Kevin Young, Robyn Klingler-Vidra

The current social transformations, ruptures, and breakdown of the neoliberal economic order call for attention to how elites, as designers and operators of this order, are promoting or responding to the disruptions caused by climate change, economic crises, wealth inequality, conflicts, pandemics, digitalization, and other technological developments, notwithstanding their own role in the creating and acceleration of these transformations.

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

In short, to address the most pressing problems of the current socio-economic order, we need to know more about the elites who play a pivotal role in it. Our mini-conference puts focus on the groups at the top of power structures in different societies, who in many ways provoke and are subject to societal emotions and hold a central position in deciding which technological solutions to mitigate e.g. climate change become part of wider political-economic projects. By gathering scholars interested in the power elites across different societies, we hope to add to the understanding of the role elite plays in the meso-, and micro level foundations of the current socio-economic order. 

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

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

Therefore, the study of elites needs to be subject for increased methodological attention on how to map these power relations and further develop the above-mentioned methodological approaches.

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

The research questions relevant to understanding the roles elites play in the current socio-economic order are many. Key questions remain, such as:

• Are power elites becoming more integrated or more fragmented?
• How do elites interact with experts and engage with expertise through think tanks or other ways to construct persuasive narratives to their claims?
• How do social institutions such as race and ethnicity function among elites?
• How can we map out the relationships between established power elites and new political forces of anti-establishment parties?
• How do we assess the ways in which elites in the Global South and the North migrate and interact?
• Where are the projects of elites assembled, and how do they mobilize social support? How do elites fend off attacks on their legitimacy and exorbitant privilege?
• How do economic elites orient themselves to mitigate collective risks?
• What is the role of expert elites and the devices they advance in the politics, emotions, and technologies of government of contemporary societies? What are the entanglements and frictions between experts and non-expert elites in this regard?
• How does sociability and everyday interaction of elites – and between elites and the wider population – affect emotions of neoliberalism?
• What are the cleavages within the elites vis-à-vis neo-liberalism? How do economic elites imagine the future of corporate power?
• What are the methodological challenges associated with studying elite backgrounds and biography?
• How can elite biographical datasets best be analyzed, shared, and compared?

This SASE mini-conference aims thus to open the dialogue on the above-mentioned issues by inviting scholars to discuss and engage with the work on power elites in order to build a stronger comparative framework with deeper linkages to other research topics in political economy, economic sociology, and related fields. We encourage contributions from adjacent fields, such as work on expertise, intellectuals, interest formation, and advocacy. We anticipate that participants will present theoretical and empirical work on power elites, but will also be motivated to position their research in a comparative framework, to grasp how elite constellations coalesce into national and international power structures. This could include works addressing the relationship between elites and rising inequality, growing political discontent, or the capability to adapt to a more ecologically sustainable economy. We are also keen on learning about, and sharing, the challenges and solutions faced by researchers on elites, and developing and spreading best practices. This includes attention to not only methods to measure and standardize the ways that data are collected, but mechanisms by which researchers can share and compare data and findings, across the Global North and Global South.

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

References:

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

Cárdenas, Julián. 2012. “Varieties of Corporate Networks: Network Analysis and FsQCA.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 53 (4): 298–322.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Koray Caliskan, Annmarie Ryan, Addie McGowan

This mini-conference aims at discussing exciting and new research on Online Advertisement Economies (See Attachment for a select set of examples). Online advertisement platforms are revolutionizing the world. As the most expansive, unregulated, and under-researched topics in contemporary capitalist economies, they are the financial backbone of today’s internet. As a large-scale, technologically advanced practice, they are also reshaping political communication, influencing how we perceive and alter our worlds.

Online advertising can be conceptualized as a platform economic process of disseminating promotional information, rooted in digital economies and communication. It leverages empirical data collection to tailor and target promotional narratives towards specific demographics. Online Ads’ infrastructures support the data exchange occurring between user devices, web servers, and ad servers. The systems underpinning advertising auctions play a pivotal role in shaping privacy concerns, platforms’ overall process and dominance. There are four primary online ad ecosystems: 1) Search Ads, exemplified by platforms like Google’s search-based markets; 2) In-App or walled garden ads seen in platforms such as Meta, TikTok, and Amazon; 3) Header bidding auctions; and 4) Video Ads, which are rapidly growing and are anticipated to rival the prevalence of Search Ads soon. Additionally, these ad platforms blend with hybrid economic models, such as “news-like” content, evidenced by articles like Wired Magazine’s “Ten Best Lipsticks of 2023,” which are seamlessly integrated with sales platforms. In terms of economic scale, Online Ads accounted for 400 billion USD in 2022. When combined with their associated markets and interconnected platform enterprises, their economy is projected to surpass 1 trillion USD by 2024.

