Elites play a crucial role by their leading role in the institutions that define how power is exercised and which forms of conflict are legitimate The current Post Globalisation order calls 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 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 ideological projects of various elites still need to be studied to understand their contribution to the persistence of neoliberalism and to the boundary conditions for inclusive solidarities in wider society. 

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. Almost twenty 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). 

There is therefore still a great need 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 defend 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.

Population ageing is the 21st century's dominant demographic phenomenon. It is represented by an increase in the relative number of older persons in a population and is associated with an increase in the median age of the population. The age structure of a population is determined by its mortality, fertility, and net migration experience.

Declining fertility, increasing longevity, and the progression of large-sized older aged cohorts are causing shares of older people to rise throughout the world. With 80% of the older persons projected to be living in low-income countries by 2050, they will be primarily affected by these evolutions with little resources to face this rapid demographic phenomenon. This hitherto unprecedented phenomenon of population ageing brings with it sweeping changes in population, expectations, needs and capacities, and with these changes, also significant implications for employment, savings, consumption, innovation, productivity, as well as the organization of (formal and informal) care. Population ageing is therefore exerting unprecedented pressures on long-established social norms and policy institutions globally, and to individuals such as caregivers. Sustained declines in fertility and increasing life expectancy are therefore raising deep questions about intergenerational exchange and equity and policy formulation, and will drive global movements in labor, capital, and trade in unknown ways over coming decades. Managing these forces is a formidable task, requiring new knowledge, and yet an evidence base is still in the early stages of development. The need for an intensive and cutting-edge research effort related to demographic ageing is therefore crucial.

While the phenomenon of population ageing is taking place throughout the world, considerable heterogeneity exists across nations and among regions. Most high-income countries already have large elderly cohorts, with 20% of the population aged 60+. This proportion will rise to more than 30% in the next four decades. The major difference between high-income and middle-/lower-income economies is that the latter face the risk to become old before getting rich (the pattern seems to be the same but the pace is much faster: between 2015 and 2050 the population of 60+ will increase by 177% against 41% in high-income countries). In some countries population ageing has been going on for quite a while, resulting already now in high dependency ratios, e.g., Japan and the quintessential ‘‘Old European’’ countries, especially Italy and Germany. Then there are relatively young countries in which the speed of ageing is dramatic, especially in Asia, notably China and South Korea. Third, there are also countries where ageing is not so dramatic, e.g., France, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Canada mainly because these countries have maintained higher birth rates than the abovementioned Asian and European countries, and some cases (such as Canada) they have been able to moderate the speed of population ageing process through immigration. The cross-national perspective is of particular importance since time-series offer no comparison scenarios: the current demographic change is without historical precedence.

In short, population ageing is inevitable and will affect all countries, with implications for nearly all sectors of society, including labor and financial markets, the demand for goods and services, such as housing, transportation and social protection, as well as family structures and inter-generational ties. However, because cultural values and institutional arrangements differ from place to place, the consequences of ageing will likewise differ. In some countries, the older people continue to work productively into old age, while in others, they withdraw early from the labor force. In some countries, the older people are supported by transfers from their families, whereas in others by transfers from the public sector. For all these reasons, older people depend to varying degrees on transfers from the younger population, and consequently population ageing has larger or smaller macro impacts.

The study of the causes of population ageing has been left mainly to demographers, partly for good reasons, but more has to be done, for example to better understand the determinants of fertility, in mobilizing frameworks from other social sciences. As for the study of the impact of population ageing, this is the favorite topic of economists. They have focused their analyses on age structure ratios, such as the number of dependent persons (the young and the old) divided by the number of persons in the population or by the number of working-age persons. It leads economists to focus on the costs of national pension and healthcare systems rise with population ageing. This has, in turn, become one of the principal public policy issues. At the same time, ageing population can lead to productivity slowdown or even decline, once again affecting the sustainability of the Welfare State. As well, it also leads to the idea that older adults are primarily a burden for the society, leaving aside their contribution to the society (as consumers, caregivers, or volunteers).

Given the importance of population ageing, it is extremely surprising that ageing has been so under-studied and under-discussed within SASE and SER. There are several potential reasons. One is that it does not seem to be directly related to political economy; rather, it is seen as an exogenous factor. Moreover, when political economy is mobilized, it is rather its conservative version that serve a neoliberal agenda, and thus is focused on the reform of the welfare state, in particular the pension system. From this perspective, a purpose of this mini-conference is to study if alternative models compared to the conservative-neoliberal one exist to tackle this demographic challenge and the impacts of those different models of adaptation to ageing on population, standard of living, well-being and the political economy of those demographic regimes. The potential of developing a research program is large, especially if one considers the importance of gender issues that are properly taken into account by the economics of ageing and the questions of conflicts between generations or between capital and labor. Whatever the reasons of this relative neglect, we emphasize that the consequences are non-negligible given the fact the perspective of socio-economics and political economy is important, and is missing from the mainstream approaches to ageing, being demographic or economics of ageing.

Moreover, from a public health perspective, the conditions under which people age have become a more critical concern than the mere number of individuals reaching old age. Although recent generations of older adults generally enjoy better health than their predecessors, increasing life expectancy also raises the number of people living with age-related consequences such as diseases, geriatric syndromes, and dependency. The health impacts of ageing may vary considerably across countries and regions, reflecting differences in national health and social systems, policy frameworks, and cultural contexts, issues that merit particular attention from SASE members adopting a comparative perspective. Furthermore, studying population ageing requires a fundamentally pluri- and interdisciplinary approach, which has a huge potential for an association such as SASE. It requires a better integration between demographic studies and the diverse research agenda within SASE. The development of the economics of ageing is remarkable, while the sociology of ageing and environmental gerontology are well established and are challenging some standard approaches dominated by medical sciences. However, political economy and socio-economics of ageing is still underdeveloped.

In short, there is a gap within SASE regarding the study of population ageing (including its impacts on societies and economies) and this mini-conference proposal aims to fulfill it. In doing so, we expect to attract new SASE members, who are directly interested in this topic, but also colleagues who are already members of SASE and who would like to develop their research in this direction. We hope that this mini-conference will contribute to the emergence of a new stage of collaboration and a new research agenda.

Finally, we recognize that this proposal is not directly related to the theme of this year’s SASE meeting. However, there are several possible connections. First, we are interested in different and important types of conflict – the intergenerational and gender – which are also related to labor questions and the relative power of active vs non-active population; second, we will welcome papers and proposals that deal with the international dimension of ageing and its impact on migration, which also raises many potential shifts in power relations between “young” and “old”, and "high-income" and "middle- and lower-income" countries and the political economy of managing migration. Of course, our mini-conference will not be limited to these two topics.

‘Precarity’ and ‘insecurity’ encompass more than mere employment uncertainty; they refer to the micro-experiences of socioeconomic insecurity faced by working class individuals and the shrinking middle class (often referred to as the ‘squeezed middle’) worldwide. In this year’s mini-conference, we emphasize the entanglement of objective and subjective boundaries which define socioeconomic insecurity, thereby extending the scope of analysis beyond economic-centred notions, such as employment status or income levels. Moreover, we examine the political reverberations of insecurity, particularly among the losers of globalization. Lastly, because insecurity is anchored in time and place, we examine how insecurity is linked to the post-globalization order, with different consequences for people in different countries and in different social positions within those countries. 

Our first aim is to conceptualize insecurity. While the conceptualization of socioeconomic insecurity is often anchored in purely (macro)economic processes, our mini-conference examines meso- and micro- manifestations of precarity. Orthodox economic approaches tend to limit the study of insecurity to ‘objective measures’ or only to examine macroeconomic processes, thereby neglecting to examine everyday manifestations of precarity that our mini-conference explores. The mini-conference aims to clarify the interplay between macro-processes and micro-manifestations of precarity, and bridge the gap between economic and cultural strands in socioeconomic studies by proposing an operationalization of insecurity that employs both objective and subjective indicators, that considers different temporal dimensions of insecurity (i.e., in the past, present and future) and that incorporates livelihoods as well as institutions.

Our second aim is to deepen the understanding of the relationship between insecurity and contemporary forms of social and political conflicts around the world. Insecurity and precarity have often been described as drivers of the political and cultural backlash experienced by globalization’s losers; they have been found to be linked to the rise of populist support around the globe. For instance, insecurity has been considered one of the driving forces behind the move toward Trump and Brexit, as well as, more broadly, the post-globalization order, particularly in Western countries. At the same time, shared experiences of insecurity can, potentially, also be a bonding factor and the basis for formulating collective actions and responses. This year, in line with the conference theme, we are particularly interested in deepening the understanding of the political reverberations of insecurity and of its role in generating and re-defining insider/outsider dynamics, status threat, group boundaries, and political conflict within national borders and globally. We anticipate that this angle will allow us to generate new exchanges between the emerging field of insecurity studies and the recent research produced by political sociology.

Our third aim is to deepen the understanding of the contextual factors that shape insecurity in the new global order. It is particularly relevant to examine how insecurity has evolved over the last few decades given the current state of polycrisis, which has had varying degrees of socioeconomic consequences across the globe. Different sociodemographic groups (e.g. shaped by age, gender, class, and race/ethnicity) may experience and respond to the crises in disparate and unequal ways, which gives rise to varying degrees of socioeconomic insecurity. At the same time, diverse coping strategies and policies carried out by institutions, organizations, and states may have a significant influence on individuals’ perceptions of employment or financial insecurity. Against this backdrop, it is highly relevant to examine cross-sectional, regional, and country-specific differences and similarities in responding to global insecurity. The concept of “insecurity” has been usefully mobilized by scholars in many countries worldwide to describe the social realities present there. This year, we hope to continue bringing together research on a global scale.

Our mini conference is concerned with advancing the empirical and theoretical understanding of the social and political manifestations and effects of socioeconomic insecurity around the world. We are particularly interested in gathering research that addresses the following questions, within and between countries or globally:

- What are the political effects of insecurity across the globe? How does insecurity generate conflict, including through status threat?

- How has socioeconomic insecurity changed over the past decades and been impacted by changes generated by globalization and by the post-globalization order? To what extent is the return to national boundaries a response to the rise of individual insecurity?

- Should we expect a divergence or convergence in experiences of insecurity across countries and regions in the new global order?

- To what extent does insecurity diverge among different socio-demographic groups? What are the connections between the insecurity experienced by individuals and intersectional inequalities pertaining to age, class, gender, and race/ethnicity?

- What are the connections between work precarity and insecurity in livelihoods? What is the relationship between objective and subjective insecurity experienced by individuals?

- What role does economic insecurity, intensified by changes to work lives, automation and financialization, play in shaping political polarization and the rise of populism?

- What role does the welfare state and different welfare regimes play in reducing or exacerbating insecurity?

- How and why do individuals make sense of their insecurity as separate from, or in relation to, others?

- What are the processes that (dis)embed insecurities in social relations and institutions?

- What is the relationship between individual and collective responses to insecurity? When do individual responses and competition create divisions, and when do these same dynamics open opportunities for collective responses?

Population ageing is the 21st century's dominant demographic phenomenon. It is represented by an increase in the relative number of older persons in a population and is associated with an increase in the median age of the population. The age structure of a population is determined by its mortality, fertility, and net migration experience.

Declining fertility, increasing longevity, and the progression of large-sized older aged cohorts are causing shares of older people to rise throughout the world. With 80% of the older persons projected to be living in low-income countries by 2050, they will be primarily affected by these evolutions with little resources to face this rapid demographic phenomenon. This hitherto unprecedented phenomenon of population ageing brings with it sweeping changes in population, expectations, needs and capacities, and with these changes, also significant implications for employment, savings, consumption, innovation, productivity, as well as the organization of (formal and informal) care. Population ageing is therefore exerting unprecedented pressures on long-established social norms and policy institutions globally, and to individuals such as caregivers. Sustained declines in fertility and increasing life expectancy are therefore raising deep questions about intergenerational exchange and equity and policy formulation, and will drive global movements in labor, capital, and trade in unknown ways over coming decades. Managing these forces is a formidable task, requiring new knowledge, and yet an evidence base is still in the early stages of development. The need for an intensive and cutting-edge research effort related to demographic ageing is therefore crucial.

