Finance, Corporations and the End of Neo-Liberalism
4:30-6:00PM
A.D. White House, Guerlac Room
Please join us for the 2013-2014 CSES Lecture Series entitled: “Finance, Corporations and the End of Neo-Liberalism.” Our Lecture Series brings to Cornell University campus leading scholars in the social sciences. This CSES Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, Program on Ethics and Public Life, and Department of Sociology.
February 6th, 2014, 4:30pm
A.D. White House–Guerlac Room
Jerry Davis, University of Michigan
The Coming Collapse of the American Corporation (and What Comes Next)?
March 27th, 2014, 4:30pm
A.D. White House–Guerlac Room
Marion Fourcade, Berkeley
Classification Situations: The Productive Effects of Financial Classifications
April 17th, 2014, 4:30pm
A.D. White House–Guerlac Room
Monica Prasad, Northwestern
Is Neo-Liberalism Over?
Please join us for our next CSES Lecture Series on October 31st, 2013 at Cornell University from 4:30 to 6PM in the Physical Sciences Building 401. Howard Aldrich will present his research “Everyone an Entrepreneur? Recognizing the Gap between the Veneration of Entrepreneurship and the Reality of Its Costs.”
Abstract
Entrepreneurship enjoys widespread appeal in nearly all capitalist nations, but start-up success has proved elusive for most entrepreneurs. In a paper published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal in 2012, Tiantian Yang and I explained the low likelihood of entrepreneurial success by focusing on the contrast between organizational forms in terms of cultural codes that tap into widely held perceptions versus organizational forms in terms of blueprints that sustain effective guidance for organizational activities. In our Journal of Business Venturing article on estimating the liability of newness, also published in 2012, Yang and I argued that most studies of nascent entrepreneurs actually understate the magnitude of the problem facing newly organized ventures. The dilemma facing nascent entrepreneurs during their life course is the incomplete and fragmentary nature of these opportunities for learning about start-up practices. I conclude by offering suggestions, based on paper published in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics this year, for further research to discover what entrepreneurs actually do during the start-up.
About
Howard Aldrich is Professor & Department Chair, Sociology, and Adjunct Professor of Management in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Aldrich research focuses on entrepreneurship, the origins of new organizational populations, gender differences in business management and organizational evolution. Among his research projects is a study of the process by which entrepreneurial teams are founded, and it focuses on similarity and differences between team members. He also is examining the contributions made by voluntary association membership to entrepreneurial success, as well as how to design courses and classroom activities to promote active learning. Dr. Aldrich won the Carlyle Sitterson Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2002. In 2000, the Swedish Foundation of Small Business Research named him the Entrepreneurship Researcher of the Year and the Organization and Management Division of the Academy of Management presented him with a Distinguished Career of Scholarly Achievement award. His book, “Organizations Evolving”, won the Academy of Management George Terry Award as the best management book published in 1998-99, and was co-winner of the Max Weber Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work.
Please join us for our next CSES Lecture Series on September 26th, 2013 at Cornell University from 4:30 to 6PM in Goldwin Smith Hall G76. Martin Ruef will present his research “Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South.”
Abstract
In the U.S. South, a free labor market rapidly—although, in some cases, only nominally— replaced the plantation system of slave labor in the years following the American Civil War. Drawing on data comprising 75,099 transactions in the antebellum period, as well as 1,378 labor contracts in the postbellum era, I examine how the valuation of black labor was transformed between the 1830s and the years of emancipation. I trace the process of valuation through four markets for labor, moving from slave purchases and appraisals within the plantation economy, to the antebellum system of hiring out, to wage-setting for black labor under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Comparative analysis of labor pricing across these markets reveals systematic differences: slave markets placed price premiums on children and young women, and occupational skills emerged as the most salient influence in the pricing of wage labor. I conclude by theorizing how transvaluation of labor occurs when markets for unfree and free workers are governed by distinct institutional conditions.
About
Martin Ruef’s research considers the social context of entrepreneurship from both a contemporary and historical perspective. He draws on large-scale surveys of entrepreneurs in the United States to explore processes of team formation, innovation, exchange, and boundary maintenance in nascent business startups. Ruef’s historical analyses address entrepreneurial activity and constraint during periods of profound institutional change. This work has considered a diverse range of sectors, including the organizational transformation of Southern agriculture and industry after the Civil War, the transition of the U.S. healthcare system from professional monopoly to managed care, and the character of entrepreneurship during the Industrial Revolution.