  Our objective for this mini-conference theme is to bring new research together and comparatively locate the main social-economic dynamics in order to better understand Online Advertisement Economies. How is it possible to map this giant digital economic geography? What kind of platform devices are designed and used in their platforms? Which individual or institutional agencies are active in their making and maintenance. What forms of inter-platform and extra-platform power relations do they entail? What kind of economic stacks are operational in Ad Platforms? How do Ad Tech and economic sociological transformations relate? Who are the primary individual or institutional actors driving the creation and sustenance of these platforms? What reconfiguration are we seeing in marketing and advertising expertise and what might the implications of this be for the marketing profession? How do inter-platform and extra-platform power dynamics manifest within this sphere? How do the advancements in Ad Tech intersect with transformations in economic sociology? How do evolving user (consumer and marketer) behaviors and preferences shape the strategies and technologies of Online Advertisement Markets? How do Online Advertisement Markets respond to the rise of ad-blocker technologies and growing consumer resistance? In the context of multi-platform users, how do Online Advertisement Markets measure attribution and success across different digital touchpoints?

An Innovative Attachment: A Speculative Sociological Design Workshop

We propose organizing a strategic or speculative design sprint/workshop within the mini-conference. Led by Caliskan and Ryan, two sociologists with design experience, the participants will co-design prototypes or speculative scenarios, merging current trends with imaginative sociological insights. This will allow them to look closer into possible changes in platform dynamics, the rise of new monetization strategies, and the socio-environmental impacts of Ad Tech. Engaging in this exercise encourages creative ideation and positions design as a tool for sociological research. It also paves the way for proactive strategic design in the online advertising sector, fueled by sociological imagination. Additionally, this workshop aims to make economic sociology more relevant and influential.

Relation to the theme of this year’s conference

The Online Advertisement Economies mini-conference speaks directly to SASE 2024’s overarching theme of “Dignified and Sustainable Economic Lives: Disrupting the Emotions, Politics, and Technologies of Neoliberalism.” The realm of online advertising, underpinned by sophisticated Ad Tech and platform dynamics, embodies and in rapport with neoliberalism as discussed in transdisciplinary critical literatures. These platforms, while driving the digital economy, often perpetuate unsustainable consumption patterns and privilege certain economic racialized, class and gendered actors over others. By exploring the tensions within stack economization and platform competition, this mini-conference seeks to unpack the complexities of digital marketplaces and question the equity, justice, and sustainability concerns of these rapidly growing economies in alignment with the broader aspirations of SASE 2024.

Its Objective of Bringing Underrepresented Topics to the Conference

The proposed mini-conference aims at introducing underrepresented dimensions to SASE 2024, especially concerning issues of race, ethnicity, heterodox economics, and design. Digital advertising platforms, while being global in reach, often perpetuate systemic biases, inadvertently amplifying racial and ethnic disparities through algorithms and data biases. By interrogating the mechanisms and implications of Ad Tech, this mini-conference will shed light on how digital platforms might reinforce or challenge existing socio-economic relations. Furthermore, by embracing a heterodox economic lens, it seeks to reach out to heterodox economic circles to challenge the dominant paradigms in understanding digital ad economies, integrating a more pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach that accounts for socio-cultural nuances and promotes a more equitable digital ad universe. The conference’s design component will conceptualize interventions that not only enhance the responsibility of Ad Tech but also draft theoretical and tangible tools for collaborative economic sociological design interventions in socio-economic realms, steering clear of reviving social engineering.

Attachment: Related Research 

Alaimo, C. & Kallinikos, J. (2018). Objects, metrics and practices: An inquiry into the programmatic advertising ecosystem. In U. Schultze et al. (Eds.), Living with monsters? Social implications of algorithmic phenomena, hybrid agency, and the performativity of technology (IS&O 2018) (pp. 110-123). Springer.

Araujo, L. & Mason, K. (2021). Markets, infrastructures and infrastructuring markets. AMS Review, 11(3-4), 240-251.