While the phenomenon of population ageing is taking place throughout the world, considerable heterogeneity exists across nations and among regions. Most high-income countries already have large elderly cohorts, with 20% of the population aged 60+. This proportion will rise to more than 30% in the next four decades. The major difference between high-income and middle-/lower-income economies is that the latter face the risk to become old before getting rich (the pattern seems to be the same but the pace is much faster: between 2015 and 2050 the population of 60+ will increase by 177% against 41% in high-income countries). In some countries population ageing has been going on for quite a while, resulting already now in high dependency ratios, e.g., Japan and the quintessential ‘‘Old European’’ countries, especially Italy and Germany. Then there are relatively young countries in which the speed of ageing is dramatic, especially in Asia, notably China and South Korea. Third, there are also countries where ageing is not so dramatic, e.g., France, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Canada mainly because these countries have maintained higher birth rates than the abovementioned Asian and European countries, and some cases (such as Canada) they have been able to moderate the speed of population ageing process through immigration. The cross-national perspective is of particular importance since time-series offer no comparison scenarios: the current demographic change is without historical precedence.

In short, population ageing is inevitable and will affect all countries, with implications for nearly all sectors of society, including labor and financial markets, the demand for goods and services, such as housing, transportation and social protection, as well as family structures and inter-generational ties. However, because cultural values and institutional arrangements differ from place to place, the consequences of ageing will likewise differ. In some countries, the older people continue to work productively into old age, while in others, they withdraw early from the labor force. In some countries, the older people are supported by transfers from their families, whereas in others by transfers from the public sector. For all these reasons, older people depend to varying degrees on transfers from the younger population, and consequently population ageing has larger or smaller macro impacts.

The study of the causes of population ageing has been left mainly to demographers, partly for good reasons, but more has to be done, for example to better understand the determinants of fertility, in mobilizing frameworks from other social sciences. As for the study of the impact of population ageing, this is the favorite topic of economists. They have focused their analyses on age structure ratios, such as the number of dependent persons (the young and the old) divided by the number of persons in the population or by the number of working-age persons. It leads economists to focus on the costs of national pension and healthcare systems rise with population ageing. This has, in turn, become one of the principal public policy issues. At the same time, ageing population can lead to productivity slowdown or even decline, once again affecting the sustainability of the Welfare State. As well, it also leads to the idea that older adults are primarily a burden for the society, leaving aside their contribution to the society (as consumers, caregivers, or volunteers).

Given the importance of population ageing, it is extremely surprising that ageing has been so under-studied and under-discussed within SASE and SER. There are several potential reasons. One is that it does not seem to be directly related to political economy; rather, it is seen as an exogenous factor. Moreover, when political economy is mobilized, it is rather its conservative version that serve a neoliberal agenda, and thus is focused on the reform of the welfare state, in particular the pension system. From this perspective, a purpose of this mini-conference is to study if alternative models compared to the conservative-neoliberal one exist to tackle this demographic challenge and the impacts of those different models of adaptation to ageing on population, standard of living, well-being and the political economy of those demographic regimes. The potential of developing a research program is large, especially if one considers the importance of gender issues that are properly taken into account by the economics of ageing and the questions of conflicts between generations or between capital and labor. Whatever the reasons of this relative neglect, we emphasize that the consequences are non-negligible given the fact the perspective of socio-economics and political economy is important, and is missing from the mainstream approaches to ageing, being demographic or economics of ageing.

Moreover, from a public health perspective, the conditions under which people age have become a more critical concern than the mere number of individuals reaching old age. Although recent generations of older adults generally enjoy better health than their predecessors, increasing life expectancy also raises the number of people living with age-related consequences such as diseases, geriatric syndromes, and dependency. The health impacts of ageing may vary considerably across countries and regions, reflecting differences in national health and social systems, policy frameworks, and cultural contexts, issues that merit particular attention from SASE members adopting a comparative perspective. Furthermore, studying population ageing requires a fundamentally pluri- and interdisciplinary approach, which has a huge potential for an association such as SASE. It requires a better integration between demographic studies and the diverse research agenda within SASE. The development of the economics of ageing is remarkable, while the sociology of ageing and environmental gerontology are well established and are challenging some standard approaches dominated by medical sciences. However, political economy and socio-economics of ageing is still underdeveloped.

In short, there is a gap within SASE regarding the study of population ageing (including its impacts on societies and economies) and this mini-conference proposal aims to fulfill it. In doing so, we expect to attract new SASE members, who are directly interested in this topic, but also colleagues who are already members of SASE and who would like to develop their research in this direction. We hope that this mini-conference will contribute to the emergence of a new stage of collaboration and a new research agenda.

Finally, we recognize that this proposal is not directly related to the theme of this year’s SASE meeting. However, there are several possible connections. First, we are interested in different and important types of conflict – the intergenerational and gender – which are also related to labor questions and the relative power of active vs non-active population; second, we will welcome papers and proposals that deal with the international dimension of ageing and its impact on migration, which also raises many potential shifts in power relations between “young” and “old”, and "high-income" and "middle- and lower-income" countries and the political economy of managing migration. Of course, our mini-conference will not be limited to these two topics.

In Comparative Political Economy, institutions have traditionally been conceived as formal and informal rules that don’t entirely determine policy outcomes, but constrain the range of options from which market actors and policymakers are likely to choose. However, the recently published Handbook of Comparative Political Economy (Elgar 2025), edited by Marino Regini and listing contributions by 49 leading scholars in this field, clearly shows that this view tends to emphasise stability over change, and 

functionalist and static analyses of how institutions work in regulating capitalism. Drawing on the title of this SASE conference, we might say that it overlooks their nature of being the outcome of social conflict and power relations, as well as potential tools for new social and political action. 

A first objective of the proposed mini-conference is to discuss whether and to what extent this general criticism is well-taken, and how it may be declined when examining specific political economy institutions. Both theoretically- and empirically-oriented papers may deal with such questions in a plurality of ways. 

A second and more ambitious objective is to address the question of whether and how the traditional role of political economy institutions is changing in the current “post-globalisation order”. This question has acquired renewed relevance in the context of the radical shift in the US political-economic approach, while it also opens the way to examining how developments in other world regions are reshaping institutions and contributing to the emerging post-globalisation order. The profound reorganization of the international political economy which is taking place, in fact, has already begun to change norms, behaviours, and institutions globally. 

Political economy institutions, in particular, have historically been created to regulate the market and, during the long period of neoliberal hegemony, have been constantly challenged by actors aiming at “freeing” capitalist markets by these rules. However, the current radical shift in the US political-economic approach is not only profoundly changing the functions and influence of international institutions. It is also, de facto, shifting the main functions of such national political economy institutions as central banks or interest associations, from the traditional one of regulating markets to a brand new one of confronting and trying to set limits to radical and often arbitrary political decisions. Hence, to what extent can we detect the main challenge to such institutions as no longer coming from actors aiming at “freeing” capitalist markets by any types of rules (as was the case during the neoliberal period), as much as it is coming from political authorities which conceive themselves as entitled to make fundamental economic decisions without any interference from economic, social and political institutions? While the first objective of the proposed mini-conference mainly invites theoretically-oriented papers, for this second objective we would especially welcome descriptive case studies of individual countries or cross-national studies of specific institutions, and systematic empirical analyses more generally, to build a sufficient empirical evidence of the profound changes going on in the role of political economy institutions in the post-globalisation order.

The current political polarisation and conflicts both within and between nations shakes up the institutional structures of the past decades. Not only are existing rules being ignored or drastically changed, but also existing normative agreements are being disrupted and assumptions that were taken for granted are being questioned. Sustainability – whether it concerns climate change or diversity – is being contested in ways that we have not seen in recent years. While a lot is at stake (increased number of humanitarian crises, intensified ecological crises, dramatic societal inequality, liberal democracy), this mini-conference centres around the roles of organizations, specifically corporations. First, we would consider the roles of corporations, wittingly or otherwise, in contributing to and enabling the 'backlash' on sustainability and the 'war on woke'. Secondly, it considers the consequences such changes have for how corporations address societal and environmental problems such as environmental degradation or gender inequality, often summarized under labels such as corporate sustainability or corporate responsibility. 

While the field of corporate responsibility and sustainability has always been characterised by controversy and divergent interests, recent developments make existing conflicts and ideological differences particularly visible. For instance, right-wing populist politicians in the US, as part of their ‘war on woke,’ have started to attack corporate social responsibility (CSR), diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)-sensitive investing. About half of the US states – those state legislatures controlled by the Republican Party – have adopted anti-ESG legislation, formally prohibiting institutional investors from taking ecological and social concerns into account when making their investment decisions. Companies have been directly targeted with punitive measures when adopting progressive policies, e.g. regarding sexual orientation of their employees or when taking a public stance against legislation undermining the rights of sexual minorities. For instance, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis threatened Disney with a loss of privileges on the territory of its theme park over its stance towards the state’s ‘Don’t say gay’-law. Even academic scholarship has started denouncing ‘woke companies’ (Foss & Klein, 2023). Hartwell & Devinney (2024) find that corporate social responsibility activities change significantly with the rise of right-wing populism in the respective country. The spill-over of political polarisation and ‘culture wars’ into the economic realm risks putting a halt to the progress that had been made towards making corporations accountable for their social and environmental impact. This development also challenges the role of the state as a regulator, provider of welfare, democracy, and security. .

Meanwhile, in other jurisdictions considerable progress was made towards enshrining sustainable organisations in the law (e.g. France’s société à mission – Segrestin et al. 2021). Even though the exact form of the regulations in the EU is currently under debate, it remains one of the most far-reaching regulatory projects in the field of corporate responsibility and sustainability. Also in the US, some states such as California are pushing for ESG demands. Business associations in Germany organize against right-wing populism (Kinderman, 2021). But these developments also reveal conflicts about interests and power, such as in the EU. Just this year, for instance, France and Germany were instrumental in watering down the proposed new legislation on supply chain oversight - one of the most longstanding and classic ambitions of the CSR movement. In the German example, the conflictual nature of the process is particularly evident, as the changes were driven primarily by the interests of a single party, supported by business associations, and despite protests from civil society organizations.  

The field of corporate sustainability is thus currently a laboratory for socio-economic and political conflicts and power struggles. The role of economic actors (including corporations but also unions, business associations, or multi-stakeholder initiatives) vis-à-vis these new global challenges requires bringing together scholars with a socio-economic perspective, with SASE being the ideal place. 

This mini-conference wants to focus on how economic actors are shaping and navigating this new reality. Corporations are both ‘culprits’ and 'targets' of the current polarisation and populist backlash (Butzbach et al., 2020). Business actors are, on the one hand, actively shaping the political developments (Adler et al., 2022), as discussed for instance in debates on CEO activism on sensitive socio-political issues (Olkkonen & Morsing, 2022). Moreover, at the same time, corporations are adapting their organisational practices in how to address societal and environmental problems to the new socio-economic developments. For instance, by using the backlash to return to previous unsustainable practices – e.g. by abandoning the strategy to shift from oil to green tech in the case of oil majors like BP. Others are seeking ways to maintain their progress without being exposed to political repercussions (e.g. by taking down CSR-related websites while continuing practices like before – the two toy companies Lego or Mattel are examples of this). Still others such as Costco seem to have benefitted from “staying the course” with more customers visiting its stores after shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to end DEI programs.

