Featured Speakers

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.