Airoldi, M. & Rokka, J. (2022). Algorithmic consumer culture. Consumption Markets & Culture, 25(5), 411-428.

Beauvisage, T., Beuscart, J-S., Coavoux, S., & Mellet, K. (2023). How online advertising targets consumers: The uses of categories and algorithmic tools by audience planners. New Media & Society.

Beuscart, J-S. & Mellet, K. (2013). Competing quality conventions in the French online display advertising market. Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(4), 402-418.

Crain, M. (2021). Profit over privacy: How surveillance advertising conquered the Internet. University of Minnesota Press.

Cluley, R. (2018). The construction of marketing measures: The case of viewability. Marketing Theory, 18(3), 287-305.

Diaz Ruiz, C.A. (2022). The insights industry: towards a performativity turn in market research. International Journal of Market Research, 64(2), 169-186.

Geiger, S. & Kjellberg, H. (2021). Market mash ups: The process of combinatorial market innovation. Journal of Business Research, 124, 445-457.

Geradin, D. & Katsifis, D. (2020). Trust me, I’m fair: Analysing Google’s latest practices in ad tech from the perspective of EU competition law. European Competition Journal, 16(1), 11-54.

Hagberg, J. & Kjellberg, H. (2020). Digitalized markets. Consumption Markets & Culture, 23(2), 97-109.

MacKenzie, D., Caliskan, K., & Rommerskirchen, C. (2023). The longest second: Header bidding and the material politics of online advertising. Economy and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2238463

MacKenzie, D. (2021). Cookies, pixels and fingerprints. London Review of Books, 43(7).

Mellet, K. & Beauvisage, T. (2021). Cookie monsters. Anatomy of a digital market infrastructure. In Digitalized Markets (pp. 14-33). Routledge.

Ryan, A., Stigzelius, I., Mejri, O., Hopkinson, G., & Hussien, F. (2023). Agencing the digitalised marketer: Exploring the boundary workers at the cross-road of (e) merging markets. Marketing Theory.

Sörum, N. & Fuentes, C. (2023). How sociotechnical imaginaries shape consumers’ experiences of and responses to commercial data collection practices. Consumption Markets & Culture, 26(1), 24-46.

Srinivasan, D. (2020). Why Google dominates advertising markets: Competition policy should lean on the principles of financial market regulation. Stanford Technology Law Review, 24(1), 55-175.

Viljoen, S., Goldenfein, J. & McGuigan, L. (2021). Design choices: Mechanism design and platform capitalism. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 1-13.

Organizers: Mishal Khan, Nabila Islam, Mo Torres, Ross Goodman-Brown

Building on past mini-conferences on theories and practices of racial capitalism (in 2023) and on racial capitalism, economic racism and ethnic chauvinism (in 2022) at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) annual meeting, we welcome papers that explore the relationship between race/ism, capital/ism, states, markets, and a variety of genres of social difference employing a diverse range of perspectives and methods. We are excited to continue building space for scholarship that centers race/racialization/social difference as foundational categories of analysis at SASE as we all grapple with the multiple challenges confronting our contemporary global order. 

While we welcome work dealing with a variety of topics that meet the above criteria, we are especially interested in submissions that trace the linkages between technology (writ large), governance (contemporary or historic), and subjectivities (racial or otherwise) that coincide with the SASE 2024 theme, “For Dignified and Sustainable Economic Lives: Disrupting the Emotions, Politics, and Technologies of Neoliberalism.” 

Inspired by the conference’s setting in Limerick, Ireland, we are also interested in scholarship that considers race/ism, capital/ism, and social difference in diverse social and geographic contexts. As Cedric Robinson has argued, the proletarianization and the formation of the so-called English working class was in fact definitively shaped by racial attitudes towards the Irish. Ireland was one of the earliest sites of British colonial governance and technological experimentation. Robinson furthermore highlighted that the English managed Ireland as a “plantation” – a central means of subduing and subjugating its land and peoples (Robinson, Black Marxism, 2000: 37). 

In line with this key insight we hope to stimulate conversations around the plantation in particular as one important lens connecting Ireland, South and East Asia, Africa, and the Americas (among many other sites). In thinking about the plantation, however, we can go beyond thinking of land, labor, and capital. The plantation, in Camilla Hawthorne’s terms, is “not only a socio-spatial disciplinary apparatus, but it is also a political technology of subjectivization” (Hawthorne, “Black Mediterranean Geographies,” 2023: 490). Such a view of the plantation as a technology of governance and a means of producing subjectivities provides analytic insight into a range of colonial, settler colonial, and neocolonial instances. We also perceive an urgent need to attend to processes of degradation and violence to both human and non-human life – emphasizing impacts on the natural world, non-human ecologies, and broader environmental ecosystems as they interact with global processes of capital accumulation. 