Moreover, and while such examples highlight varying corporate agency, this mini-conference wants to stress its link to the institutional environment. Changes at the organizational level resulting from the socio-economic and political conflicts described above can have very different organizational and ultimately societal consequences in different institutional contexts. For instance, changes in the communication at Lego, a family-owned Danish firm, may have very different consequences compared to changes at Mattel, a publicly-traded US firm. Summarizing this trend as reverse decoupling (doing it without talking about it), for instance, might be too short handed. Comparative studies need to shed light on how this differs across institutional settings (e.g., does reducing explicit DEI lead to its vanishing in countries where it is not backed-up by complementary institutional rules, such as low gender inequality or a strong gender-equitable welfare state?). Institutional differences may thus lead to divergent situations across the globe, not presenting a uniform way of navigating to the political threats but creating what Matten and Moon (2020, p. 8) refer to as hybridization, where “various and varying balances of explicit volition and implicit” forms of how corporations address societal problems co-exist. Similarly, changes in regulation may be different in scope because of institutional complementarities and interdependencies in each specific legislative context. For example, many Republican-led states, such as Florida, have banned ESG criteria for public pension investments, viewing ESG as anti-competitive and contrary to fiduciary duty, which aligns with the Republican party program. In contrast, states like California support ESG to promote climate action and social inclusion, reflecting Democratic Party ideology. The European Union similarly backs ESG through its Green Deal. Global developments can therefore lead to very complex mingling of objectives and orders in these legal systems. Different institutional settings may create pathways for how the current conflicts about ideas, modes of evaluation, and structures of control around sustainability evolve (Bartosch & Lohmeyer, 2025). 

This mini-conference invites scholars sharing an interest in the interface between corporations and sustainability (CSR, sustainability, corporate political activity, state-business relations), including but not limited to political economy, sociology, anthropology, business studies, economic history, economic geography, industrial relations, organizational analysis, and neighboring disciplines. 

The goal is to organise a cohesive program along the lines of the analysis of the socio-economics of sustainability in times of global conflicts, with several panels with papers along the following topics (the list of topics is only indicative):

• How does the current backlash against sustainability, ESG, and CSR affect how corporations address societal and environmental problems such as environmental degradation or gender inequality? How does this differ across countries? 
• How does the backlash change the relationship between states and businesses?
• What are the international dimensions of the political backlash, e.g. in terms of strategies of corporations that are active in more than one jurisdiction?
• Do we witness a specific change in the management ideology of companies that leads to this backlash against CSR et al.? Is it just a response to institutional pressures (external) or reflects new value preferences of senior management (internal/intrinsic)?
• Are there specific industries in which this backlash is more pronounced and palpable (i.e. technology, finance, or others)?
•  How do companies manage divergent (opposing) requirements such as mandatory DEI requirements in the EU and President Trump’s prohibition of such initiatives?
• What political strategies do corporations vis-à-vis the risks arising from the ‘culture wars’ spillover into the economy?
• How do changing government incentive structures in the context of backlash against sustainability affect green transition?'
• How does the current situation shape for whom companies signal (explicitly) and organise (maybe also implicitly) responsibilities?
• Changes at the national institutional level: how do political shifts lead to a change in the discourse on corporate responsibility?

References:

Adler, P. S., Adly, A., Armanios, D. E., Battilana, J., Bodrožić, Z., Clegg, S., Davis, G. F., Gartenberg, C., Glynn, M. A., Aslan Gümüsay, A., Haveman, H. A., Leonardi, P., Lounsbury, M., McGahan, A. M., Meyer, R., Phillips, N., & Sheppard-Jones, K. (2022). Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion. Journal of Management Inquiry, 32(1), 3-20. https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926221119395 (Original work published 2023)

Bartosch, J., & Lohmeyer, N. (2025). Explicitization of Corporate Social Responsibilities at the National Institutional Level. Business & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503241308725

Butzbach, O., Fuller, D. B., & Schnyder, G. (2020). Manufacturing discontent : National institutions , multinational firm strategies , and anti-globalization backlash in advanced economies. Global Strategy Journal, 10, 67–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/gsj.1369

Foss, N. J., & Klein, P. G. (2023). Why do companies go woke? Academy of Management Perspectives, 37(4), 351-367.

Hartwell, C. A., & Devinney, T. M. (2024). A responsibility to whom? Populism and its effects on corporate social responsibility. Business & Society, 63(2), 300-340.

Kaplan, R., & Kinderman, D. (2019). The business-class case for corporate social responsibility: mobilization, diffusion, and institutionally transformative strategy in Venezuela and Britain. Theory and Society, 48(1), 131–166. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45200390

Kinderman, D. (2021). German Business Mobilization against Right-Wing Populism. Politics & Society, 49(4), 489-516. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220957153

Matten D., Moon J. (2020). Reflections on the 2018 decade award: The meaning and dynamics of corporate social responsibility. Academy of Management Review, 45(1), 7–28.

Olkkonen, L., & Morsing, M. (2022). A Processual Model of CEO Activism: Activities, Frames, and Phases. Business & Society, 62(3), 646-694. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503221110184 (Original work published 2023)

Segrestin, B., Hatchuel, A., & Levillain, K. (2021). When the Law Distinguishes Between the Enterprise and the Corporation: The Case of the New French Law on Corporate Purpose. Journal of Business Ethics, 171(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04439-y

The Just Transition as a worker-driven movement was articulated in the 1990s by Tony Mazzochi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. Searching for an alternative to the narratives of inevitable job losses and downward social mobility, Mazzochi sought to reframe the relationship between environmental regulation and the working class as an opportunity to reimagine what socially and ecologically meaningful labour could look like (Mazzochi, 1993). The Just Transition is not just a transition away from fossil fuels and high-emitting industries, but it is fundamentally a question of a “just transition for whom?” (Cha, 2024). Transitions have historically produced greater socio-economic inequalities, leading to great wealth and prosperity for a few while leaving workers and communities behind. The potential of a Just Transition will be determined by the capacity of union organizations to mobilize workers, both in the workplace and public arena, in support of the necessary policies (Stevis, 2021; MacDonald, 2025). This challenge remains formidable.

The pursuit of such a Just Transition is confronted with new challenges amidst competing and entangled nationalist agendas, heightened by stalled “green” capitalism, far right petro-nationalism and rising militarism. Following Trump’s reelection, the reversal of state support for a “green” capitalist transition has thrown industries such as offshore wind into a panic, with the very future of the industry in doubt. Driven by a so-called “America First” agenda, the Trump administration has launched waves of tariff wars that, through re-organizing supply chains, indirectly disrupt and delay global green transition efforts. In this context, workers confront unjust transitions as “green” sectors slow down and promises of the revival of manufacturing jobs fail to materialize amidst growing uncertainty. Also, as Thea Riofrancos (2023) observes, a “security–sustainability nexus” underlies emergent “green” industrial policies. By tracing how the geopolitical race for critical minerals for the energy transition is supplanted by a race for minerals to fuel the war machine (Riofrancos, 2025), militarism rises as a central concern in just transition discussions (Ismail, 2025). Amidst this new conjuncture, calls for workers to reimagine the conditions of ecological production away from war and climate destruction and towards a just future is more urgent than ever (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2019).

Possible themes include (not exhaustive):

• Different conceptions and policies of Just Transitions;
• Different union and organized labour strategies vis-à-vis the ecological transition;
• Working conditions in emergent “green” economies;
• The role of the state and industrial policies in advancing Just Transition(s);
• The relationship between unjust transitions and the rise of far-right petro-nationalism;
• The challenges of international worker solidarity amidst green industrial policies and militarism;
• Variety of methods to study labour environmentalism in comparative and global contexts.

This event is organized by the Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism Study Network (TULE), a cross-national and interdisciplinary network exploring pathways and challenges to advancing just transitions and foregrounding the multifaceted roles of trade unions in tackling the climate crisis.

Work Cited
Cha, J. M. (2024). A just transition for all: workers and communities for a carbon-free future. MIT Press.
Harry, S. J., Maltby, T., & Szulecki, K. (2024). Contesting just transitions: Climate delay and the contradictions of labour environmentalism. Political Geography, 112, 103114.
Ismail, F. (2025). Mobilising against the ecological costs of imperialism and war. (Video). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNgpPq-25ZQ
Mazzochi, T. (1993). A Superfund for Workers. Earth Island Journal, 9(1), 40-41.
Riofrancos, T. (2025). The ‘critical minerals’ rush could result in a resource war. Financial Times. www.ft.com/content/b3709429-a99b-4105-afa5-001d08a3fd80
Riofrancos, T. (2023). The security–sustainability nexus: Lithium onshoring in the Global North. Global Environmental Politics, 23(1), 20-41.
Räthzel, N., & Uzzell, D. (2019). The future of work defines the future of humanity and all living species. International Journal of Labour Research, 9(1/2), 145-171.
Schept, J. (2022). Coal, cages, crisis: The rise of the prison economy in Central Appalachia. New York University Press.
Stevis, D. (2021). Embedding Just Transition in the US: The Long Ambivalence. In N. Räthzel, D. Stevis, and D. Uzzell (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies (pp. 591-620). Palgrave: Macmillan.
The Transnational Institute. (2024). Climate in the Crosshairs: The planetary impact of NATO’s spending increases. https://www.tni.org/en/publication/climate-in-the-crosshairs.
Tyner, J. (2019). Dead labor: Toward a political economy of premature death. University of Minnesota Press.
Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism Network. (2024). Founding document. https://tulelabour.org/.
Wilgosh, B., Sorman, A. H., & Barcena, I. (2022). When two movements collide: Learning from labour and environmental struggles for future Just Transitions. Futures, 137, 102903.

Migrant labour lies at the intersection of states, markets, and social reproduction. It sustains global value chains and national welfare systems alike. Globalisation created new migration pathways through expanding production networks, partial border liberalisation, and the rise of recruitment industries. Sending states promoted labour exports, while employers in both advanced and emerging economies grew reliant on foreign workers. Indeed, the reliance on migration has been both a function and an outcome of globalisation, often reflecting former colonial relationships.

At the same time, globalisation and recent geopolitical developments and conflicts have led to changes in the distribution of economic power and alliances, impacting also the supply chains and the flow of capital, while the governance of migration has become one of the most contested arenas of our time. Across the ‘Global North’, governments face a growing disjuncture: economies depend on migrant workers, yet political discourse and policy regimes increasingly seek to limit or segment their presence. In the UK, Brexit exemplifies how anti-immigration sentiment can lead to dramatic political and economic changes. In the United States, deportation targets coexist with continued employer dependence on (often undocumented) migrant workers. Migrants are linked to the weakening of industrial relations through “social dumping,” even as welfare systems rely on their contributions to survive. States pursue technological fixes to reduce dependency on foreign workers and increase control, yet at the same time expand managed migration programmes further afield to find workers for labour-intensive and low-paid jobs. Race, ethnicity, gender, and class continue to structure opportunity and belonging, reinforcing patterns of inequality.

Global crises intensify these contradictions. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how much essential sectors such as healthcare, care, agriculture, and logistics depend on migrant workers, even as these same workers remained excluded from welfare protections. Armed conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine, or Sudan, among others, generate new flows of displacement and reveal both the erosion and the racialisation of humanitarian protection, while refugees are often treated as reservoirs of labour.

Global migration in its current form, therefore, exemplifies the extractivist nature of the global capitalist economy. These dynamics have, in turn, given rise to new forms of labour resistance that emerge outside traditional frameworks of labour organisation. Migrant workers, often excluded from established organisations, are at the centre of bottom-up strategies that overlap with ecological, feminist, and human rights movements. Campaigns for fair housing, climate justice, gender equality, and racial justice increasingly intersect with migrant struggles, highlighting how precarious labour and precarious lives are bound together. These alliances signal a shift: rather than relying only on established labour institutions, solidarities may emerge across sectors, identities, and borders, creating novel forms of collective power.

Migrant labour is therefore one of the clearest sites for observing the contradictions of globalisation, the fragility of institutions, social divisions and conflict, and the possibilities of resistance.

