Socio-Economic Review

Socio-Economic Review (SER) is the official journal of SASE. It is part of a broader movement in the social sciences that returns to the economy’s socio-political foundations. Devoted to advancing socio-economics, SER deals with the analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection of economy and society. Articles in SER explore how the economy is or should be governed by social relations, institutional rules, political decisions, and cultural values. SER considers the different ways in which the economy affects society, such as by breaking up old institutional forms and giving rise to new ones. The scope of the journal is deliberately broad, and thus opens the debate to new variations on its general theme. Its peer-review editorial structure allows editors to engage intellectually with authors and their submission.

As of January 2021, SER is online-only.

SER Cafe

 

SER Café: an online, real-time discussion forum where members of the audience can virtually meet and interact with the authors of one or two papers recently published in Socio-Economic Review. The audience is expected to have read the articles.


Socio-Economic Review Cafe: The Socio-Economics of Climate Change

Register here!

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Matthew Soener (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Scott Frickel (Brown University).

Join us for a discussion of the socio-economic dimensions of climate change. Soener, in “Are IMF programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South?,” finds that the coercive conditions of IMF loans push countries to implement extractive economic programs, which increase greenhouse gas emissions. Frickel and co-author Meghan Kallman, in “Making the ‘business case’: vocabularies of motive and clean tech innovation in the hidden developmental state,” find that a market-oriented justification lubricates the adoption of new clean technology, while also obscuring the state’s role in developing this innovation.

Come join us for a discussion on the (un)intended climate impacts of state and global policies. The event will take place on Friday, May 17, at 9AM PST/11AM CDT/12PM EST/6PM CET. Register at this link!

As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors. No lengthy talks. Our authors look forward to your questions and comments.

SER on Tap

Hosted by Jacob Bromberg, SER on Tap is a podcast produced by the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics to expand on and draw out implications of recent articles published in Socio-Economic Review through interviews with the authors. It is available on Apple Podcasts, PodBean, and elsewhere.


EPISODE 6

Thomas Oatley (Tulane University) talks with us about his article, “The dual economy, climate change, and the polarization of American politics,” which illustrates how the knowledge economy and the carbon economy are at odds with one another, and how this polarizes contemporary American politics.

Listen

EPISODE 5

Jens Beckert (MPIfG) talks with us about his article “Varieties of wealth: toward a comparative sociology of wealth inequality,” which examines two cases of high-wealth inequality to illustrate how different aspects of wealth can be more important, more powerful, or more tolerable according to institutional and cultural contexts.

Listen 

EPISODE 4
Timur Ergen (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies) and Sebastian Kohl (Free University Berlin) speak with us about their article, “Rival views of economic competition,” which schematizes moral arguments made in regard to economic competition so as to open a systematic ethical debate on the matter.
Listen

EPISODE 3
Steve McDonald (North Carolina State University), Amanda Damarin (Georgia State University), and Scott Grether (Longwood University) discuss their article “The hunt for red flags: cybervetting as morally performative practice,” which examines the wildly freeform and morally as well as practically dubious exercise of “cybervetting”.
Listen

EPISODE 2
Jonathan Mijs (Boston University) discusses his article “The paradox of inequality: income inequality and belief in meritocracy go hand in hand,” which explores the baffling paradox by which countries faced with growing inequality experience less popular concern regarding inequality than do more egalitarian nations.
Listen

EPISODE 1
David Hope (King’s College London) and Julian Limberg (King’s College London) discuss their article “The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich.” The article considers the dramatic decline in taxes on the rich across advanced democracies over the past 50 years and seeks to estimate the average effects of major tax reforms on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment.
Listen 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Past SER Café Events

2024
 
SER Cafe: Contemporary Capitalism through the Lens of Institutions (March 14th, 2024)

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Carly R. Knight (New York University), and Ann-Christine Schulz (Institute for Digital Transformation and Strategy) and Alexander Himme (Kuehne Logistics University)

Join us for a discussion of contemporary capitalism through institutional studies. Knight, in “Classifying the corporation: the role of naturalizing analogies in American corporate development, 1870–1930,” traces the history of the classification of the corporation and argues that the symbolic privatization of the corporation was the joint product of both liberal and progressive legal theorizing, and these “naturalizing analogies” are critical to understanding the symbolic structure of corporate capitalism. Schulz and Himme, in “Stock market reactions to downsizing announcements: an analysis through an institutional lens”, examine stock market reactions to corporate downsizing using a neo-institutional perspective and demonstrate the performance effects of corporate downsizing and investors’ role in legitimizing this prevalent business practice.