Thinking with/about plantation geographies – and other topics that resonate with the broader themes it invokes – we hope to cultivate a space that contemplates the translation of technologies of Black subjectivization to contexts outside of the context of North America. At the same time, we understand that racialized projects of North America have always produced a transnational movement of bodies and/as capital.

We invite submissions that build on a body of work in race, gender and sexualities, racialized organizations, race and neoliberal governance, racialized property regimes, the historic relationship between race and capitalism in different geographic contexts, environmental racism and the production of waste, ecological violence and land degradation, colonial and ongoing extraction of labor from the Global South, and work that highlights alternative genres of social difference (gender, caste, kinship, et cetera), among others. Papers using global and transnational perspectives and de/post/anticolonial and intersectional approaches are welcome.

Organizers: Ieva Zumbyte, Dorota Szelewa

This mini-conference convenes scholarship on how welfare states across the world have shaped
policy-making on gender equality, with a focus on barriers, drivers, and consequences of policy
development. A substantial body of research, primarily conducted in the Global North, particularly in OECD countries, explores how gender systems interact with and are influenced by welfare states.

There is a strong consensus that over the last 50 years, welfare states have facilitated women’s
attachment to the labor market in high-income countries. Cross-national studies show that subsidized childcare and paid parental leave have the highest power in explaining cross-country variation in female employment (Hook and Ruppanner 2021). However, welfare systems have generally not provided equivalent levels of incentives for men to engage in caregiving at home as they have for women’s paid employment. Most high-income countries have notably shorter paternity than maternity leave and limited compensation for paternity/parental leave. Despite legitimizing and encouraging women’s paid employment, welfare states continue to prioritize childcare and family responsibilities for mothers. Moreover, some argue that welfare states have offered greater support for well-educated, socio-economically advantaged women, sometimes at the expense of their less-educated and less-advantaged counterparts (Pavolini and Van Lancker, 2018).

What drives these policy developments? Have there been changes in the development towards
more gender-equal sharing of care? The European Union has been a key proponent of social
investment and, more recently, father-specific care in the work-life balance policy framework. Most recently, the EU’s WLB Directive, adopted in 2019 and implemented across member states in 2022, introduces minimum standards for parental and paternity leave, carers’ leave, and the right to flexible working arrangements for parents. By requiring each member state to earmark at least two months of paid leave for each parent, the directive has the potential to equalize entitlements and take-up across Europe. Thus, the directive explicitly promotes gender equality by stating that the level of compensation for leave should encourage mothers and fathers to take leave. However, even with such mandates, substantial regional variation in the modalities of policy implementation may remain due to varying institutional legacies, cultural attitudes, and intentions of policy-makers (de la Porte et al., 2023a; Saxonberg 2013; Garritzmann, Häusermann, and Palier 2022: de la Porte et al., 2023). Does the Work-Life Balance Directive affect national gender equality policies and especially leave practices? And to what extent is there a regional dimension in how welfare states ‘de-genderize’ care?

Meanwhile, in the Global South, low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America has been historically characterized by weak fiscal and state capacity and substantial labor market informality. This implies a very different welfare architecture for gender equality policies. In the formal labor market, women and men may have access to traditional family leave policies akin to those in many European countries. However, workers in the informal sector are excluded from these entitlements. Informal sector workers usually rely on kinship networks and receive different kinds of policies to help them manage work and family life.
In recent decades many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have adopted various
social protection policies, such as cash transfers, subsidies, and childcare programs, often targeting women based on their poverty and motherhood status. Such policies usually don’t focus on gender equality and have been criticized for perpetuating women’s caregiving roles (Samman et al. 2016).

Thus, labor market (in)formality or segmentation can differentiate the welfare strategies for people within countries. Importantly, the duality of labor markets and welfare systems is not confined to the Global South; labor market transformations involving flexibilization, employment precarity and insecurity operate alongside secure and protected employment worldwide. Since the bulk of theoretical insights on the relationship between welfare states and gender inequality is in the context of formal sector employment, there is a pressing need for in-depth analyses of the causes and consequences of gender equality policymaking considering labor market informality and segmentation.