With this mini-conference, we aim to reflect on these contradictions. We welcome proposals that address the following thematic clusters:

Governance, borders, and the contradictions of globalisation

• Racialisation and securitisation in managed migration programmes

• Colonial legacies in the structuring of contemporary migration regimes

• Migration industries and the role of transnational labour mediation

Labour, welfare, and extractivism

• Migration and social reproduction

• Intersections of migration and welfare regimes

• Digitalisation, new technologies and their impact on migrant workers

• Migrant workers and informal work

• Socially constructed notions of “skills” and “skilled”

Resistance, solidarity, and new forms of collective power

• Migrant workers and trade unions

• Bottom-up forms of collective organisation

• Intersections of labour and other social movements

• Sabotage and everyday practices of resistance

Global value chains (GVCs) are among the most consequential and contested manifestations of globalization. By organizing production across borders and fragmenting labor across jurisdictions and legal regimes, GVCs have enabled lead firms to restructure risk and responsibility while consolidating control over value creation. This model of “supply chain capitalism” (Tsing 2009) has radically shifted power in employment relations, eroded national labor protections, and rendered traditional labor law frameworks increasingly ineffective. In response, a wave of regulatory and policy initiatives—from corporate social responsibility schemes to international, regional, and national regulatory frameworks such as mandatory human rights due diligence laws and guidelines—has sought to govern labor conditions in supply chains, with mixed results. These efforts, while important, have struggled to overcome deep structural inequalities and persistent power asymmetries embedded in GVCs, particularly at their lower tiers (LeBaron 2020; Anner 2020; Kuruvilla & Li 2021).

Today, however, we are entering a period of profound transformation. In what many describe as an era of post-globalisation or de-globalisation (Antras 2020; Butollo et al. 2025), national industrial and trade policies are moving from a prosperity-driven agenda to a security-driven logic—prioritizing supply chain resilience, technological sovereignty, and economic nationalism over openness and interdependence. This shift is visible in policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, reshoring and “friend-shoring” strategies, export controls, and rising protectionism. While these trends may signal the retreat of global economic integration, GVCs remain central to production—and increasingly central to geopolitical contestation.

This mini-conference asks: What happens to workers’ rights and their governance in global supply chains under conditions of post-globalisation? From a labor governance perspective, this new era does not lessen the importance of transnational frameworks. Instead, it raises urgent new questions: Who governs labor standards in an increasingly fragmented (post-)global economy? What institutions survive the shift to security-driven policy? What new coalitions or exclusions are emerging? And who are the winners and losers?

As Gereffi et al. (2025) argue, today’s “security-embedded governance” transforms GVCs from sites of efficiency-driven coordination into vehicles of economic statecraft—often at the expense of transparency, labor standards, and multilateral accountability. At the same time, many workers—especially in the Global South—continue to face exploitation under old regimes of subcontracting, just-in-time production, and regulatory voids. Rather than resolving these issues, post-globalisation may reconfigure them—reproducing existing inequalities under new logics of power and legitimacy.

Drawing on research from the European Research Council (ERC)-funded ChainGE Lab, we explore how workers, their representatives, and allied actors are organizing, disrupting, and reimagining power in a fractured global economy. We center the role of law—as both a tool of domination and a site of insurgent resistance—in shaping labor-capital conflict under shifting GVC configurations.

We explore this overarching question through five interrelated lines of inquiry:
• How is power being redistributed within and across supply chains in this moment of geopolitical fragmentation and industrial policy resurgence?
• What strategies of resistance and disruption are workers and organizers deploying at key chokepoints in global production?
• How is the governance of workers’ rights evolving—and what conflicts are emerging over who governs, how, and in whose interest? What new institutional frameworks, legal tools, and political imaginaries are emerging—and who are the winners and losers of these shifts?
• How do identity and geography shape access to rights, protections, and bargaining power across GVCs?

Suggested Structure of the Mini-Conference
We envision the mini-conference as organized around four interrelated research questions, each addressing how conflict and power operate in global value chains amid the transformations of post-globalisation and geopolitical fragmentation. Together, panels under these themes will explore how workers’ rights, agency, and forms of regulation are being reconfigured in an era marked by rising economic nationalism, contested transnational governance, and shifting political-economic alliances.

1. Power and Geopolitics in GVCs
   How governments (at the national, regional, and international levels), lead firms, and financial institutions exercise and redistribute power at the upper-stream of GVCs amid geopolitical fragmentation, industrial policy, and changing global and local power relations. We will ask how de-globalization pressures are redistributing power over supply chain governance and labor outcomes.

2. Worker Resistance and Disruption
   How workers and organisers build power across workplaces, supply chain nodes, and transnational networks through strikes, litigation, grassroots organising, digital tools, and solidarity actions, and how these efforts shift and respond to de-globalization. How are workers, unions, and grassroots organizers building power especially under conditions of political volatility and economic restructuring? This theme explores how strikes, litigation, digital tools, and solidaristic cross-border campaigns are evolving in response to de-globalization logics and what new vulnerabilities or leverage points are being created in fragmented supply chains.

3. Contested Governance of Rights
   Who governs labor rights in global supply chains today—and through what mechanisms, institutions, and ideologies? As global integration gives way to fractured regulation, this theme investigates emerging conflicts over jurisdiction, legitimacy, and enforcement between states, lead firms, suppliers, unions, NGOs, international organizations, and regional and national policymakers. How are struggles over governance authority reshaping the normative and institutional landscape of labor regulation in GVCs? And what alternative legal tools, institutional forms, and political imaginaries are emerging to contest supply chain exploitation, specifically in an era of post-globalization?

4. Identity, Inequality, and Space
   How do race, caste, gender, migration status, and colonial legacies shape the distribution of rights and vulnerabilities across GVCs—particularly as production is reorganized in the wake of reshoring and supply chain reconfiguration? This panel explores the spatialized and embodied dimensions of inequality in supply chains, asking whether and how post-globalisation reordering intensifies or redistributes structural exclusions, and shapes access to rights, protections, and bargaining power, along geographic and identity-based lines.

Alongside these thematic panels, we also anticipate sector-specific discussions. Possible panels may address industries such as electronics, garments, food, logistics, green transition sectors, and defense. We also expect to include at least one panel focused on the arms and defense industry, which provides a striking case of the fusion of opacity, geopolitical significance, and regulatory exceptionalism. This sector will be examined alongside others to generate broader insights into global production.

Rather than assuming the decline of transnational labor governance, this mini-conference foregrounds the need to rethink it: to understand how labor law, organizing, and GVC structures interact under conditions of post-globalisation, their distributive effects, and how workers’ power can be built across these changing terrains.

By investigating how workers’ rights are being asserted, eroded, or reimagined under new global conditions, this mini-conference contributes directly to SASE’s 2026 theme: “Fighting Divisions: Conflict and Power in a Post-Globalisation Order.”

Anner, M. (2020). Squeezing workers’ rights in global supply chains: purchasing practices in the Bangladesh garment export sector in comparative perspective. Review of International Political Economy, 27(2), 320-47.
Antras, P. (2020). De-Globalisation? Global Value Chains in the Post-COVID-19 Age, Working Paper 28115, National Bureau of Economic Research.
Butollo, F. et al. (2025). The end of globalized production? Supply-chain resilience, technological sovereignty, and enduring global interdependencies in the post-pandemic era. Critical Sociology, 51, 779-798.
Gereffi, G. et al. (2025). Navigating industrial policy and global value chains in an era of disruptions. Journal of International Business Policy, 8, 207-23.
Kuruvilla, S. & Li, C. (2021). Freedom of association and collective bargaining in global supply chains: a research agenda. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 57(2), 43-57.
LeBaron, G. (2020). Combatting Modern Slavery: Why Labour Governance is Failing and What We Can Do About It. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Tsing, A. (2009). Supply chain capitalism and the human condition. Rethinking Marxism, 21, 148-76.

While debates on sustainability transitions have extensively theorized the tensions between environmental goals and economic growth, the role of “competitiveness” arguments in SET contexts remains inadequately understood. Green production techniques and products are usually seen as a guarantee of future competitiveness. However, the relationship between the two is far from clear. Competitiveness denotes either price or technological advantages. Price competitiveness is clearly at odds with high environmental standards, and technological competition does not necessarily lead to green production techniques and products either. The continued investment in combustion engines is a recent example of this issue.

This theoretical gap is particularly problematic in our current post-globalization order, where the notion of a singular world market has become ill-founded due to multipolar power relations, the rise of China and India, and the parallel erosion of liberal economic institutions such as the WTO. We argue that competitiveness discourse, while frequently mobilized in green industrial policy debates, often functions as “climate obstruction” in a fragmented global system where meaningful competition benchmarks are increasingly unclear.

“Competitiveness” was one of the core organizing principles of the world order of the last thirty years, characterized by free trade, open markets, and the WTO as a central institutional player. Despite the fundamental shifts toward a multipolar world order, competitiveness remains significant in public and political discourse and is frequently invoked as a guiding principle for green industrial policy. From green steel production to renewable energy manufacturing and carbon pricing mechanisms, competitiveness arguments are routinely deployed to justify or critique sustainability policies.

However, the question arises: what is the role of competition and competitiveness in a world where geo-economic rivalry defines state behavior, where nations regulate foreign economic power within their markets while simultaneously projecting their own abroad? In this context, relating to this year’s conference theme on conflict and power, we interrogate the meaning of competition and competitiveness with respect to sustainability transitions.

In a global system where the notion of a singular world market is increasingly untenable, we ask: How can competitiveness be meaningfully understood in sustainability contexts? How do competitiveness concerns figure in neo-imperialist rivalry and great power conflicts? What kind of strategies can be observed linking competitiveness and other concerns such as security and global warming? To what extent and in which ways is competitiveness mobilized as a “climate obstruction” argument when clear benchmarks for competition no longer exist? What are the implications of such theoretical confusion for advancing sustainability transitions beyond the limits of liberal market orthodoxies?

Against this background, the focus of this mini-conference is twofold. Firstly, we are interested in the relationship between sustainability and competitiveness, both theoretically and empirically. In this regard, we are particularly interested in how competition and competitiveness might delay or even obstruct climate action. Secondly, this session examines how competition has fundamentally transformed from economic competition within a unified global market to multidimensional geo-economic competition across fragmented economic blocs.

We explore whether traditional market-based competition concepts remain analytically useful when competition increasingly encompasses technological sovereignty, supply chain security, and strategic resource control. This transformation suggests that competitiveness arguments in SET debates may also be proxies for deeper concerns about national security and geopolitical positioning rather than market efficiency.

The proposed mini-conference clearly relates to this year’s topic of Fighting divisions: Conflict and power in a post-globalization order by centering a decisive phenomenon, competition, and exploring its effects on the green transitions, conflicts, and divisions of a post-globalization era. Situating the socio-ecological transition within these broader structural transformations, the panel foregrounds the entanglement of environmental goals with conflictual reconfigurations of power, illuminating how sustainability debates are refracted through divisions characteristic of the post-globalization order.

Given the rather narrow focus of mainstream economists on competition, this mini-conference promises to be especially compelling for heterodox economists and scholars working on the history of economic ideas. At the same time, the proposed topic takes a global perspective.

“How does land and the institutions, actors, and states that control, contest, and exploit it shape the wider dynamics of power and conflict in a post-Globalisation order?” This is the question that animates this mini-conference. In doing so, it seeks to re-centre the Land Question in contemporary socio and political economic debate and scholarship.

This mini-conference contends that land is the foundational factor structuring political and economic power in the emerging post-Globalisation order. By re-centering land and raising it as the main object of analysis, we aim to illuminate how land and the power it confers shape institutions, create and mediate conflicts, and determine possibilities for both domination and resistance in an era marked by ecological crisis and geopolitical realignment.

