This seminar aims at providing students with the analytical and conceptual tools to study markets. The conceptual texts and case studies provide insights into different approaches in economic sociology, featuring sessions on recent developments in the economy.
Competition is a constitutive feature of capitalist societies. Social conflicts over the introduction, abolition and regulation of market organization are saturated with implicit moral arguments concerning the desirability of competition. Yet, unlike private property, exchange relations and social inequalities, economic competition has rarely been the explicit core of moral debates over capitalism. Drawing on a broad variety of social science literature, this article reconstructs, maps and systematizes ethical arguments about economic competition in capitalist societies. We discuss six contradictory rival views of economic competition and illustrate their influence by providing historical examples of the respective views in action in political-economic debates. This article serves as a mapping groundwork for reviving the systematic ethical debate on economic competition. In addition, our map of rival views lends itself to use as a structuring tool in empirical research on the moral economy and ideational embeddedness of capitalist societies, markets and firms.
Article in Analyse & Kritik on the history and limits of the Mittelstand-ideal in debates about democratic capitalism with S. Kohl. ...
Article in Socio-economic Review on the moral economy of economic competition with S. Kohl. ...
The paper compares competition policy reform in the United States and Europe. It argues that ideological and professional legacies in European antitrust agencies blocked the inflow of new concentration-friendly economic ideas into the field.