This mini-conference is directly related to the theme of the conference. As articulated by
Nancy Fraser (1994; 2022), the foundation of dignified and sustainable economic lives rests upon
social reproduction–care activities often performed by women outside the official economy. The
reproduction of the workforce, from birthing and caring for new generations to feeding, bathing, and resting adult workers so that they can return to work the next day, is essential for the functioning of the capitalist economy. This means that welfare states continue to play a vital function in redistributing and revaluing care which curbs the logic of exploitative and uneven capital accumulation.

In light of these global developments in welfare states in both Global North and South, this
mini-conference will adopt a comparative perspective to explore three interconnected questions:
1. How have welfare states evolved in addressing gender inequalities? Have they expanded, reduced, or restructured entitlements and incentives to combat gender inequalities, and in which specific areas?
2. What strategies have welfare states employed to encourage gender equal participation in caregiving in light of recent initiatives, such as the EU’s WLBD? How have these policies influenced the division of paid work and caregiving among individuals of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, races, or castes?
3. Is it possible to observe any convergence trends on a global scale? Are there global actors other
than the EU that have recently promoted a more gender equal sharing of care? Or is the regional
perspective more adequate for grasping common trends in reforming welfare policies when it
comes to policy (de)genderization?
4. What are the primary challenges and obstacles to progressive and proactive policy-making aimed at addressing gender inequality in the private sphere? How have these hurdles varied across different locations and time periods? What factors are impeding greater investments in initiatives such as parental leave and universal childcare, in the global North and South? What are the administrative hurdles to accessing parental leave in different regions?
5. Building upon the previous question, how have these challenges and barriers been addressed?
What factors have driven policymaking efforts concerning gender equality on both national and
international scales? How are feminist organizations involved in shaping gender equality policies?
Additionally, which stakeholders, beyond feminist movements and leftist parties, contribute to
advocating for gender equality policymaking, and in what capacities?

This mini-conference will provide a space for gender and welfare researchers to engage in critical
and comparative inquiry into these questions. We would invite papers engaging in empirical
contribution to fill in knowledge gaps, especially when it comes to gender inequalities in Global
South or taking the regional perspective going beyond (only) the European Union or OECD
countries. Finally, we would like to encourage discussions about the suitability of concepts invented in the West to the analysis of policy processes and social inequalities in the countries of the Global South in the search for common conceptual ground.

References:

de la Porte, C., Im, Z. J., Pircher, B., & Szelewa, D. (2023a). “The EU’s work-life balance directive:
Institutional change of father-specific leave across member states.” Social Policy &
Administration, 57(4), 549–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12920

Fraser, Nancy. 1994. “After the Family Wage.” Political Theory 22(4): 591–618.

Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the Planet and what we can do about it. Verso Books.

Hook, Jennifer, and Leah Ruppanner. 2021. “Gendered Outcomes,” in Daniel Béland, and others
(eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, 2nd edition, Oxford Handbooks.

Garritzmann, Julian. L., Häusermann, Silja, and Palier, Bruno. 2022. The World Politics of Social
Investment: Volume I: Welfare States in the Knowledge Economy. Oxford University Press.

Emmanuele Pavolini & Wim Van Lancker. 2018. “The Matthew effect in childcare use: a matter of
policies or preferences?” Journal of European Public Policy, 25:6, 878-893, DOI:
10.1080/13501763.2017.1401108

Samman, E., Presler-Marshall, E., Jones, N., Stavropoulou, M., & Wallace, J. 2016. Women’s
work. Mothers, Children and the Global Childcare Crisis. London: Overseas Development Institute.

Saxonberg, Steven. 2013. “From Defamilialization to Degenderization: Toward a New Welfare
Typology 1.” Social Policy & Administration 47(1): 26–49.

Organizers: Jacqueline O’Reilly, Mark Stuart, Esme Terry, Rachel Verdin, Steve Rolf

Contemporary knowledge of digital work ecosystems is limited, and analysis remains embryonic. We know that employers’ investment in digital technologies is patchy; inequalities in skills and rewards are increasing; access to healthy working lives is polarised; and regional inequalities persist. However, we have very limited knowledge of how the role out of digital infrastructures at work and the provision of welfare affect intersectional inequalities in terms of race, gender and abilities in different geographical regions (Verdin et al. 2023).