The globalisation era promoted narratives of integrated economies, borderless worlds, and footloose capital, yet these visions obscured rather than eliminated the materiality of territory. As nation-states reassert sovereign control and new forms of territorial competition emerge, we witness a re-politicisation of land and the rediscovery of land as the ultimate source of power and wealth. This re-territorialisation, however, differs fundamentally from pre-globalisation land politics. Contemporary land struggles are occurring within increasingly artificial processes shaped by decades of neoliberal transformation, such as novel forms of financialisation, datafication, and ecological commodification.

By re-centering land in our analysis of post-globalisation conflicts, this mini-conference aims to generate insights into emerging power structures and possibilities for alternative futures. Land is not merely the stage upon which social dramas unfold but an active force shaping institutional possibilities, political imaginaries, and material life chances. Understanding land's role in contemporary conflicts—from housing crises to climate breakdown, from food security to digital sovereignty—is essential for grasping the dynamics of our historical moment and imagining more just and sustainable territorial arrangements. We welcome papers on any topic that seek to re-centre land in socio-economic and political analysis. Topics may include (but should not necessarily be limited to) the following:

1. Land Conflicts and New Imperialisms
   We invite papers examining how territorial expansion and control legitimate contemporary imperial projects. How do states and corporations deploy narratives of development, security, or environmental protection to justify land grabs? What role does land play in projects like the “Gaza Riviera,” where territorial conquest intersects with real estate speculation? What role is climate change having in these dynamics, as it alters the value and viability of territories, creating new geographies of habitability and abandonment?

2. Extractivism and Resource Conflicts
   As we approach peak oil and face critical mineral shortages for green transitions, land-based resources become flashpoints for conflict. We seek contributions analysing the political economy of extraction in both Global South and North contexts. How do extractive industries reshape governance structures and social relations? What new forms of resistance emerge from communities defending their territories?

3. Digital Infrastructure and the Material Internet
   Despite narratives of virtual worlds and cloud computing, digital capitalism depends fundamentally on land-intensive infrastructures. We invite papers examining topics such as the territorial footprint of data centres, the geopolitics of submarine cable routes, and conflicts over sites for renewable energy to power digital systems. How does control over the land hosting digital infrastructure translate into new forms of power? What are the implications of AI’s massive energy and spatial requirements for territorial politics?

4. Institutions and Power in the Regulation of Land
   As legal and policy frameworks determine who controls land and for what purposes, land regulatory systems become flashpoints for conflict. We seek contributions examining how planning laws, property registration, and environmental protections mediate competing territorial claims between states, markets, and communities. How do these architectures embody political choices about land access and use? What happens when indigenous rights clash with development strategies, or when democratic participation conflicts with technocratic expertise?

5. Consequences of Urban and Rural Land Concentration
   The rise of property wealth inequalities and the associated erosion of mass homeownership have enabled new forms of rent extraction by those accumulating land and property, with clear implications for the distribution of populations over urban space. These tensions are also found in the global rush to acquire agricultural land, which puts local populations and livelihoods at risk. How are these conflicts between the landed and the landless mediated by regulatory, fiscal, and cultural norms? What are their implications for housing markets as well as the organisation of production across Global South and Global North contexts?

6. Land Rent and Heterodox Economics
   With the (partial) retreat of liberal economics, there has been renewed recognition of the imperfect features of land as an essential factor of production (spatial fixity, finitude, and heterogeneity), and the scope this opens up for land bubbles and busts and for landowners to exert market and structural power in variegated mechanisms of rent extraction. What can heterodox economics tell us about the role of power, uncertainty, and speculation in land markets? Or about how the resulting problems of valuation, whose models are rooted in neoclassical assumptions, impact the subsequent power dynamics of treating land as a financial asset?

We hope that the mini-conference will bring together diverse scholars from different sub-disciplines who might not otherwise recognise their shared concern with land as power. By creating a dedicated space for examining land conflict across multiple dimensions—financial, legal, ecological, urban, and political—we can develop more integrated theoretical frameworks and develop a diverse scholarly community. Abstract submissions should be made via the SASE website by 16 December. If accepted, please note that a full paper submission is recommended. Deadlines and timescales are provided on the SASE website.

The world economy is undergoing fundamental transformations, from the climate crisis requiring an unprecedented change in the way we produce, finance, and work to the rise of new emerging powers and resurgence of geo-economic conflict. These shifts, in the Global South, shape and are shaped by monetary and financial subordination. Global South countries continue to face, for example, a structurally higher cost and risk of finance, external vulnerability and financial crises, limited policy space, and the need for costly self-insurance mechanisms. In short, the structural power of finance continues to take a particularly violent form of expression in the Global South.

The proposed research agenda on International Financial Subordination (IFS) has recently sought to bring different approaches together to create a constructive encounter and further theoretical and empirical cross-disciplinary scholarship and debate (Alami et al. 2023). A central premise is that there is a long history to these hierarchies, which are both remarkably enduring but also change over time, in relation to shifting configurations of capitalism and empire. As the world economy currently experiences such shifts, IFS is likely to evolve as well as shape global changes.

This mini-conference seeks to explore how IFS is likely to change in the current conjuncture, and how this manifests in different geographies. On the one hand, the ongoing debt crisis, the difficulty to mobilise the financing needed for climate adaptation and mitigation, and the increasingly larger and more volatile global financial cycle which disproportionately affects Global South countries, point to the enduring existence, if not deepening, of such hierarchical monetary and financial structures. On the other hand, the increasing importance of emerging capitalist economies such as China and various bloc formations among them, and the active use of financial statecraft (e.g. through unconventional monetary policies, capital account re-regulation and/or big outward facing financial actors) of many Global South economies highlight the potential of a rupture of dominant monetary and financial relations.

The core question we want to discuss is what happens to structures of financial and monetary hierarchies, dependence, and subordination in a turbulent global constellation. This entails questioning to what extent IFS is indeed a result of the global structures of money, finance, and production, how enduring these structures will be going forward, and if structures are able to change or even break down, where do we find the major levers of change? To what extent is what political economists call the structural power of finance reconfigured, enforced, or re-asserted, and which ways are being tried to break out of it? With what implications for development and citizens in the Global South? And of course, where do we find variegation in common patterns of structural change? Critically analysing shifting patterns of financial and monetary hierarchies at the present historical juncture may help us better understand how these hierarchies are reproduced and contested over time.

We invite contributions that seek to address these questions. In particular, we welcome contributions focussing on five interrelated sets of factors that have the potential to transform monetary and financial hierarchies.

1. The acceleration of the climate crisis and the corresponding transformation of global climate finance. This includes the multiplication of green financial products; shifting patterns of climate finance to the Global South; the proliferation of transition, physical, and financial risks and transformations in the insurance industry; Southern-led demands for sustained flows of climate finance to fund climate adaptation and mitigation in the face of cuts to aid budgets; power struggles in the global governance architecture of climate finance; the expansion of state-owned financial institutions to finance green industrial ambitions.

2. Geopolitical transformations and realignments in the imperialist hierarchy of global capitalism. These include the weaponisation of the US-dominated dollar system and the global payments architecture; shifting state-financial relations in the global North; the refusal of developing and emerging countries to “align” with any single geopolitical bloc and the increasing assertiveness, including in the area of money and finance, of mid-range powers such as Turkey, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia; deliberate strategies to leverage inter-imperial competition to finance infrastructure and green industrial projects; the geopolitical use of state capitalist instruments such as sovereign funds, state-backed venture capital funds, and development banks; the multiplication of de-dollarisation initiatives.

3. Changes in the structure of financial markets themselves. These include the rise of alternative financial actors such as asset managers, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds; the role of new stock exchanges and regional financial centres outside the traditional centres of financial power; the multiplication of regional financial arrangements; the increasing presence and outward investment of Global South banks and financial institutions in the global economy.

4. Changes to global structures of production. Those include state-led and corporate attempts at reconfiguring global value chains (“re-shoring”, “friend-shoring”, etc.); the internationalisation of transnational corporations from the Global South; the race to compete in the areas of clean tech, critical transition minerals, and renewable energy; competition to finance large-scale infrastructure projects in the Global South; high-tech competition and its implications for finance in the Global South.

5. Technological change and its impact on both firm strategies and monetary phenomena. This includes the rise of digital currencies, both public and private; the extension and deepening of the digital financial inclusion agenda; the positioning of US and Chinese tech giants in the digital finance space, notably in the Global South; the financial operations of “intellectual monopoly capitalism”.

While these themes cover a broad set of factors and phenomena relevant to the potential changing character of IFS, this mini-conference welcomes contributions focussing on other areas of IFS and its evolution in the current global conjuncture.

Few industries epitomize the contradictions of globalisation more starkly than textile, garment, and fashion. It is simultaneously a driver of industrialisation, a massive source of employment, and a vibrant canvas for cultural identity. Yet, these contributions are built upon a foundation rife with conflict. This mini-conference proposes that in a dawning post-globalisation order, these long-standing tensions are not fading but rather transforming, driven by the dual forces of geopolitical supply chain restructuring and the rise of a precarious digital labor economy. Answering this call requires a truly interdisciplinary and global effort.

The global garment and creative industry provides a perfect showcase for the SASE 2026 Theme. From each textile material, to garment production, to fashion weeks, each stage of this industrial chain provides vivid empirical evidence. It is a field where the dynamics of the global value chain, the material realities of U.S.-China trade frictions, the immaterial labor of digital platforms, and the persistent legacies of colonialism converge. Critically, understanding this industry's turbulent transformation is essential to grasping the contours of the nascent post-globalisation order.

Proposed Themes:

1. Geographies of Power: Relocation and Conflict in the Fashion Value Chain
   As fashion production shifts from offshoring to reshoring or nearshoring, how are power relations and conflicts between brands, states, and labor being reconfigured? Does this new geography of production, often triggered by geopolitical rivalries and manifesting in "China+1" or "friend-shoring" strategies, lead to a genuine redistribution of value, or does it simply create new zones of dependency and exploitation?

2. The Great Divide: Symbolic Power and Conflict in High and Low Fashion
   How does the division between high-end luxury and low-end fast fashion function as a mechanism of social stratification and symbolic power? In what ways does this dynamic produce conflict, from the cultural appropriation by elite brands to the systemic labor exploitation required to sustain the fast fashion model?

3. Sustainability, Equality, and Eco-Colonialism
   Is a truly sustainable fashion industry fundamentally in conflict with the growth logic of global capitalism? How does the sustainability discourse itself become a site of power, potentially creating new forms of eco-colonialism where Global North standards create new barriers for Global South producers?

4. Platform Capitalism and its Discontents: Innovation and Power in Digital Fashion
   How does the rise of the platform economy (e.g., TikTok, SHEIN) alter the power dynamics between individual entrepreneurs, grassroots movements, and incumbent fashion houses? Does this technological shift create new forms of algorithmic dependency and exploitation, placing the immaterial labor of influencers and content creators in a precarious relationship with the material labor of garment workers?

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In an academic landscape often focused on high-tech, cutting-edge domains, we wish to turn our attention to the enduring and connective power of the fashion industry. We recognize that global development is not a uniform process. Fashion, in its unique capacity and versatility, serves as a critical thread that links various stages of economic and social development across the globe. The contemporary trend of "retro" is, in itself, a stylish attitude—a conscious refocusing on the rich heritage and persistent relevance of this foundational industry.

Furthermore, we are keenly aware that for many scholars, particularly those from the Global South and early-career researchers, attending a conference in France presents significant logistical and financial challenges, including visa processes and travel expenses. To foster a truly inclusive and accessible academic dialogue, we will be prioritizing a virtual conference format. We warmly encourage submissions from scholars of all backgrounds and geographical locations, believing that diverse perspectives are essential to enriching our conversation.

Reduced working time is likely to be a crucial component of the future of work, as it is capable of providing answers to the needs of an increasingly diverse workforce, transformation of work in an age of AI, as well as tensions between capital and labour stemming from rising challenges to fair and sustainable working and living conditions. However, the implementation of working time reduction policies is not without its challenges.

