Course Information

Instructors: Dr. Olivier Pilmis (olivier.pilmis@sciencespo.fr) & Dr. Timur Ergen (te@mpifg.de)
Format: Intensive 3-day seminar
Dates: January 10-12, 2024
Location: Sciences Po Paris
Semester: Winter 2023/2024
Institutions: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies & Sciences Po Paris

Markets are the core organizational mechanisms of capitalist economies. From a sociological perspective, markets are not just an economic device for the allocation of goods but are institutions inseparably interwoven with the political, social, and cultural environments in which they operate.

Course Materials
  • Complete Syllabus — Full course syllabus with detailed information and requirements

Assessment

Students complete response memos (about 3 pages each) on assigned readings. The memos should not just summarize readings but rather take up specific arguments, raise questions of evidence, usefulness, or plausibility, or draw attention to strengths and weaknesses. Selected students will also present their research projects in relation to specific sessions (10 mins per presentation). Memos are due Friday, January 5th.

Day 1: January 10, 2024

Session 1: What are markets? Conceptual perspectives

9:00 am–12:00 pm

Required Reading:

  • Beckert, Jens, 2009, The social order of markets, Theory and Society, 38 (3), pp. 245–269.

Advised Readings:

  • Aspers, Patrik, 2011. Markets, London, Polity Press (ch. 2).
  • Fligstein, Neil, 1996, Markets as politics: a political-cultural approach to market institutions, American Sociological Review, 61 (4), pp. 656–673.
  • Polanyi, Karl, 2001, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Boston, Beacon Press (ch, 4–6).
  • Weber, Max, 1978 [1922], The Market: Its Impersonality and Ethics, in Economy and Society, Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, pp. 635–640 (Vol. 1, part. II, ch. 7).

Session 2: Embeddedness and beyond

1:00 pm–4:00 pm

Required Reading:

  • Krippner, Greta, 2001, The elusive market: embeddedness and the paradigm of economic sociology, Theory and Society, 30 (6), pp. 775–810.

Advised Readings:

  • Barber, Bernard, 1995, All economies are ’embedded’: the career of a concept, and beyond, Social Research, 62 (2) pp. 387–413.
  • Callon, Michel, 1998, Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics, in Callon, Michel (ed.), The laws of the market, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, pp. 1–57.
  • Granovetter, Mark S., 1985, Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness, American Journal of Sociology, 91 (3), pp. 481–510.
  • Zelizer, Viviana A., 2012, How I became a relational economic sociologist and what does that mean? Politics and Society, 40 (2), pp. 145–174.

Session 3: Competition

4:30 pm–6:30 pm

Required Reading:

  • Ergen, Timur & Sebastian Kohl, 2022. Rival Views of Economic Competition. Socio-economic Review 20, 3, pp. 937–965.

Advised Readings:

  • Dobbin, Frank and Timothy J. Dowd, 2000, The market that antitrust built: public policy, private coercion and railroad acquisitions, 1825 to 1922, American Sociological Review, 65 (5), pp. 631–657.
  • Foster, Chase, 2022 , Varieties of neoliberalism: courts, competition paradigms and the Atlantic divide in antitrust, Socio-Economic Review, 20(4), pp. 1653–1978.
  • Podolny, Joel M., 1993, A status-based model of market competition, American Journal of Sociology, 98 (4), pp. 829–872.
  • Simmel, Georg, 1904, The sociology of conflict: I, American Journal of Sociology 9 (4), pp. 490–525.

Day 2: January 11, 2024

Session 4: Markets Under Siege: Organization and the State

9:00 am–12:00 pm

Required Reading:

  • Farrell, Henry and Abraham Newman, 2019. Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion. International Security, 44 (1), pp. 42–79.

Advised Readings:

  • Davis, Gerald F., 2011. The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation, Seattle University Law Review 34, pp. 1121–1138.
  • Dubuisson-Quellier, Sophie, 2022. How does affluent consumption come to consumers? A research agenda for exploring the foundations and lock-ins of affluent consumption, Consumption and Society, 1(1), pp. 31–50.
  • Lei, Ya-Wen. 2023. The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China. Princeton: Princeton University Press
  • Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1943. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge (Part II: Can Capitalism Survive?, pp. 59–164).

Session 5: Contestation, Market Devices and Inequality

1:00 pm–3:30 pm

Guest Speaker: Prof. Marie Trespeuch

Required Reading:

  • Steiner, Philippe, & Marie Trespeuch, 2019. Contested Markets: Morality, Market Devices, and Vulnerable Populations, Simone Schiller-Merkens and Philipp Balsiger (ed.) The Contested Moralities of Markets (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 63), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 31-48.

Session 6: Morals, Pricing & Prediction

4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Guest Speaker: Prof. Melike Arslan

Required Reading:

  • Kiviat, Barbara. 2019. The Moral Limits of Predictive Practices: The Case of Credit-Based Insurance Scores. American Sociological Review 84(6): pp. 1134–1158.

Joint dinner at 8:00 pm

Day 3: January 12, 2024

Session 7: Markets Under Siege: Algorithmic Control

9:00 am–12:00 pm

Required Readings:

  • Culpepper, Pepper D., and Kathleen Thelen, 2020. ‘“Are we all Amazon primed? Consumers and the politics of platform power”, Comparative Political Studies, 53(2), pp. 288–318.

Advised Readings:

  • Fourcade, Marion, 2017. The fly and the cookie: alignment and unhingement in 21st-century capitalism, Socio-Economic Review, 15(3), pp. 661–678.
  • Mellet, Kevin and Thomas Beauvisage, 2020, Cookie monsters. Anatomy of a digital market infrastructure, Consumption Markets and Culture, 20(2), pp. 110–129.
  • Rona-Tas, Akos, 2020. Predicting the Future: Art and Algorithms, Socio-Economic Review, 18(3), pp. 893–911.

Session 8: Markets Under Siege: Asset Management and Wealth Chains

1:00 pm–3:00 pm

Required Reading:

  • Braun, Benjamin, 2021. American asset manager capitalism as a corporate governance regime, in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, edited by J. Hacker et al. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 270–294.

Advised Readings:

  • Birch, Kean, and Fabian Muniesa, 2020, Introduction: Assetization and Technoscientific Capitalism, in Birch, Kean, and Fabian Muniesa (eds.), Assetization: Turning things into assets in technoscientific capitalism, Cambridge, MIT Press, pp. 1–41.
  • Gabor, Daniela, 2022. The Wall Street Consensus, Development and Change 52(3), pp. 429-459
  • Godechot, Olivier et al., 2022, Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality, Socio-Economic Review, Online First.
  • Seabrooke, Leonard, & Saila Stausholm, 2023, The firm-territory nexus in a fragmented economy: Scales of global value and wealth chain entanglement. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Online First.

Session 9: Conclusion: What have we learned?

3:30 pm–4:30 pm

Final reflection on the seminar’s key insights and theoretical contributions to understanding markets in contemporary capitalism.