Kate Aronoff is a contributor to The Intercept and a writing fellow at In These Times covering climate and American politics.
Michael Burawoy has been a participant observer of industrial workplaces in four countries: Zambia, United States, Hungary and Russia. In his different projects he has tried to illuminate -- from the standpoint of the working class -- postcolonialism, the organization of consent to capitalism, the peculiar forms of class consciousness and work organization in state socialism, and, finally, the dilemmas of transition from socialism to capitalism. Over the course of four decades of research and teaching, he has developed the extended case method that allows broad conclusions to be drawn from ethnographic research. Continue reading
Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She works on social and political theory, feminist theory, and contemporary French and German thought. A recipient of the American Philosophical Association’s 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize and of the Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Cordoba (Argentina), Professor Fraser held a “Blaise Pascal International Research Chair” at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in 2008-2010.
Greta Krippner is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in economic sociology, political sociology, the sociology of law, and social theory. Her work explores how the rise of the market has intersected wider social, cultural, and political transformations in U.S. society in the “long” twentieth century. Her first book, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2011), examined the financialization of the U.S. economy in the period since the 1970s, arguing that the turn to finance was an inadvertent response to unresolved distributional dilemmas as post-war growth stalled. Her current book project traces the evolution of methods of risk-based pricing over the course of the twentieth century, asking how the notion that each individual should “pay the cost” of her own riskiness emerged as a widely accepted normative principle governing how risk is distributed in contemporary society.
Andreas Novy is a socioeconomist, associate professor at and head of the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development (MLGD) at Vienna University of Economics and Business. He has published extensively in the field of urban development, social innovation, development studies and transdisciplinarity. He is president of the International Karl Polanyi Society, hosted at MLGD. He has been head of the Austrian Green Foundation, co-founder of the Viennese Paulo Freire Center and co-organizer of two Good Life for all-Congresses in Vienna. He is teaching on Future-fit economics and finishing a German-speaking book on Zukunftsfähiges Wirtschaften (Future-fit Economics) (forthcoming-2019, Beltz Verlag, together with Richard Bärnthaler and Veronika Heimerl). Other recent publications include Local social innovation to combat poverty and exclusion: a critical appraisal (co-eds. S.Oosterlynck and Y.Kazepov (forthcoming-2019, Polity Press) and (together with C. Thomasberger und M. Brie) the editing of Kari Polanyi: Die Finanzialisierung der Welt. Karl Polanyi und die neoliberale Transformation der Weltwirtschaft((forthcoming-2019, Beltz Verlag).
Margaret Somers is a social theorist and comparative historical sociologist whose scholarly work is wide ranging and eclectic, embracing economic sociology and political economy; social and political theory—including normative studies of rights and social justice; political sociology, social change, and legal studies of democratization and citizenship rights; methods of historical sociology, theories of knowledge and ideas, and historical epistemology. Beyond sociology, her work draws from economic as well as legal, and social history; political theory and moral philosophy; British, French, and American history; economic anthropology and historical demography. Continue reading
Professor of Sociology with a focus on Sociological Theory and Social Analysis (with particular emphasis on the gender dimension) and Head of the Department of Social Theory and Social Analysis (until 2018: Theoretical Sociology and Social Analysis) at the Institute of Sociology of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Economics the Johannes Kepler University in Linz.
In the wake of the Sociology of Management Tools research manual (Chiapello, Gilbert, 2013) which took stock of the different possible approaches to develop a sociology attentive to management tools and political instruments, I try to develop an analysis of transformations of capitalism from decoding the tools of management used by companies and political instruments implemented by public law persons to regulate and organize this capitalism. More specifically, I have been interested for two years in the phenomenon of financialization of our economy and the tools that accompany this financialization. I seek in particular to document the penetration of all sectors of activity by "financialized " tools, that is to say instruments that are conceptually and technically based on the techno-scientific corpus of modern finance. Continue reading
Professor Angela P. Harris joined the UC Davis School of Law (King Hall) faculty in 2011. She began her career at the UC Berkeley School of Law in 1989, and has been a visiting professor at the law schools of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown. In 2010-11, at the State University of New York - University at Buffalo School of Law, she served as vice dean of research and faculty development.
Harris is the author of a number of widely reprinted and influential articles and essays in critical legal theory. She is also a prolific co-author of casebooks, including Criminal Law: Cases and Materials; Race and Races: Cases and Materials for a Diverse America; Gender and Law; and Economic Justice. Along with Carmen Gonzalez, Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, and Yolanda Flores Niemann, she is editor of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (2013), a well-received anthology focused on the experiences of women of color faculty and graduate students. Continue reading
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? In addition to writing for the Prospect, he writes for HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and The New York Review of Books.
Professor Kari Levitt was born in Vienna in 1923, the only child of Karl Polanyi and Ilona Duczynska. In 1933 Karl emigrated to England followed by Kari in 1934 and Ilona in 1936. Kari attended Bedales School (1936-1940) and the London School of Economics from 1941-1943 at the wartime Cambridge campus and in London from 1945-1947 – interrupted by two years of national war service with the Research Department of the Amalgamated Engineering Union in South London. In 1946 she participated in the historic study of the Effects of Allied Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy directed by Nicholas Kaldor. With a small staff, in less time, the study came to the same conclusion as a similar larger, American study, directed by John Kenneth Galbraith, that aerial bombardment of industrial cities had the perverse effect of increasing German war production. She graduated from LSE with First Class Honours in 1947, specializing in statistics. Kari met Canadian historian Joseph Levitt in wartime London, on leaves from active service in the Canadian armed forces in Italy and Normandy. She joined him in Canada in 1947. In 1947 Karl Polanyi obtained an appointment as a visiting professor at Columbia University, but Ilona was unable to join him in New York on account of McCarthyist legislation. She established a home in Canada on the outskirts of Toronto near Pickering, Ontario where Karl visited on Christmas, Easter and summer vacations until his retirement from teaching in 1953. Continue reading
Claus Thomasberger, professor of Economics and International Policy at the University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany. Author and co-editor of numerous articles and books on Karl Polanyi, including: The Belief in Economic Determinism, Neoliberalism, and the Significance of Polanyi's Contribution in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation (with M. Brie) (2018), Karl Polanyi: Economy and Society (with M. Cangiani) (2018)..
Fred Block specializes in economic sociology and political sociology. He also leads the Center for Engaged Scholarship hat provides fellowship support for Ph.D. students in the social sciences whose work has the potential to make U.S. society more egalitarian, more democratic, and more environmentally sustainable. Block’s recent writing focuses on innovation in the U.S. economy, the intellectual legacy of Karl Polanyi, and the critique of free market economics. Continue reading here and here
Peter Evans is best known for his work on the comparative political economy of national development, exemplified by his 1995 book Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation and a recent series of articles on the “21st Century Developmental State.” For the past several years he has been researching the ways in which social movements can mobilize transnationally to build a “counter-hegemonic globalization.” Among these movements, the global labor movement is a key actor. See his 2008 article, “Is an Alternative Globalization Possible?” and his 2010 article “Is it Labor’s Turn to Globalize?” Continue reading
Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and Faculty Co-Director of the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog. She joined the Yale Law faculty in January 2012. Her areas of research include information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M. Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School. Continue reading
Marguerite (Margie) Mendell, who earned her PhD in Economics from McGill University (1983), has been teaching at the SCPA since 1986. Her current research and teaching are on the social economy in Quebec and internationally, social finance and impact investing, social innovation, the commons, economic democracy, and the work of Karl Polanyi whose influence continues to grow today. Margie Mendell is participating in a growing international dialogue on innovative economic initiatives to reduce inequality and develop new collective forms of wealth creation through her participation at scholarly conferences and international meetings of the OECD, the European Commission, the Global Social Economy Forum (GSEF) and civil society gatherings. Dr. Mendell is the co-founder of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy established at Concordia University in 1988, the repository of the entire Karl Polanyi Archive.
James Scott, Ph.D., Yale University, 1967, is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program and a mediocre farmer. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. His publications include Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale Press, 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale Press 1980, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Press, 1998; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Press, 2008; Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton Press, 2013; Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Agrarian States, Yale Press, 2017. Continue reading
Frederick Wherry is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and Director of the Dignity and Debt Network, a partnership between the Social Science Research Council and Princeton. He, Kristin Seefeldt, and Alvarez Alvarez are the authors of Credit Where It’s Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship. The book includes a Foreword by José A. Quiñonez. Wherry is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Consumption (with Ian Woodward, forthcoming September 2019) and he is editor of the four-volume Sage Encyclopedia of Economics and Society as well as Money Talks: How Money Really Works (with Nina Bandelj and Viviana A. Zelizer). He is the author or editor of four other books or volumes. He edits a book series at Stanford University Press: Culture and Economic Life, with Jennifer Lena and Greta Hsu. He was the 2018 President of the Social Science History Association (ssha.org) and the past chair of the Economic Sociology Section and the Consumers and of the Consumption Section of the American Sociological Association. Continue reading