The current neoliberal capitalist system implicitly promises a redistribution of labour productivity gains across the workforce in the form of shorter working hours and improved quality of working life. Yet, these promises have rarely been realised and even less so in a universal or equitable way. Corporate financialisation disproportionately reaps these productivity gains in ways that lead to a further concentration of wealth, while continuously spreading casualisation and precarisation in the labour market. The labour process of working time has long been subjected to the neoliberal logic that puts productivity gains and value creation over a sustainable, fair, and equitable working time. Could reduction of working time require a paradigm shift? What are the implementation challenges? Can it reduce or rather increase power and socio-economic inequalities? How would reduced work time affect, and how is it affected by, the current organization of society, community, and family?

In this mini-conference, we aim to bring together the latest cutting-edge scholarship on work hours and work time reduction. The issue has received increasing recent attention from social scientists, including economists, political scientists, and sociologists—and now human resource management—but there has been little cross-disciplinary exchange and dialogue. There is a need now for both empirical evidence and re-conceptualization regarding the alternatives to current, standard economic models and institutions. Such advances are needed in order to understand the potential for worktime reduction to improve sustainability, well-being, dignity, and solidarity in contemporary economies.

The proposed panels will provide an opportunity to set out what we already know, how new evidence is affecting scholars’ understanding of work time, and what future research agendas should be. There is also a particular interest in theoretical papers that engage the worktime reduction agenda with critical perspectives such as feminism, intersectionality, de-growth, sustainability, and the future of work discourse, including job quality. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, gender studies, geography, economic history, business, labour relations, 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, age/life-course, and their intersections in working time practices and needs.

• Sustainability and well-being: the environmental impacts of various WTR arrangements; the productivity/worktime nexus; working time, well-being, and work-life balance; motivations for shorter hours; consumption; 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: social and political actors driving change; power relations and working time policy; cross-national comparisons; employment effects of worktime reduction.

• Unions: collective bargaining efforts to reduce working time; analyses of variation across sectors, countries, etc.; how working time reduction shapes efforts to build and sustain solidarity within and across groups.

• Artificial intelligence and 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.

• Implementation: exploring variation across different policy approaches; how the conditionality of worktime reduction shapes implementation, experiences, and outcomes; implementation successes, failures, challenges, and best practices.

• Failure cases: understanding why organizations stop or reverse worktime reduction practices; how failure is defined and experienced by different actors; learning from the growing body of longitudinal data from recent research.

• Research methods: exploring the variety of methods used to study worktime reduction and enabling cross-pollination across approaches.

In recent years, particularly since the first presidency of Donald Trump, the United States has escalated its use of economic protectionism and extra-economic coercion as strategic tools to preserve its declining global hegemony—especially in response to the structural challenge posed by China’s rise. These actions include new industrial policies, instrumentalization of global supply chains, strategic technological decoupling, unilateral sanctions, export controls, financial restrictions, and, more recently, 

asymmetrical trade regimes – forcing more open markets from trade partners while erecting tariff walls. A paradigmatic case was the reimplementation and expansion of the so-called “Liberation Day Tariffs” in 2025, which imposed a 10% base tariff on most imports, with significantly higher rates on selected goods from China, Mexico, and the European Union—reaching up to 145% in some categories. These measures—justified by Trump as reciprocal corrections for persistent trade deficits—have reverberated across the globe, disrupting value chains, increasing consumer prices, and prompting retaliatory and adaptive responses from both emerging and industrialized economies. 

China’s counteroffensive, for instance, included mirrored tariffs (up to 125%), export control of critical minerals, stronger intra-Asian supply chain integration, and state-backed investments in technological autonomy. While the European Union and Japan seemed to have caved to Trump’s pressures, many countries from the Global South and North have responded by implementing new industrial policies, rethinking trade alliances, and adopting national-developmentalist or protectionist strategies to defend their domestic economies. In parallel, Trump’s increasingly punitive trade and migration policies have also intensified global political tensions, reinforced anti-American sentiment, exacerbated migratory crises—especially at the U.S.–Mexico border—and fueled nationalist and anti-imperialist movements. These processes are deeply connected to broader dynamics of global disorder: the erosion of multilateral institutions, the decline of neoliberal globalization, and the emergence of a fragmented world order where conflict, coercion, and economic nationalism become dominant logics. 

This mini-conference proposes to examine the political economy of these transformations by gathering empirical and theoretical contributions focused on U.S. imperial strategies and the diverse forms of competition, resistance, adaptation, and political realignment they provoke. Particular attention will be given to identity-based mobilizations, South–South cooperation, migration patterns, and the redefinition of economic sovereignty in a world where the old promises of globalization are no longer held. Through comparative case studies from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond, we aim to illuminate the frictions, contradictions, and potential alternatives emerging from the current global conjuncture. This proposal directly engages with the core of the 2026 SASE theme by analyzing how U.S. imperial economic actions contribute to new global divisions and how these divisions are contested, resisted, or reconfigured. The protectionist turn in U.S. foreign economic policy exemplifies the transition from a globalized, rules-based order to one structured by open confrontation, economic warfare, and geopolitical asymmetry. By foregrounding the interplay between conflict (trade wars, sanctions), power (hegemonic decline and reassertion), and resistance (policy, identity, migration), this mini-conference sheds light on the dynamics that are defining the post-globalization era. 

It also invites debate on how states and societies in the Global South navigate these shifting structures of power—whether through confrontation, negotiation, or innovation. We aim to uncover how these tensions produce not only crises but also possibilities: new regionalisms, alternative development agendas, and cross-border solidarities that may point beyond the imperial frame. 

We anticipate participation from researchers based in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, Sub Saharan Africa, North America, and Europe. The mini-conference will actively recruit emerging scholars and prioritize the inclusion of perspectives underrepresented in mainstream political economy debates. Sessions will be designed to balance empirical case studies, theoretical interventions, and cross regional dialogue, facilitating deep engagement with the politics of conflict, resistance, and power in the contemporary world.

Prices are increasingly being politicized today. Phenomena such as inflation, trade wars, economic sanctions, boycotts, or sabotage have become central features of our new economic world order and have positioned prices at the heart of many political conflicts. Where do price instabilities come from, how are they politicized, and what are their social and cultural consequences? The mini-conference sets out to explore the role of price in unsettled times and shed light on how prices play into existing divisions and contribute to new ones.

Prices are the central mechanism of capitalist economies. Prices orient consumer preferences and motivate investment, they signal future trends and allocate scarce resources. While mainstream economists have long claimed that prices result from the “natural” interaction of demand and supply, economic sociology has conceptualized prices as embedded in broader societal structures. As Bourdieu pointed out, “It is not prices that determine everything, but everything that determines prices.” From Émile Durkheim to Viviana Zelizer, Lucien Karpik, or Harrison White, scholars have highlighted how cultural values, institutional contexts, power struggles, or economic networks shape the dynamics of prices.

Economic sociology’s interest in prices dates back to a time of relative stability. In contrast, today’s world is, as A. Tooze famously framed it, a “world of polycrisis.” Various overlapping emergencies—climate crisis, wars, the renewal of nationalism—have contributed to a world characterized by increased uncertainty. What is more, powerful political actors intentionally hollow out institutions meant to stabilize prices (central banks, IMF) and actively seek to inflict price instability on others. In this context, price volatility and inflation have become central political issues. How can established theories on price and inflation help us to understand these current dynamics, and what new approaches might be warranted?

The aim of this mini-conference is to explore the “politics of price” and bring together economic sociologists and political economists working on the topic. We seek both empirical and theoretical contributions related to the topic, especially those that focus on the following themes:

1. Politics of blame around prices and inflation
   In recent years, the emergence of terms such as “greenflation,” “covidflation,” “putinflation,” and “greedflation” highlights how discussions around prices have become entangled with politics and infused with moral significance. Rather than attributing price volatility to the “invisible hand,” such expressions assign blame to specific actors. How are prices politicized, and what are the consequences of such discourses? Certain consumer goods (e.g., eggs, gas) appear especially prone to moralization, while periods of shortage—triggered by geopolitical tensions or pandemics—are particularly likely to elicit it. Price-blaming can serve as a means for governments to deflect responsibility but may also intensify social and political conflicts. We are seeking contributions that address these issues, investigating the moral economy of prices in unsettled times.

2. Weaponization of prices
   Prices are currently at the center of various international conflicts and have become a defining feature of a post-globalization world order. From Russia using wheat prices as a weapon during its war with Ukraine, to Donald Trump using tariffs on specific goods as a tool of diplomacy, and social movements pushing for the boycotts of Israeli products, prices have become deeply entangled with politics both nationally and internationally. How do prices become a weapon, who are their (unintended) casualties, and what are strategies of defense? We are interested in contributions that look at how prices become a stake of international relations.

3. Coping with price instability in everyday life
   Price instabilities affect the everyday life of people—where they live, what they eat, what they wear. Yet different social groups have different resources for mitigating price instabilities. How do people navigate price instability and what coping strategies do they apply in their everyday life? How do companies respond to price changes? Similarly, we are interested in how actors make sense of price instabilities: What are people’s folk theories of inflation and how do they explain price increases? We are interested in contributions exploring the practices, projections, and tools economic actors employ to cope with price volatilities.

4. Reconfiguring the regulatory landscape of prices
   Since the 1970s, price controls were gradually pushed to the margins of the political agenda. Today, however, they are making a return as a tool for economic stabilization and the management of scarce resources. Increasingly, political actors are drawing explicit connections between high prices and growing concentration of industrial power. At the same time, crises such as the pandemic or the war in Ukraine have intensified political calls for regulatory oversight of companies’ pricing practices, for example in the pharmaceutical and energy sectors. We are interested in contributions that study this reconfiguration of the regulatory institutions and practices around prices.

Reduced working time is likely to be a crucial component of the future of work, as it is capable of providing answers to the needs of an increasingly diverse workforce, transformation of work in an age of AI, as well as tensions between capital and labour stemming from rising challenges to fair and sustainable working and living conditions. However, the implementation of working time reduction policies is not without its challenges.

The current neoliberal capitalist system implicitly promises a redistribution of labour productivity gains across the workforce in the form of shorter working hours and improved quality of working life. Yet, these promises have rarely been realised and even less so in a universal or equitable way. Corporate financialisation disproportionately reaps these productivity gains in ways that lead to a further concentration of wealth, while continuously spreading casualisation and precarisation in the labour market. The labour process of working time has long been subjected to the neoliberal logic that puts productivity gains and value creation over a sustainable, fair, and equitable working time. Could reduction of working time require a paradigm shift? What are the implementation challenges? Can it reduce or rather increase power and socio-economic inequalities? How would reduced work time affect, and how is it affected by, the current organization of society, community, and family?

In this mini-conference, we aim to bring together the latest cutting-edge scholarship on work hours and work time reduction. The issue has received increasing recent attention from social scientists, including economists, political scientists, and sociologists—and now human resource management—but there has been little cross-disciplinary exchange and dialogue. There is a need now for both empirical evidence and re-conceptualization regarding the alternatives to current, standard economic models and institutions. Such advances are needed in order to understand the potential for worktime reduction to improve sustainability, well-being, dignity, and solidarity in contemporary economies.

The proposed panels will provide an opportunity to set out what we already know, how new evidence is affecting scholars’ understanding of work time, and what future research agendas should be. There is also a particular interest in theoretical papers that engage the worktime reduction agenda with critical perspectives such as feminism, intersectionality, de-growth, sustainability, and the future of work discourse, including job quality. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, gender studies, geography, economic history, business, labour relations, 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, age/life-course, and their intersections in working time practices and needs.

• Sustainability and well-being: the environmental impacts of various WTR arrangements; the productivity/worktime nexus; working time, well-being, and work-life balance; motivations for shorter hours; consumption; 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: social and political actors driving change; power relations and working time policy; cross-national comparisons; employment effects of worktime reduction.

• Unions: collective bargaining efforts to reduce working time; analyses of variation across sectors, countries, etc.; how working time reduction shapes efforts to build and sustain solidarity within and across groups.

• Artificial intelligence and 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.

• Implementation: exploring variation across different policy approaches; how the conditionality of worktime reduction shapes implementation, experiences, and outcomes; implementation successes, failures, challenges, and best practices.

• Failure cases: understanding why organizations stop or reverse worktime reduction practices; how failure is defined and experienced by different actors; learning from the growing body of longitudinal data from recent research.

• Research methods: exploring the variety of methods used to study worktime reduction and enabling cross-pollination across approaches.

Illegal markets are spaces of economic exchange in which the production, distribution, and/or consumption of goods and services fall outside the formal regulatory apparatus of the state. These markets do not merely coexist with legal economies but are often deeply entangled with them, sustained by complex forms of organization, negotiation, and coercion. The exercise of power in such contexts is profoundly shaped by the absence of formal oversight and the asymmetries of information that characterize illegal exchanges. This mini-conference invites scholars to engage with the dynamics of power and conflict in illegal markets, broadly understood, and seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on how these dynamics are structured, reproduced, and contested.

A central point of departure is the recognition that information asymmetry is intrinsic to outlawed economies. Participants in illegal markets, whether producers, intermediaries, consumers, or protectors, operate under conditions of secrecy, deception, and strategic opacity. Unlike legal markets, where contracts, pricing mechanisms, and dispute resolution procedures serve to mitigate uncertainty, actors in illegal markets must rely on incomplete, hidden, or deliberately distorted information. This asymmetry is not a by-product of illegality but one of its defining characteristics. It shapes bargaining power, influences the capacity to exercise violence or coercion, and determines how alliances and dependencies are formed. Those who can control information—about routes, prices, enforcement risks, or identities—often gain disproportionate influence, leading to highly unequal and unstable power relations.

The second core theme concerns the emergence and management of conflict in the absence of formal regulation. In legal markets, conflicts over territory, pricing, access, and enforcement are mediated through courts, contracts, arbitration, or administrative authorities. By contrast, illegal markets lack recognized mechanisms to resolve disputes or prevent escalation. The absence of enforceable rules or legitimate authorities creates a structural predisposition to conflict. Disputes over territory, taxation, profit-sharing, or betrayal can easily trigger violence or coercion, particularly when claims cannot be settled through contracts or legal recourse. In this sense, conflict in illegal markets is not accidental but a systemic outcome of the institutional void produced by prohibition.

Nevertheless, illegal markets do not operate in a state of pure anarchy. Actors develop informal mechanisms of governance to manage disputes, allocate power, and regulate competition. These mechanisms may include the establishment of hierarchies within criminal organizations, the use of violence or intimidation as a mode of arbitration, and the reliance on reputation, silence, or corruption to enforce agreements. Mafias, protection rackets, clandestine brokers, complicit state officials, and community-based networks may function as de facto regulators. Such institutions, while often fluid and localized, shape access to resources, reduce certain transaction costs, and sustain long-distance illegal commodity chains. Yet they also generate new forms of exclusion, dependency, and conflict, particularly when competing authorities overlap or lose legitimacy.

This mini-conference welcomes proposals that investigate power relations and conflict dynamics in illegal economies across historical periods, geographic regions, and thematic domains. Studies may focus on the organization of criminal groups, the governance of contraband flows, the role of corruption and informal sovereignty, the management of disputes in clandestine networks, or the ways in which violence is deployed to enforce or contest order. Particular attention may be devoted to how hierarchies emerge within illegal supply chains, how informal institutions stabilize or destabilize illegal markets, and how state actors interact with or reshape these systems. By foregrounding the interplay of secrecy, coercion, and informal governance, the conference seeks to deepen scholarly understanding of the political and social logics that structure illegal economies and the conflicts they engender.

Within economic sociology and political economy, the asymmetries and violence that have marked North–South relations for centuries have been widely theorized and studied. The stock of concepts available to researchers today is abundant: imperialism (Gindin & Panitch, 2013), dependency theory (Kvangraven, 2023), neo-colonialism (Ziai, 2023), global value chains (Weissenbacher, 2025), world-systems (Jacob, 2023), and the transnational capitalist class and the transnational state (Robinson & Sprague, 2018).

Most of these concepts have been mobilized within analytical frameworks that have structured many of the debates in the social sciences about how power and conflict within North–South relations should be understood. The premise upon which this mini-conference is built is twofold:

First, many of these frameworks need updating in light of developments within both Global North and Global South states, as well as the way economic activity and its politics are interwoven across the global economy. The return of protectionism, the weakening of multilateralism (Hopewell, 2021), the multiplication of wars and economic sanctions (Poast, 2019), and the reshaping of trade in the context of climate change policy have led to new analytical categories such as “green extractivism” (Dunlap, Verweijen & Tornel, 2024), “green imperialism” (Pedregal & Lukić, 2024), and “energy colonialism” (Müller, 2024).

Second, the capacity of these frameworks to inspire and guide the production of robust and socially useful data is increasingly in question. This has become more problematic as new (e.g., web scraping, ADD, machine learning, AI) and revitalized (e.g., network analysis, field analysis) methods of data creation, collation, and analysis become available.

For these reasons, this mini-conference seeks to renew socio-economic inquiry into North–South relations by inviting papers that address both theoretical and methodological issues, alongside empirical cases and examples.

From a theoretical perspective, adopting more sociological approaches means questioning analyses that assume the existence of autonomous economic dynamics and focus only on how these are politically supported or regulated. Instead, this mini-conference calls for understanding North–South economic relations as inherently political. Measures that appear to disrupt the ordinary course of exchange—such as reciprocal tariffs or sanctions regimes—do not signal a “return of the political,” but rather a redeployment of relations that are fundamentally both economic and political. Likewise, extractive enterprises should not be viewed as “purely economic” predation detached from the political arrangements of international organizations; they are inseparable from political power relations.

This mini-conference welcomes contributions that empirically document developments that are simultaneously political and economic, with particular interest in comparative analyses across time and space.

Methodologically, the goal is to move beyond analyses of North–South relations based solely on macro-level data and descriptive statistics, toward approaches that engage more deeply with the political and economic nature of these relations. Field theory enables relational analyses that characterize both structural power relations and symbolic, political struggles. The challenge lies in extending and adapting this approach to systematically analyze relations between the fields that organize economic activity, and to connect multiple scales of analysis. Similarly, social network analysis promotes relational reasoning by revealing the nature, frequency, and intensity of interactions among actors—thereby exposing their political and economic power and alliances.

The mini-conference seeks to showcase empirical research applying these methods, as well as contributions engaging critically with them.

References
Dunlap, A., Verweijen, J., & Tornel, C. (2024). The political ecologies of “green” extractivism(s): An introduction. Journal of Political Ecology, 31(1), 436–463.
Gindin, S., & Panitch, L. (2013). The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Verso Books.
Hopewell, K. (2021). Trump & Trade: The Crisis in the Multilateral Trading System. New Political Economy, 26(2), 271–282.
Jacob, F. (2023). Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century. In F. Jacob (Ed.), Wallerstein 2.0: Thinking and Applying World-Systems Theory in the 21st Century. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Kvangraven, I. H. (2023). Dependency Theory: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Its Relevance Today. In A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Müller, F. (2024). Energy Colonialism. Journal of Political Ecology, 31(1), 701–717.
Pedregal, A., & Lukić, N. (2024). Imperialism, Ecological Imperialism, and Green Imperialism: An Overview. Journal of Labor and Society, 27(1), 105–138.
Poast, P. (2019). Beyond the “Sinew of War”: The Political Economy of Security as a Subfield. Annual Review of Political Science, 22(1), 223–239.
Robinson, W., & Sprague, J. (2018). The Transnational Capitalist Class. In The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies. Oxford University Press.
Weissenbacher, R. (2025). Development in Chains: On the Radical Origins of Global Value Chain Research. Globalizations, 22(4), 522–549.
Ziai, A. (2023). Postcolonial Critique of Economic Development. In Handbook on Critical Political Economy and Public Policy. Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 374–386.

Insurance is an economic sector whose decisive importance for Western economies has been built on principles of mutualisation defined more than two centuries ago: while it is impossible to predict who, individually, will be confronted with a particular risk, it is possible to know that, on average, in a given population, a certain number of claims will occur: if everyone contributes, it becomes possible to compensate those who are affected. This risk protection technique has played a decisive role in enabling initiatives that might otherwise never have seen the light of day. By collecting premiums from policyholders, insurers end up gathering a considerable portion of household savings – more than a 

quarter in Europe, and more than a third in France and Germany. By investing the sums they collect, they play a decisive role in the financial markets: in Europe, they are the leading institutional investors. In addition to this decisive economic role, they also play a political role: as stakeholders in the welfare state, insurers are one of the key elements enabling the establishment of the forms of solidarity specific to Western societies, to the point that they have been described as ‘insurance societies’. (Ewald, 1986). 

The decisive importance of the insurance sector contrasts with the relative discretion of social science research on insurance and its market. Over the past decade, research has developed in response to three major developments whose impact extends far beyond the insurance sector alone, but whose specific consequences must be studied in terms of their interactions – which is what this mini-conference proposes to do: financialisation, big data and AI, climate change and other emerging risks. 

Like most economic sectors, insurance is primarily subject to a process of financialisation: the primacy of shareholder interests over those of other stakeholders, the prevalence of forms of reasoning derived from financial theory, the globalisation of investment flows and arbitrage opportunities, etc. In relation to these very general trends, the position of insurers has long been paradoxical: because they are key players in the financial markets, they have played a decisive role in spreading these trends to all economic sectors; but due to certain characteristics of their market (relative impermeability of national borders; the continued existence of many small companies that are sometimes distant, at least in theory, from capitalist logic, with the weight of mutual insurance companies; long-term investment strategies, etc.), insurers – or at least some of them – have long been less susceptible to its penetration than other firms. The ways in which financialisation has taken hold of insurers vary from one market to another and are one of the subject of research that the mini-conference aims to stimulate and present. 

Like financialisation, the use of big data and AI is by no means specific to the insurance industry – but, like financialisation, it is applied in ways that address specific challenges. The mutualisation that underpins the insurance business model is based on a form of asymmetry: it is impossible to predict the future on an individual scale, but the law of large numbers makes it possible to manage it on a collective scale. Is the combination of data with a high level of granularity, on the one hand, and calculation tools whose principles differ from those of actuarial calculation, on the other, likely to challenge this asymmetry? And what would be the consequences of this challenge? These two questions can be answered theoretically – for example: if it were to happen, would the individualisation of rates call into question the very possibility of solidarity? – and empirically: do insurers actually rely on these new data and tools when defining their products? 

Finally, the emergence of ‘new risks’ in insurers' portfolios is simply a reflection of tensions within the sector that extend beyond it. The implications of climate risks, the advent of cyber risk, the consequences of riots and violent demonstrations place the issue of insurability with renewed urgency on the agenda of insurers and public authorities: under what conditions are these risks insurable, and with what commercial and/or public mechanisms? 

The mini-conference welcomes contributions that will help establish whether these developments challenge the major balances that underpin the functioning and place of the insurance industry in Western societies. In particular, they may focus on two cross-cutting questions: 

• Are these developments likely to affect certain categories of the population differently and to redraw the boundaries of exclusion for certain policyholders? 
• How do they challenge the construction of international insurance markets – a construction that has been slow to take shape over the past decades, but is nevertheless well established? 