 
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Socio-Economic Review Cafe: The Financialization of Households

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Marek Mikuš (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), and Xiaojing Wang and Anne-Marie Ward (both of Ulster University) 

Join us for a discussion of how the state and the financial economy are implicated in contemporary household finance. Bobek, Mikuš, and Sokol, in “Making sense of the financialization of households,” review the state-of-the-art literature on this topic and argue that household participation in the financial economy constitutes “a systematic transfer of value from the bottom of society to the top.” Wang and Ward advance a policy proposal for resolving household overindebtedness in their paper “Socio-economic framework for the design of national household insolvency systems,” that takes into account variations in political orientations to indebtedness and levels of social insurance provisions between countries.

Come and join us to discuss how socioeconomic research on household financialization can inform policy solutions for its negative consequences. The event will take place on Wednesday, January 24th, at 9AM PST/12PM EST/6PM CET. Register at this link!

 

2023

The first SER Café of 2023 was held on Thursday, February 9 at 4pm UTC (11am US Eastern/8am US Pacific/5pm Central European).

We spoke with Ekaterina Svetlova (University of Twente) and Akos Rona-Tas (UC San Diego) about the relationship between technology, economy, and society.

The authors discussed their respective SER articles, “AI Meets Narrative: The State of Research on Expectation Formation in Sociology and Economics” (2021) and “Predicting the Future: Art and Algorithms” (2020).

 


The third SER Café of 2023 will be held on Monday, June 19, at 11am EST/ 8am PST/ 5pm CET! We will be speaking with Cèline Bessiére (Paris Dauphine University),  alongside Daria Tisch (Max Plank Institute for the Study of Societies) and Tamara Gutfleisch (Manneheim Centre for European Social Research) about the relationship between intergenerational transfers, wealth, and gender inequality. The authors will briefly discuss their respective SER articles, “Reversed Accounting: Legal Professionals, Families, and the Gender Wealth Gap in France” (2019) and “Unequal but Just? Experimental Evidence on (Gendered) Distributive Justice Principles in Parental Financial Gifts” (2022).

We will follow the discussion with an extended Q & A session. Please use this link to register for this timely conversation!

 

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Socio-Economic Review Café: Close Relationships, Trust, and the Economy

The event will take place on Thursday, November 16th, at 9 AM PST/12 PM EST/6 PM CET. Register at this link! The audience is expected to have read the articles.

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Wenjuan Zheng (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), David Shulman (Lafayette College), and Kent Grayson (Northwestern University) 

Join us for a discussion of close relationships and the potential and pitfalls of trust in the economy, as well as the ways technology can mediate these dynamics. Shulman and Grayson’s paper “Et Tu, Brute? Unraveling the puzzle of deception and broken trust in close relations” (2023)  discusses why closeness, as with friends or coworkers, is no guarantee of trust, revisiting theoretical discussions of trust to shed light on detection errors and associational dilemmas. Meanwhile, Zheng’s paper “Converting donation to transaction: how platform capitalism exploits relational labor in non-profit fundraising” (2023) investigates what happens when platforms intermediate trusting relationships, demonstrating how they reconfigure charity events and mediate civic interactions through invisible value extraction. 

Together, these papers offer insights into how trust is built, maintained, and challenged in a world increasingly facilitated by technology. 

As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors rather than lengthy talks. Come ready to engage. 

[Here’s the Zoom registration link separately if you need it: https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sdO6vrDIuHdK5zKF0YwkthFjphgaBGddv]
 

 

 

 


2022

The inaugural SER Café took place on 3 June 2022 at 4pm UTC (12pm US Eastern/9am US Pacific/6pm Central European).

The Platform Economy

Featured Articles

Both articles were published in SER’s special issue on Understanding the Platform Economy

The conversation was moderated by SER student interns Gokhan Mulayim, Amy Knight, and Bernardo Mackenna.

Sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics