Meet the Editors

Laura Adler is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University. Her dissertation examines how organizations set pay for new employees, identifying organizational practices and cultural ideas that reproduce and legitimize gender pay inequality. Past research has examined the preference for precarious work among aspiring artists, efforts to regulate the gig economy, and the cultural factors that shape whether people use their social networks to get a job. She has a Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley and a Bachelors from Yale University.

Valerie Arnhold is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations / Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests combine organizational, political, and risk sociology in order to understand the changing role of nuclear accidents for the evolution of the nuclear industry and nuclear politics in France and, to a lesser extent, in Germany and the E.U. more broadly. Her dissertation is tentatively entitled “Beyond Apocalypse? Sociology of Nuclear Accidents and their Governance, 1986-2016.” Based on a multi-site ethnography accompanying the work of experts and regulators on the accident of Fukushima Dai-ichi in 2011, her dissertation shows how these public actors worked with sector-specific procedures and rules to progressively challenge the apocalyptic images of nuclear hazards, showing that they could be rendered “manageable” through the tools of nuclear safety. Her research therefore helps scholars to understand the ways modern states manage major hazards and crises: by transforming them into ordinary events. In addition, it uncovers several mechanisms regarding the role of the industry and sector-specific agencies in strategically shaping policy areas such as nuclear energy. Valerie holds an M.A. in European Studies from the University of Bath, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Sciences Po as well as a B.A. in German-French studies.

Assaf S. Bondy is a sociologist studying the political economy of industrial relations systems in advanced economies, combining New Institutional and neo-corporatist theories with theories of intersectionality and agency. Currently he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA. His work so far has been dedicated to the study of changing conditions for collective action in labor markets, focusing on the context of the Israeli labor market. His latest publication, on patterns of coordination between company-level collective bargaining in new organizing sites, was published in 2019 (Hurt Publications). His current projects analyze collective-action strategies across different countries and sectors to reveal similarities and differentiation in changing forms of representation. Additionally, Assaf’s work investigates the relations between traditional and “new” actors in industrial relations, to understand sources of organizational and political change and their trajectories.

Florencia Labiano is a doctoral student at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales in the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina. Her research interests intersect economic sociology and urban studies in order to address the social production of the “formal” rental housing market in Buenos Aires City. She makes extensive use of interviews and participant observations to study the moral-economic tension among the requirements and practices developed by landlords and real estate agents to select tenants. She also works with different sources on the transformations of symbolic value of homeownership status to make intelligible the supply, offer, and intermediaries’ dynamics within the rental housing market. She discusses the segmentation approach between the “formal” and “informal” and proposes to address this distinction as a product of the adequacy between landlords, tenants, housing, and the dwelling location in the city. More broadly, she seeks to think the coproduction of the city and the market. Florencia hold a B.A. in Sociology from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where she studied employers’ decisions in the construction industry labor market.

Erik Peinert is a sixth-year PhD candidate in political science at Brown University. His research interests broadly investigate the political economy of advanced industrial states and the politics of economic policymaking, specifically in the domain of competition and market power. His research draws from different disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and economics, and his broader interests include business-state relations, institutional change, antitrust, intellectual property rights, and the politics of economic ideas. His dissertation seeks to understand why many industrialized countries have alternated in the long run between national policy regimes in favor of enforcing price competition on one hand, and supporting market power and domestic monopolies on the other. He has completed extensive archival field research in the United States and France, to track the changes in economic beliefs among political and policy leaders over time in both countries. Originally from Massachusetts in the U.S., he holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. from Brown University.

Jeanne Lazarus is a tenured CNRS research fellow at the CSO in Sciences Po (Paris). Her research has focused on relationships between bankers and customers in French retail banks. She published L’Epreuve de l’argent in 2012, and edited several special issues on banking, credit and money management. The latest was co-edited with Mariana Luzzi “L’argent domestique: des pratiques aux institutions”. Jeanne has also conducted research on the sociology of money and the consumption and monetary practices of the impoverished. She is currently studying the ways in which public policy structures household finances and conceives the protection of populations deemed to be at risk of financial insecurity, due to precarious employment and the withdrawal of social welfare provisions.