Please join us for the final lecture in the 2012-2013 CSES Lecture Series where Paul Ingram will present his research on “The Gentlemen Slave.”
Abstract
We consider the influences on entering into ‘dirty business’ by which we mean economic activity that violates cultural values. We consider individual disposition to violate norms as a function of status, social contagion in a network, where status determines influence, and the role of a social movement to ignite attention to the norms and their violation. We analyze who entered the Liverpool slave trade. We find that high status Gentlemen were more likely to do so, and that they were highly influential on the behavior of their network partners. The abolition movement affected an increase in the magnitude of social influence, and shifted the balance of influence in favor of non-slavers.
About
Paul Ingram is the Kravis Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School, and Faculty Director of the Columbia Senior Executive Program. His PhD is from Cornell University, and he was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University before coming to Columbia. He has held visiting professorships at Tel Aviv University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Toronto. The courses he teaches on management and strategy benefit from his research on organizations in the United States, Canada, Israel, Scotland, China and Australia. His research has been published in more than forty articles, book chapters and books. Ingram’s current research projects examine the influence of intergovernmental organizations on foreign direct investment and democratization; the structure and efficacy of managers’ professional networks in China and the United States; and the effects of networks and institutions on the evolution of the Glasgow shipbuilding industry. He has served as a consulting editor for the American Journal of Sociology, a senior editor for Organization Science, an Associate Editor for Management Science and on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly and Strategic Organization.
Cultural and Technical Innovation: The Twin Foundations of Economic Growth
4:30-6:00PM
Malott Hall 251
Please join us for our next CSES Lecture Series on February 28th, 2013 at Cornell University from 4:30 to 6PM in Malott Hall 251. Jack Goldstone will present his research on “Cultural and Technical Innovation: The Twin Foundations of Economic Growth.”
Abstract
Modern economic growth rests on innovation; that is widely accepted. But innovation is usually seen as proportional to effort, investment, and levels of accumulated knowledge technological prowess. These are positive forces; but innovation also requires overcoming the negative forces of established authority, intellectual ‘sunk costs,’ and the vested interests who benefit from maintaining status quo beliefs. Only Western civilization was successful in overcoming these negative forces. This was not due to any exceptional flexibility or vibrancy in Western culture. Quite the reverse, it was due to the exceptional rigidity and closure of Western intellectual culture prior to 1500, and the impact of discoveries on that rigid system which broke it open and led to new world views.
About
Professor Jack A. Goldstone is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, Dr. Goldstone was on the faculty of Northwestern University and the University of California, and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association; Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History; and nine other books as well as over one hundred research articles on topics in politics, social movements, democratization, and long-term social change. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox News, and written for Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Al-Hayat and the International Herald Tribune. His latest book is Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Please join us for our next CSES Lecture Series with guest lecturer Siegwart Lindenberg. Lindenberg (PhD Harvard 1971) is professor of Cognitive Sociology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is one of the founders of the Inter-University Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS) and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
His main interests lie in the areas of microfoundations for theories on collective phenomena, especially theory of model building, theory of social rationality, goal-framing theory, theory of human goals and wellbeing (SPF theory), and theory of norms; self-regulation and pro- and antisocial behavior; and groups and relationships (including various forms of solidarity and contracting), especially theory of interdependencies (functional, cognitive, and structural) and theory of sharing and joint production and theory of solidarity.
Please join us for the 2012-2013 CSES Lecture Series. Our Lecture Series brings to the Cornell campus leading scholars in the social sciences. Recent visitors include James Baron, Robert Barro, Mary Brinton, Paul DiMaggio, Frank Dobbin, Ronald Dore, Peter Evans, Neil Fligstein, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Gibbons, Mark Granovetter, Avner Greif, Gary Hamilton, Russell Hardin, Justin Yifu Lin, Barnaby Marsh, John Meyer, Douglass North, Michael Novak, Charles Sabel, AnnaLee Saxenian, Neil Smelser, Duncan Watts and Harrison White. The Center’s breadth of activities contributes greatly to the rich array of opportunities — both intellectual and personal — in economic sociology at Cornell.
“Economic sociology is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social economic action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.”— Max Weber
