AxPo Seminar

Abstract:

The controversies surrounding the heavily redacted contracts between the European Commission and COVID-19 vaccine producers have highlighted ‘transparency’ as a hotly debated concept in the European pharmaceutical market. In this presentation, we show that the intersection between the pharmaceutical market and concerns about affordable medicines has come to depend on variable meanings of the notion of transparency, as mobilized by diverse market organizers. While being a guiding principle behind the construction of the European pharmaceutical sector, market transparency was implemented through devices that enacted specific definitions of transparency and thus produced distinct market organizations over time. We identify three visions of transparency that became translated into distinct organizational arrangements of the pharmaceutical market: transparency for states (until 1990), transparency for corporations (1990-2010), and transparency for state coalitions (since 2010). Our article sheds light on how struggles over the definition of transparency play a crucial role in the organization of markets. We also discuss why engaging in such controversies has become increasingly important for those contesting the market status quo in a post-political context, emphasizing the ‘not-so-post-political’ potential of these debates.

Abstract:

Within current debates on the ‘return of the state’, the state is regarded as an almost absent actor in contemporary capitalism. In these debates, the state intervenes in the economy as an agent of regulation in a context of purported crisis of the neoliberal order, while its multiple role (direct and indirect) in tech-based urbanised economies remains overlooked. In this paper, I analyse the key role of the state in tech-driven economies. Drawing on my research, I explore the actually existing role of the state in urbanised knowledge economies, highlighting that the state does not intervene in a traditional Keynesian sense of regional economic planning, but through a ‘strategic urbanisation’ of its conduct. In recent years, mainstream urban economists have highlighted place-specific endowments such as cultural diversity, environmental amenities, and the clustering of talent as the main factors attracting competitive businesses and highly skilled human capital in one place rather than in another. In my paper, I attempt to show how entrepreneurial urban economies are strategically constructed through a complex ‘politics of operations’ (financial, cultural, logistics) enacted by both the local and the national states. In the concluding part of my talk, I discuss the implications of my conceptual perspective for the analysis of the French Tech Initiative.

Abstract:

What does a desirable economic future look like? By which economic ideal and traditions should it be governed? Based on Lisa Suckert’s previous work on economic imaginaries of the future, national economic identity and economic critique, she provides first insights into a new project. It explores how four major capitalist developments - globalization, financialization, digitalization and de-carbonization - have been discussed as opportunity or threat in different national European contexts. By capturing and comparing the explanations about why these developments need to be enabled or constraint, the analysis reveals the underlying economic ideals (e.g. growth, equality, employment,innovation, stability, national autonomy) that serve to evaluate, what a good economy is. As it depicts how these economic ideals have changed or remained stable over time and to what extent we can observe national varieties of “the good economy”, the analysis contours the potential and challenges for not only re-imagining but re-making the economy on a European scale. In this vein, the presented research contributes to understanding the ideational infrastructure of capitalism in the 21^st century. 

Abstract:

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the question of how to regulate banks effectively has received a great deal of scholarly attention. While economic research usually refers to cross-country comparisons, the long-term evolution of regulatory systems is rarely examined. This paper examines one of the longest regulatory cycles in history, triggered by the banking crisis of the 1930s. It explores financial regulation in 12 countries (Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, USA, Japan, Argentina, Greece) between 1920 and 1980. We combine a qualitative study of legal instruments with a quantitative approach, based on the reconstruction of an overall regulatory index. Moreover, we use balance sheet data from commercial banks to measure changing risk exposure of credit banks and financial markets over time. The insolvency risk of large commercial banks is measured with a calculation of the Z-score. Based on this empirical research, the project combines a comparative analysis of national regulatory regimes with a historical perspective. This will allow to answer a variety of fundamental questions: Was national financial regulation based on path dependencies? How important was regime competition? Did regulatory systems converge over time? Has international fragmentation increased risk exposure of banks? What are the political factors that drive regulatory cycles?