The concept of digital work ecosystems contextualises the evolution of the connected worker and the nature of fractious connections in a broader institutional network (Altman et al. 2021; Kitsing 2021). This requires understanding the evolution of digital ecosystems and digital connections through work in relation to on-going interactions between government, business, trade unions and community actors. The concept of Innovation Work Chains (Stopford and O’Reilly 2022) focuses analysis beyond the immediate contracted workforce of an organisation in one location. This encourages greater analytical recognition of how digitalisation affects inter-organisational dependencies (Haveman 2022). The interaction of key actors and decision makers, in different institutional settings, affects the outcome of the digital transformation of work and coordinating governance of labour market institutions shaping the digital ecosystem and dignity at work. 

Yet little remains known about how inclusive and synergised digital work ecosystem are being developed, or not. The successful evolution and governance of digital work ecosystems is essential for improved economic performance, citizens’ well-being, dignity at work and job quality. While digital technologies are profoundly shaping work, it is unclear how economic and institutional governance is adequately evolving to navigate these challenges. The aim of this mini-conference is to attract a wide range of international contributions examining these evolutions.  Papers can focus on:

1. Which theoretical and methodological approaches contribute to understanding the evolution of digital work ecosystems from a comparative perspective?
2. How does the adoption and impact of digital technologies vary by sector, region and country?
3. Where have digital technologies transformed work to foster good jobs and dignified work for different groups of workers, and where has this failed?
4. How can the digital ecosystem support displaced workers and help those looking for work?
5. How do employment laws and regulations affect the characteristics of the digital ecosystem? 
6. How are civil society organisations including trade unions and NGOs involved, or not in the evolution of digital work and welfare ecosystem?

References:

Altman, E.J., Schwartz, J., Kiron, D., Jones, R. and Diana, D. (2021). Workforce Ecosystems: A New Strategic Approach to the Future of Work. [online] MIT Sloan Management Review. 

Haveman, H.A. (2022). The Power of Organizations. Princeton University Press.

Kitsing, M. (2021). The Political Economy of Digital Ecosystems. Routledge.

Stopford, N. and O’Reilly, J. (2022) ‘Innovation Work Chains in US Retail: Automation, Tracking and AI Adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Digit Working Papers No. 2, University of Sussex.

Verdin, R, O`Reilly, J, McDonnell, A (2023) Digital Welfare Ecosystems in Europe: Social protection systems preventing social exclusion and enhancing opportunities to participate in the digital economy. EUROSHIP Working Paper No. 23. Oslo: Oslo Metropolitan University. DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.22060376. Available at: https://euroship-research.eu/publications 

Link to conference theme: “Socio-Economics in a Transitioning World: Breaking Lines and Alternative Paradigms for a New World Order”

Conceptually examining the comparative evolution of digital ecosystems directly addresses the conference theme in both theoretically and empirically identifying emerging societal paradigms related to the digital transformation of work and welfare comparatively.

This mini conference will aim to address issues of intersectional inequalities around race, gender and ability in the evolution of digital connectivity by focusing on the different impact of connectedness for different communities. It will also encourage papers that provide an historical perspective on the evolution of digital technologies at work. Theoretically this draws on heterodox economics, legal studies and comparative economic sociology from a global perspective.

Contact: Professor Jacqueline O’Reilly: j.o-reilly@sussex.ac.uk

Organizers: Matías Dewey, Gabriel Feltran

This mini-conference continues the debate on illegal markets that we started at SASE 2023. In this second edition, our proposal emphasises the interfaces between legal and illegal markets, as well as the technologies that enable their contemporary expansion; in addition, we seek to thematise the different ways in which illegal markets impact local power disputes. Globalisation, upheavals and crisis situations are fertile ground for the emergence of illegal markets. Inflation, exchange rates, political turmoil and far-reaching technological innovations often provide the conditions for different actors – not just “organised criminals” – to mobilise resources for illegal transactions. 

The proposed mini-conference seeks to shed light on these interfaces in illegal markets. From a sociological perspective, the focus is on how money and illegal actors are directly or indirectly connected to different legal economies and official infrastructures. Illegal market actors, such as organised criminals, consumers, brokers, corrupt governments and state agents, use different technologies to draw power from different sources. For example, contemporary drug markets use cryptocurrencies, but also ports and airport infrastructure to circulate the value that is used for consumption or laundering strategies, opening legal companies and paying taxes. These networks and their operating mechanisms are still largely unknown. Today, in different territories in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the power of money and criminal organisations coexists with state sovereignty and different levels of social acceptance. This money also circulates widely in the Global North.

