Lena Pellandini-Simanyi is Assistant Professor at the Universitàdella Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland.
I am an economic sociologist interested in how normative ideas shape markets. I study how new markets and novel consumer and organizational practices emerge, drawing mainly on ANT, cultural economy and Bourdieu. My work focuses on normalization and legitimation – on how practices that were once considered morally wrong or weird gradually become seen as normal – and on how they contribute to processes of social exclusion. Lending to subprime borrowers, acquiring risky financial products, or the growing consideration of environmental aspects by firms and consumers are examples that my research has covered. I am author of the book Consumption Norms and Everyday Ethics that situates consumption norms as a lens through which we can understand everyday moralities embedded in practice, and of articles published in Economy and Society, Sociology, the Sociological Reviewand the Journal of Cultural Economy, among others.
I received my PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. My current projects look at the making of the postsocialist Hungarian mortgage market, the financialization of everyday life in the US and in Eastern Europe and the reversal of the responsibilization trend in financial regulation in the UK, Switzerland and Hungary (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Hungarian Scientific Research Funds).