Governance and Economic Organisations

The Governance and Economic Organisations research programme focuses on organisations that participate in economic operations and their regulation. Businesses and market intermediaries are taken as objects of study, as are less visible actors such as consulting firms, evaluative, exploratory, and expert bodies, professional associations, unions, and NGOs.

The research in this programme is organized along three lines of inquiry:

1. The first is concerned with interactions between the abovementioned organisations and their institutional environments, as well as with the uses of the economy that they fashion for clients, consumers, and citizens. Socio-historical approaches enable researchers to track changes in economic organisations and the roles they play.
2. The second focuses on the regulations at work within economic operations. Central questions to this line of inquiry include: What kinds of regulations arise from contemporary interventions by the public authorities? What roles are played by joint, private, or self-regulation? And how is such regulation articulated on different levels?
3. Finally, the third line of inquiry concentrates on the effects of different sources of normativity (e.g., the law or the norms and values held by civil society, professional groups, or private interests) on the economy. Researchers are attentive to the construction and transmission of economic knowledge, both academic and professional.

Using qualitative and quantitative methods at the intersection of sociology, political science, and history, this programme’s research combines economic sociology, organisational sociology, sociology of law, sociology of social movements, and sociology of public policy.

Programme directors: Kevin Mellet, Etienne Nouguez and Vincent Himmer..

Themes addressed

• Construction of markets (medicine, personal finance, environment, etc.)
• Interactions between the economic world and civil society
• Regulation of economic activities
• Social and political role of economic knowledge
• Analysis of economic practices
• Corporate governance
• Evolutions in capitalism
• Public/private interactions