2026 Sabina Avdagic Early Career Scholar Prize Winner & Honorable Mention

Tommaso Crescioli (Prometeia/LSE) & Toon Van Overbeke (Maastricht University), “Rising Market Power and its Political Discontents” (Winner of Sabina Avdagic Paper Prize, SASE)

We are delighted to support this paper for the Sabina Avdagic Prize. It takes one of the more stubborn puzzles in contemporary political economy: why small business owners increasingly vote radical right, and offers a genuinely original answer: rising market concentration. As large corporations consolidate, micro-firms are squeezed, their owners lose income, status and trust in institutions, and they turn from incumbents to the radical right.

What makes the paper stand out is the ambition of the research design. The authors marshal three distinct bodies of evidence, Orbis historical firm data, ESS individual data, and CLEA constituency results, and align them into a single coherent account that holds at every level. Few papers attempt this kind of triangulation, fewer still pull it off.

The deeper contribution is conceptual. Most of the voting literature works the capital-labour and within-labour cleavages. This paper opens up conflict within capital and gives it an electoral dimension, exposing a politically salient faultline that the field has largely missed.

It is timely, theoretically fresh, and empirically serious, and it speaks directly to the question of whether democratic capitalism undermines the very conditions that make it possible. This is exactly the kind of work that Sabina would have loved. We recommend it warmly and without reservation.

José Luis Gallegos Quezada, Tal Simons & Rebecca Hewett (all authors are based at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University), “Disputing the Future of Work: How Workers Shape the Organizational Effects of Automation” (Honourable Mention, Sabina Avdagic Prize, SASE)

We are pleased to recommend this paper for an Honourable Mention. It takes a question that sits at the heart of debates on the future of work: how can workers shape what automation does to them when they are shut out of the decisions that design and deploy it? Its answer is both elegant and original. Through a longitudinal study of dockworkers at the Port of Rotterdam, the authors show that organised labour can constrain, condition and repurpose technology’s intended effects even without a seat at the table, preventing forced layoffs by bargaining over how automation was coupled to work arrangements.

What makes the paper stand out is its conceptual precision. The authors develop the idea of affordance realignment, and in doing so bridge two literatures that rarely speak: the affordance tradition in organisation studies, which locates worker agency at the point of use, and the industrial relations scholarship on collective bargaining over technology. The result reframes worker agency as collective and governance-oriented rather than individual and situated, a genuinely useful move.

The case is a most-favourable one, with exceptionally high union density and an unusually rich archive, which leaves open how far the argument travels. But this is the natural question to ask of a deep, well-built single case, not a flaw in it. The paper is careful, theoretically disciplined, and beautifully positioned.

It is timely, conceptually fresh, and grounded in patient fieldwork, and it speaks directly to whether workers can still shape the terms of technological change in contemporary capitalism. This is exactly the kind of scholarship that Sabina would recognise. We recommend it warmly for an Honourable Mention.