Network L: Regulation and Governance
This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels. It was formed to foster interaction between the more specialized group of regulatory governance scholars and larger sets of scholars of political economy, socio-economics, law, public policy, development, the welfare state, institutional analysis, risk management, and democracy. Regulation and governance relies in part on state power and domestic politics, but also extends beyond the state, as seen in systems of professional authority, private regulation, and transnational governance. As such, the study of regulation and governance intertwines with the study of markets, firms, associations, political parties, public and private bureaucracies, and international organizations. Going beyond typical policy analysis, this network seeks to broaden our understanding of how regulation and governance relate to processes of democratization, state building, liberalization/marketization, development, and legitimation of political economic orders.
Network L Organizers
John W. Cioffi
Maha Rafi Atal
University of California, Riverside
John W. Cioffi
John W. Cioffi is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Cioffi received his J.D. with High Honors from Rutgers University School of Law-Newark and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his academic career, Professor Cioffi clerked for United States District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise (D.N.J.) and practiced law as a litigation associate with the New York law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.
Professor Cioffi is the author of the book, Public Law and Private Power: The Comparative Political Economy of Corporate Governance Reform in the Age of Finance Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2010), part of the Cornell Studies in Political Economy series edited by Peter J. Katzenstein. This work focuses on the comparative law and political economy of national corporate governance regimes and their reform in the United States and Western Europe up to and including the global financial crisis.
He has published numerous articles and book chapters on comparative law and regulation, with a focus on the comparative political economy of corporate governance, financial regulation, and labor relations. His articles have appeared in the Politics & Society, Regulation & Governance, Law & Policy, the Journal of Law and Society, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and various law reviews.
Prof. Cioffi’s current research investigates conflicts of interest as products of complex legal, political, and institutional processes that pose a persistent insidious threat to democratic politics and the rule of law. At its core is the reciprocal dynamic in which law and politics influence the forms, prevalence, and political economic consequences of conflicts of interest, even as legally constituted and institutionalized conflicts of interest generate allocations of power that, in turn, alter law and politics.
University of Glasgow
Maha Rafi Atal
Maha Rafi Atal, University of Glasgow, takes a political economy approach to the study of corporate power. Her current book project, examines “corporate social responsibility” as a system of Company Rule, tracing its history from colonial trading corporations to contemporary multinationals. She is also interested in how corporations exercise influence in the media and in politics, in the political power of internet platform companies, and in corporate accountability under international law.
In addition to her academic career, she is an award-winning business journalist, with work published in Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New Statesman, among others. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Public Business, a non-profit supporting reporting, research and discussion about the wider impact of business actions.
Prior to coming to Glasgow, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Copenhagen Business School, and earned degrees from the University of Cambridge, Brown University and Columbia University.
SASE Networks
A: Community, Democracy, and Organizations
This network focuses on the moral or values-based underpinnings of human thought, practices, and institutions that comprise civil societies, particularly as they relate to the participatory, collectivist, and democratic aspirations of organizations, markets, and other spaces of collaboration and contestation.
B: Globalization and Socio-Economic Development
This network considers how, at a time of a polycrisis, domestic, transnational, and international institutions and markets influence the contours of developmental opportunities in the global economy and beyond.
C: Gender, Work & Family
This network focuses on exploring the current state, and the changes in institutions concerned with gender and family roles and workplace organization.
D: Professions and Expertise
Through the Professions and expertise network we seek to develop critical analysis of the dynamics of professions and expertise.
E: Comparative Capitalisms
The aim of this network is to advance research on changing labor markets, industrial relations, and systems of social protection within the study of contemporary capitalisms.
F: KITE: Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship
This network focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as its underlying technologies and knowledge sources. On these topics, we particularly welcome, but do not require an institutional perspective.
G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources
The network welcomes contributions on the general issues of labor market segmentation, unemployment, and the link between training, skills and jobs.
H: Markets, Firms and Institutions
This network focuses on the interrelationships between markets, firms, and institutions.
I: Alternatives to Capitalism
The broad aim of this research network is to advance the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of alternatives to capitalism.
J: Digital Economy
Digital technologies are contributing to radical, growing and unpredictable transformations of economic life, raising a broad range of new issues for scholars of the economy. This research network is dedicated to the study of these issues.
K: Institutional Experimentation in the Regulation of Work and Employment
This network focuses on making work better through actor experimentation with institutions to regulate work.
L: Regulation and Governance
This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels.
M: Spanish Language
A lively Spanish-speaking section that was established in 2011.
N: Finance and Society
The goal of this network is to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue on the study of finance and include perspectives from social sciences outside of economics.
O: Global Value Chains
This network aims to bring together social scientists interested in analyzing the causes and consequences of this offshoring-outsourcing phenomenon.
P: Accounting, Economics, and Law
This network focuses on the intersection of accounting, economics and law. Institutional design, rules and social norms are critical to the working of organizations in economy and society.
Q: Asian Capitalisms
The basic idea of this first area network within SASE is to make Asia a central field of investigation for theories of institutional change and diversity of capitalism.
R: Islamic Moral Economy and Finance
This network aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to consider and discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving its stated ideals by highlighting the tension areas as well as the dynamism observed in the practice of Islamic finance.
S: Environment and Climate Change
This Network aspires to advance a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical dialogue on the interactions between the economy, society, and the environment.
T: Health
This network focuses on the social scientific study of health, broadly defined. It explores four key areas: the embeddedness of health within broader economic, political, and social structures and systems, health equality and equity, organizing and the organization of health, and pricing and valuation of health. The network aims to foster an interdisciplinary community and promote cross-national comparisons in global health, including but not limited to studies about drugs, medicines, healthcare, community and public health, and health policy.
U: Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire
This network is devoted to engaging the connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery, and capitalist expansion and global socio-economic development.
V: Geoeconomics
This network explores empirical and theoretical puzzles at the intersection of geopolitics, international political economy, and national capitalist systems in an era of ongoing global transformation. It brings together scholars studying how intensifying rivalries, shifting power relations, and geoeconomic competition reshape state strategies, growth models, welfare regimes, and global production networks (and vice versa).
W: Elites and Power Structures
This network examines how economic, political, and cultural elites shape contemporary socio-economic systems. It brings together scholars exploring elite formation, power, and networks, and their influence on inequality, institutions, markets, and social change through comparative and interdisciplinary research.