Illegal accumulation may be residual in some strong national economies, but it represents a good portion of GDP in poorer and smaller countries. Based on the concept of illegal markets as arenas for the exchange of goods or services whose production, distribution or consumption is legally prohibited (Beckert and Dewey 2017), we argue that economic and technological exchanges can take place effectively if the actors involved mobilise various interfaces. 

The topic of our mini-conference concerns the interfaces, technologies and power that enable market players to effectively carry out illegal exchanges. The organisers identified that: 1) illegal markets are not disconnected from different accepted social spheres and must be understood in their relations with legal markets and its regulation; 2) new technologies are widely used by illegal actors, allowing them to expand rapidly; 3) the unequal distribution of resources in illegal markets includes capital and the use of force, which impacts local power relations.  

Interfaces: actors in illegal markets use and launder their money by manipulating regulations and overseeing to camouflage their actions and/or protect themselves. On the one hand, they strategically take advantage of both prohibitions and loopholes in regulations to get their money into legal economies. On the other hand, governments and state agents can benefit from the taxes of different legal companies illegally fuelled. Sometimes law enforcement sells protection to criminals or even eliminates some players from the market, etc. the interests of the state and crime are the same. Some other times, the situational interests of the state and crime are the same. 

Technologies: participants in illegal markets can use technology to make illegal economic exchanges possible. There are different technologies that agents can mobilise to achieve their objectives. There are well-known physical technology devices or infrastructures, such as the container, mobile phones or the postal service, which agents use to make transactions. Now, digital technologies and infrastructures have taken illegal markets to a new level. Social media and messaging apps allow for the creation of semi- and fully private markets, digital payment services facilitate fast and anonymous money transfers and food delivery apps facilitate distribution.  

Power relations: the illegal circulation of valuable goods produces side effects related to the distribution of power. Actors can take advantage of the unequal distribution of resources to create illegal markets. Crises and war situations are good examples: some social actors with access to scarce goods are in an excellent position to satisfy people who need, for example, food or medicines. Long-standing inequalities (Tilly, 1998) have also created the conditions for the emergence of illegal markets, a situation intensified by the lack of a sense of belonging among vulnerable groups. Deep economic inequality can therefore be exploited by groups capable of producing wealth in illegal markets and becoming de facto rulers of marginalised populations. Authoritarian states can rely on illegal markets and actors to impose their domination. Consequently, the hybridisation of political orders based on unequal resources for violence and accumulation seems to be a trend in several highly developed criminal contexts (Steputtat 2013, Arias and Barnes 2013, Feltran 2020). 

This mini-conference aims to address these contemporary issues in and around the rapidly changing global illegal markets. We look forward to a mini-conference that showcases a wide variety of illegal markets and their interfaces.

References

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

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

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

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

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

Organizers: Sigrid Quack, Antoine Dolcerocca, Christian Bessy, Konstantin Hondros

In the knowledge economy (Powell & Snellman, 2004) or economies fostering an aestheticization of its products and services (Lash & Urry, 1993), knowledge and culture are increasingly commodified, mainly through the institution of intellectual property rights (IPR) (Coriat & Weinstein, 2011). Much of the debate revolves around whether IPR positively incentivize the creation of novel and valuable knowledge and products and, thus, foster creativity and innovation through private control, or whether the monopolies granted through IPR are detrimental for society at large, because they impede access to knowledge (Hodgson, 2019). Throughout all major domains of IPR – patent, copyright, and trademark – pinpointing the right balance between public access to knowledge versus private control over IPR remains a troubling socio-economic issue, with diverse effects experienced in the daily practices of actors (Bessy & Chateauraynaud, 2019; Dobusch et al., 2021). 

This is emphasized by the observation that many of society’s “grand challenges” have intricate relations to IPR: during the pandemic (as well as in its aftermath) patent monopolies of Western vaccine producers impeded with timely access to vaccines for large parts of the global population. No less, current technological innovations of artificial intelligence (AI) are underpinned with socio-economic questions about IPR. Whether it is about ownership in original works and inventions created by AI, compensation for rights holders of copyrights used to train AI, or public access to proprietary AI-algorithms.