Abstract:

Lately, new chapters have been written on the seemingly endless history of “the end of neoliberalism”. Following the Global Financial Crisis and the covid public health crisis we now experience digital capitalism’s return to some industrial policy, some new focus on public services, some strategic protectionism, much if not all at least partly due to the geopolitics of the new rivalry with China. Does all this indeed signal the age of post-neoliberalism has begun at last? At the level of currently leading corporations furthermore, the control and even ownership of markets by the GAFAM+ companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft plus Chinese competitors like Alibaba) have been suggested by Philip Staab (2019) to break with neoliberal concepts of market neutrality and a commitment to market competition and market expansion (“free market movement”). In my talk I will try to unpack (some of) these claims by way of re-visiting the historical evolution and a variety of neoliberal approaches to markets and competition in order to assess the extent to which present developments need to be considered serious challenges to neoliberal order. I will also observe the strategies GAFAM+ corporations in opposition to new regulatory approaches (“strategy mobility”) in an effort to observe and better understand present (global) political contestations affecting and driven by these strategic actors.

Abstract :

The world of work has been severely afflicted by COVID-19. To deal with the immense employment crisis, unemployment benefits were extended in many countries. This raised the classical question of whether this support would decrease the motivation of the unemployed to search for work. The answer to this conundrum is deeply rooted in sociological thought about work centrality and the meaning of work in our life. Is the motivation to work limited to the quest to ensure livelihood, or is work a primary source of dignity, self-image, fulfillment, and self-realization? How has these factors been affected by the pandemic? This study takes advantage of the COVID-19 disruption to assess shifts in work centrality and work values during the extended coverage of unemployment benefits. The investigation consolidates pre-COVID-19 surveys of work orientations in Israel with a COVID-19-era assessment. The results demonstrate that this shock has been powerful enough to put individuals’ work orientation to the test and made them reconsider the meaning of work in their life. Overall, the surge in work centrality during the pandemic and the gravitation of values toward job security reflect the universal trauma caused by the sharp decrease in employment certainty.

Abstract: 

Algorithms shape culture, but how?  Algorithms are now so intertwined with markets, workplaces, and media that scholars describe them as part of our social systems of meaning-making.  This project examines how algorithms shape the practical work of making culture.  I draw from an immersive ethnography of content creators who engineer entertainment videos to go viral on social media.  Algorithms, I find, discipline creative workers into making attention-grabbing content, often transforming their artistic visions of authenticity.  First, creators learn to subjugate their own tastes to data; second, they adapt to algorithm changes; third, they simplify stories into visual, often stereotypically sexualized and racialized imagery; fourth, they copy what works; fifth, they experience thrills of a game of scoring metrics.  Ultimately, successful creators redefine their standards of quality with quantitative metrics they think algorithms will reward.  By documenting this labor process, and creators’ shift in values and authenticity, I arrive at a theory of algorithms as performative in the online cultural economy, and fundamentally at odds with social media platforms’ insistence that they prize and reward authenticity.

Abstract:

Multilingualism is an ever-present feature in political contexts around the world, including multilingual states and international organizations. Increasingly, consequential political decisions are negotiated between politicians who do not share a common native language. “The Language(s) of Politics” uses the case of the European Union to investigate how politicians’ reliance on shared foreign languages and translation services affects politics and policy-making. It not only shows that multilingualism is an inherent and consequential feature of EU politics, but also that it depoliticizes policy-making by reducing its political nature and potential for conflict. That is because both foreign language use and reliance on translation result in communication that is simple, utilitarian, neutralized, and involves commonly share phrases and expressions, which masks the national and political backgrounds, preferences, and priorities of EU actors. Policy-makers also tend to disregard politically charged language because it might not reflect what a speaker meant to say, and they are constrained in their ability to use vague or ambiguous language to gloss over disagreements by the need for consistency across languages. Multilingualism thus affects the EU’s political culture, by shaping perceptions of political differences, polarization of opinion, intensity of debate, and the resonance of arguments and evidence.

How is knowledge organized in American higher education? In recent decades, the adoption of market-oriented logics within universities and higher education research institutions has had profound implications on how the pursuit of knowledge is rewarded and shaped. This "commercialization of science" had profound consequences on how research programs are conceived and operationalised. But, how did this environment affect the production of knowledge beyond forms of science directly relevant to ideas of innovation? In this chapter, I explore the role of budget models in shaping and regulating how universities structure their instructional and research operations. Focusing on recent models of budgeting, this talk shows how budgeting techniques become means for implementing change in higher education as part of outwardly legitimate interventions that have direct consequences on the experience and outputs of knowledge-makers.