These questions could be addressed in contributions that tackle some of the following themes, which we mention here in a non-exhaustive manner: 

• How have risks evolved over the last couple of decades? Today, French insurers see emerging risks as including climate change, cybersecurity, social unrest and riots, and economic risks. How do different societies perceive "emerging risks"? Could we expect a divergence or convergence of risks across countries and/or regions? 
• How and when does a threat become a demand for protection or a business opportunity? • In what ways are these new risks reshaping the insurance ecosystem? Are new actors entering the market, or are existing institutions being reorganized? Examples include Flood Re (UK) and the European public reinsurer project. Are new protection tools being adopted, such as ILS and parametric insurance? • What tensions exist between private insurance markets and public solidarity-based systems in addressing global emerging risks? 
• What might a comparison of different protection regimes teach us about the pros and cons of each? • Does the combination of emerging risks and new big data and IA-based tools imply new forms of discrimination? 

• How do emerging risks influence public policy and new regulations (DORA, IA act, FIDA, etc…) • What is the relationship between individual and collective responses to the need for prevention and the mitigation of risks? 
• How is trust in insurance institutions constructed or eroded when insurers face challenges like uninsurable risks, exclusions, or catastrophic events?

Building on four mini-conferences on the entanglements of race and capitalism at the 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), we are seeking 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 and categories of practice. We are also increasingly seeking work that puts race in intersectional dialogue with other identities, particularly gender. 

Our mini-conference is well-suited to respond to the theme of SASE 2026: “Fighting Divisions: Conflict and Power in a Post Globalisation Order.” As trade, international finance, global value chains, employment, and labor relations make front-page news, we draw attention to the way that these 

processes are racialized, with racial and other social differences forming the basis for capital extraction even while they are naturalized. Our mini-conference has become a valuable site for discussions of these topics. Labor has been central to our mini-conference from the beginning, and we have had labor-related panels as well as panels on organizing and social movements across sections like housing, migration, education, transportation, and agriculture. Our papers have increasingly showcased the importance of the Global South and North-South relations, with papers on Brazil, India, and South Africa in dialogue with papers on South Korea, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our participants have debated finance capitalism across areas such as private equity, fringe finance, city budgets, and urban development, particularly as it intersects with climate change and environmental protection. We also have a long-running focus on land and property as sources of power that echoes this year’s theme. 

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, 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.

Pierre FRANCOIS est sociologue, directeur de recherche au CNRS (Sciences Po/CSO). Il travaille sur la finance contemporaine et sur l’histoire du capitalisme. Il est notamment l’auteur, avec Claire Lemercier, d’une Sociologie historique du capitalisme.

Les trois âges du capitalisme

Comment penser les évolutions de long terme du capitalisme ? A l’échelle individuelle, la notion renvoie à la recherche du profit pour lui-même – et sous ce jour, le capitalisme semble avoir toujours existé. Les sociétés capitalistes, qui se peuvent définir comme celles où ce comportement singulier a acquis une légitimité et où il affecte la très grande majorité des individus – qui soit l’adoptent, soit le subissent – sont plus récentes : on peut schématiquement les voir émerger, sur tous les continents, dans le dernier tiers du XVIIe siècle. D’emblée mondial, le capitalisme s’étend – davantage qu’il ne naît – à partir des petits groupes, exigus et dominants, où ce comportement avait cours jusque-là. Son histoire peut alors s’organiser en trois âges, dominés par des figures et des logiques contrastées qu’il est impossible d’agencer comme une marche vers le progrès : l’âge du commerce (c. 1680-c. 1880), l’âge de l’usine (c. 1880-c. 1980) et l’âge de la finance (c. 1980-). Le passage d’un âge à un autre n’obéit ni à une logique fonctionnelle (le capitalisme changerait en surmontant les défis qui se présentent à lui), ni à un déterminisme technologique (ce sont moins les innovations qui comptent que leur trajectoire d’adoption), ni à des scansions politiques (les âges survivent aux élections, aux changements de régimes et aux conflits mondiaux) : c’est l’affrontement des groupes dont les intérêts et les schémas de pensée s’opposent, et l’accroissement conflictuel de la division du travail, qui rendent compte des transformations graduelles du capitalisme, et de celles qui le voient passer d’un âge à un autre.

Roberto Pedersini is Professor of Economic and Labour Sociology at the University of Milan, where he is Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences. He graduated with a degree in economics and obtained a PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research, with a dissertation on privatisation processes in Central and Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland).

His main fields of research are comparative industrial and employment relations, as well as the interaction between agency and social and political institutions in shaping economic processes, with a specific focus on the role of collective action. He has participated in and coordinated several research projects since the late 1990s and has published many journal articles, essays, and monographs on these topics. He regularly participates in national and international conferences to present papers on his current research.

He is Chief Editor of the Italian scientific journal Stato e mercato, an established reference for socio-economic studies in Italy, and is part of the editorial boards of other journals, including Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research.

As an expert in industrial and employment relations, he has participated in various initiatives and projects of Italian and international organisations, including notably the European Commission, the International Labour Office, the European Economic and Social Committee, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, and the European Trade Union Institute.

He has been a member of SASE since 2012. He was the local organiser of the 2013 Milan SASE Annual Meeting and served on the Executive Council between 2014 and 2016. He has contributed to the organisation of the SASE Early Career Workshop (ECW) since its first edition in 2016 in Berkeley, and chaired the ECW Committee between 2018 and 2023.

SASE, or the argonauts of socio-economics: Seeking the keys to understand our societies and economies

SASE attracts an increasing number of scholars from different disciplines who analyze a broad range of topics with various analytical frameworks and methodologies. This makes SASE’s Annual Meeting a unique event to present and discuss scientific work in a multidisciplinary context.

The success of SASE as a scientific organization suggests that the paradigm of socio-economics is inclusive and can accommodate a variety of themes and approaches. Complementarily (or alternatively), it may also mean that the understanding of socio-economics has changed and broadened through time, not to mention that different research communities within SASE may hold a distinct and peculiar view of what socio-economics is.

I first look to our past: the foundation of socio-economics and SASE and its development through our annual meetings (and interactions with the Socio-Economic Review), to identify the core conceptual and analytical elements that can constitute our distinctive scientific approach and identity. I consider the viewpoints that this annual meeting offers on our societies, polities, and economies. I then look to the future: to the contributions we can provide to better understand where we are and where we are heading.

Surbhi Kesar is Senior Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. Her recent and ongoing work focuses on labour, informal economy, structural transformation and postcolonial capitalism (mainly focussing on, though not limited to, India); relation between identities and social exclusion; political economy of crises; a critical engagement with the social reproduction theory; and approaches towards decolonising the field of economics. Her research is embedded in Marxian Political Economy and South-centric critical frameworks of economics. She is working on several projects in these areas and has published in various economic development and political economy journals on these issues. She also recently co-authored a book ‘Decolonising Economics: An Introduction’. 

She received her PhD in Economics from South Asian University, New Delhi, and has been a Fulbright Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is an Associate Editor for Oxford Development Studies journal and an editorial board member of the Review of Radical Political Economics journal. She is a Steering Group member for the Diversifying and Decolonising Economics initiative.

Informality, labour exclusion, and structural transformation

Abstract: Today, around 60% of the global workforce is informally employed, with the share exceeding 80% across much of Asia and Africa. The persistence—and in many contexts intensification—of informality despite sustained growth raises fundamental questions about the nature of structural transformation and capitalist transition in the Global South, and about contemporary global capitalism more broadly. Existing explanations in mainstream and even many critical strands of economics and political economy seek to account for this endurance, yet they often miss the deeper contradictions embedded in current transformation processes. 

This lecture foregrounds an alternative Global-South-centric theoretical perspective that highlights how these dynamics generate the systematic exclusion of labour from secure, formal employment—not as an anomaly or temporary phase, but as a structural outcome of growth itself. The argument is illustrated using evidence from India’s enterprise and labour market surveys, where three decades of rapid economic expansion have coexisted with pervasive informal livelihoods. Reframing labour exclusion in this way positions it at the centre of debates on industrial policy and structural transformation: not as a challenge that growth and industrial expansion will automatically resolve, but as a central bottleneck shaping development trajectories in both the Global South and, increasingly, the Global North.

A Generalized “Double Movement”: Ideologies and Conflicts Surrounding Exchange Institutions

Karl Polanyi’s “double movement” thesis posits a conflict between different ways of conceiving the relationship between the economy and society, between market and non-market transactions.

This presentation aims to generalize Polanyi’s argument.

First, the presentation proposes to understand the double movement as a struggle for what Antonio Gramsci called cultural hegemony and as a political conflict surrounding exchange institutions.

Second, the presentation proposes to broaden Polanyi’s typology of exchange institutions by adding commons and matching devices, thus allowing for a better understanding of community management of natural resources and the personalized allocation of highly important goods.

Finally, the presentation examines the institutional and political struggles surrounding the boundaries of each of these institutional forms.

Philippe Steiner, professor emeritus of sociology at Sorbonne University, is interested in the history of social sciences (Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology, Princeton UP, 2010; Calculation and Morality, with C. Oudin-Bastide, Oxford UP, 2019) and economic sociology (Faire la fête. Sociologie de la joie, Presses universitaires de France, 2023) with a focus on non-market transactions (La société du matching, with M. Simioni, Presses de Sciences-Po, 2024; Altruism, Gift and Symbolic Exchanges, Brill 2025).

Lara Monticelli is an economic sociologist and co-founder of the SASE Network I: “Alternatives to Capitalism,” established in 2017. She has over a decade of experience at world-class institutions, including Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), and, most recently, University College London (UK). She is currently Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the ESRC/UKRI Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol.

Her work is inspired by, and engages with, prominent contemporary thinkers within the interdisciplinary field of “capitalism studies” and centres on the urgent need to foster transitions toward more just, equitable, and sustainable futures. Her current research agenda advances this vibrant field of scholarship by moving beyond critique to examine how imaginaries of alternative futures are prefigured, contested, and negotiated in relation to contemporary capitalism by a wide range of social actors.

She has pursued this agenda through the prestigious EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship project EcoLabSS – Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change, as well as through several field-defining publications on prefigurative movements and prefigurative politics. She co-edits the book series “Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century” with Bristol University Press.

She is currently working on several new publications and projects, including the monograph Prefigurative Social Movements: Politics in Practice, in which she develops a novel Marxian, Polanyian, and Fraserian framework for the study of social movements, and a major grant proposal examining how powerful corporate actors, particularly Big Tech corporations, not only engage in speculation, but also enact forms of reactionary prefiguration that shape dominant imaginaries of the future and of capitalism itself.

If Not Now, When? Towards an Economic Sociology of Alternatives

Over the past two decades, scholarship on alternatives to capitalism has expanded dramatically across economic sociology, political economy, sustainability studies, development studies, political and social theory, and critical management studies. From degrowth and doughnut economics to community wealth building, democratic planning, solidarity economies, and pluriversal alternatives, researchers have generated a rich and diverse landscape of proposals for economic transformation - many of which have been presented and discussed at SASE's Network I "Alternatives to Capitalism" since its establishment in 2017. Yet despite this intellectual vitality, the field remains highly fragmented. While economic sociology has developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding markets, institutions, organizations, and capitalism itself, it lacks a comparable framework for studying alternatives systematically.

This keynote argues that the time has come for a sociology of alternatives. Rather than treating alternatives as isolated experiments or normative aspirations, I propose approaching them as a coherent object of sociological inquiry. The central question is no longer whether alternatives exist, but how they emerge, diffuse, interact, institutionalize, and challenge existing forms of economic organization.

Building on Erik Olin Wright's work on real utopias while engaging critically with feminist scholarship, particularly Nancy Fraser's and Stefania Barca's analysis of capitalism's background conditions of possibility, I argue that alternatives should be evaluated not only in terms of feasibility or desirability but also in terms of their capacity to transform the social relations that sustain contemporary capitalism. Questions of care, social reproduction, ecology, democracy, and coloniality are therefore not peripheral but constitutive of any adequate sociology of alternatives.

The keynote concludes by outlining a new research agenda for economic sociology, one capable of moving beyond the diagnosis of capitalism towards the systematic study of economic futures and transformative possibilities.