This mini-conference, in line with this year’s SASE conference theme, proposes to explore IPR as a crucial element to the “politics and technologies of neoliberalism,” and to foreground the central role of socio-economics in analyzing the embeddedness, impact, and practices of IPR in fields, markets, and organizations both in local and global economies. Beyond the established IPR-disciplines of economics and law, socio-economics is in a unique position to investigate, criticize and potentially add to solving IPR-related shortcomings with most detrimental effects on society at large. To this end, the mini-conference identifies potential broader topics for abstract or paper submissions that are intentionally explorative to motivate a diverse debate around IPR in socio-economics. 

We welcome both empirical (qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, experimental, etc.) and theoretical submissions interested in the socio-economic analysis of intellectual property, including but not limited to:

• Doing IPR: against an understanding of IPR as an institution, a socio-legal lens of “living law” highlights the role and agency of actors when doing IPR, how they both access and control knowledge in their practice. Though still often a practice of professionals like patent or copyright lawyers, the ubiquity of IPR forces “everybody” into IP-related practices and, thus, makes them lifeworld experts of IPR. 
• Conflicts about IPR: as an institution, for many actors in political and economic arenas IPR are taken for granted. Still, numerous conflicts over IPR are fought out in public debates or at court. These could be most relevant sights to investigate justifications of IPR, as well as questions related to power and control, and whether they remain stable or change over time.
• Inequality and IPR: there is ample evidence that IPR foster inequal access to knowledge and knowledge-driven products in global economies. Still, global and local influence of IPR vary greatly and an analysis sensible for the different scales of IPR could yield a deeper socio-economic understanding of the relationship between IPR and inequality. Here, questions of IPR-inequality need to take into account a gender perspective and thus the issue of who owns IPR effectively. Moreover, little research has focused on the conventions for allocating IPR between actors, which can lead to inequalities in the distribution of the fruits of innovation.
• Alternatives to IPR: often, IPR are presented as necessity for creativity and innovation as well as their economic thriving. Yet, commons-based creation and approaches of sharing knowledge have proven to be invaluable in many sectors of contemporary economies. To socio-economically investigate commons- and sharing approaches to knowledge, also in relation to the IPR-driven mainstream, yields opportunities for unpacking claims of IPR and providing counter-imaginaries.
• Investigating IPR: though IPR are ubiquitous, they are highly abstract and very complex, both in their legal build-up and in their real-life unfolding. There is quite some difficulty in making IPR-sensitive research more accessible, not least for the discourses of socio-economics. Methodological questions as well as broader research agendas would thus be of relevance for socio-economic IPR-research.

With regard to these topics (among others), we welcome submissions exploring questions such as:

• How do IPR play out in different societal fields and markets?
• How is ownership over IPR distributed globally and are there local “counter-practices” to challenge IPR?
• What is the role of morality in IP-laden markets? In what ways do IPR add to or impede with moralization of markets?
• What are the alternatives to exclusive IPR regimes and how are these alternatives deployed. 
• What are conditions for viable commons and commons-based innovation regimes? 
• How are IPR markets a vector of innovation or producer of inequalities in the allocation of rights due to the reduction of forms of co-ownership? 
• What is the role of market intermediaries and what type of regulation could reduce overly speculative activities which break with the initial spirit of the founding of IPR?
• How do practices of exclusive ownership relate to practices of sharing in knowledge economies?
• What are methodologically promising avenues to investigate IPR in socio-economics?
• How can we construe a research agenda for IPR investigation in socio-economics?

References

Bessy, C., & Chateauraynaud, F. (2019). The dynamics of authentication and counterfeits in markets. Historical Social Research, 44(1), 136-159.

Coriat, B., & Weinstein, O. (2011). Patent regimes, firms and the commodification of knowledge. Socio-Economic Review, 10(2), 267-292.

Dobusch, L., Hondros, K., Quack, S., & Zangerle, K. (2021). Between Anxiety and Hope? How Actors Experience Regulatory Uncertainty in Creative Processes in Music and Pharma. Research in the Sociology of Organizations 75, 137–160.

Hodgson, G. M. (2019). How mythical markets mislead analysis: an institutionalist critique of market universalism. Socio-Economic Review, 18(4), 1153-1174.

Lash, S. M., & Urry, J. (1993). Economies of signs and space (Vol. 26). London: Sage.

Powell, W. W., & Snellman, K. (2004). The knowledge economy. Annual Review of Sociology., 30, 199-220.