N: Finance and Society
Akos Rona-Tas is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego where he is also founding faculty of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute. For many years, he was a senior research associate at INRA, Paris, and he was the President of SASE in 2018-2019.
He has written two books on market creation. Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: Demise of Communism and Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary, was published by Michigan University Press, the second one, co-authored with Alya Guseva, Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries, by Stanford University Press.
He has published articles on the post-communist transition, on small entrepreneurs, consumer credit, and payment card markets in journals including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Research on Sociology of Organizations, Journal of Comparative Economics, Research in the Sociology of Work, as well as various chapters in edited volumes. He is currently working on the problem of rationality and uncertainty in two different contexts: credit assessment and the use of science in risk management.
Akos Rona-Tas has been a member of SASE since 2005. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the Finance and Society Network, served on the Executive Council between 2012 and 2015, as Treasurer between 2015 and 2018, and as SASE President in 2018/19.