SASE 2024 Conference in Limerick
For Dignified and Sustainable Economic Lives: Disrupting the Emotions, Politics, and Technologies of Neoliberalism
27–29 June 2024
University of Limerick – Limerick, Ireland
Conference Theme Overview
The 2024 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Meeting, held in Limerick, Ireland, explored how social transformations, ruptures, and crises shape the pursuit of dignity and sustainability in economic lives.
The theme emphasized the entanglement of economic systems with social structures, power, culture, emotions, and technologies. It asked how research on these entangled economies can help envision and enact a better world.
Building on SASE’s strong traditions in macro political economy, institutional analysis, and development, the conference encouraged work across scales of analysis:
Macro: Historical and contemporary political economy, financialization, racial capitalism, inequality, poverty, climate change, and the future of digital economies.
Meso: The role of corporations, non-profits, governments, and social movements in entrenching or disrupting systems of exclusion, and the search for more equitable organizational designs.
Micro: Everyday processes of economic interaction in marketplaces, online spaces, households, and circuits of care, with attention to the emotional meaning of money, work, and relational practices.
Contributions addressed urgent issues including climate change, pandemics, economic inequality, military conflict, surveillance, and AI, while exploring solutions such as democratization of work, mutual aid, innovative approaches to cash relief, and new paradigms of economic justice.
The conference highlighted how movements for sustainability and equity can disrupt neoliberal logics and build alternatives that foster greater dignity in economic lives.
As always, SASE served as a platform for interdisciplinary and international dialogue, bringing together both established scholars and emerging voices.
A Limerick for Limerick
We’ll hold a SASE meeting, you see,
To change economic decree,
Neoliberalism aside,
’Twill be a wild ride,
To make a more just economy.
SASE President at the time: Nina Bandelj
Network A: Community, Democracy, and Organizations
Network A is devoted to the examination of alternative, participatory, and/or solidaristic forms of economic enterprise and entrepreneurship, community organizations, third-sector organizations, or political organizations. By alternative, participatory, and/or solidaristic, we mean to encourage the analysis of how communities, enterprises, and societies can be organized around: (1) principles of democratic governance; (2) processes that build social solidarity and cooperation; and/or (3) substantive values and purposes that go beyond calculative self-interest and instrumental relations.
Network B: Globalization and Socio-Economic Development
This network considers how, at a time of a polycrisis, domestic, transnational, and international institutions and markets influence the contours of developmental opportunities in the global economy and beyond.
Network C: Gender, Work and Family
This network focuses on exploring the current state, and the changes in institutions concerned with gender and family roles and workplace organization.
Network D: Professions and Expertise
Through the Professions and expertise network we seek to develop critical analysis of the dynamics of professions and expertise.
Network E: Comparative Capitalisms
The aim of this network is to advance research on changing labor markets, industrial relations, and systems of social protection within the study of contemporary capitalisms.
Network F: KITE: Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship
This network focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as its underlying technologies and knowledge sources. On these topics, we particularly welcome, but do not require, an institutional perspective.
Network G: Labor Markets, Education, and Human Resources
The network welcomes contributions on the general issues of labor market segmentation, unemployment, human resources, and the link between training, skills and jobs.
Network H: Markets, Firms and Institutions
This network focuses on the interrelationships between markets, firms, and institutions.
Network I: Alternatives to Capitalism
The broad aim of this research network is to advance the international, comparative and interdisciplinary study of alternatives to capitalism.
Network J: Digital Economy
Digital technologies are contributing to radical, growing and unpredictable transformations of economic life, raising a broad range of new issues for scholars of the economy. This research network is dedicated to the study of these issues.
Network K: Institutional Experimentation in the Regulation of Work and Employment
This network focuses on making work better through actor experimentation with institutions to regulate work.
Network L: Regulation and Governance
This network promotes the interdisciplinary study of regulation and governance at national and global levels.
Network M: Spanish Language
A lively Spanish-speaking section that was established in 2011.
Network N: Finance and Society
The goal of this network is to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue on the study of finance and include perspectives from social sciences outside of economics.
Network O: Global Value Chains
This network aims to bring together social scientists interested in analyzing the causes and consequences of this offshoring-outsourcing phenomenon.
Network P: Accounting, Economics, and Law
This network focuses on the intersection of accounting, economics and law. Institutional design, rules and social norms are critical to the working of organizations in economy and society.
Network Q: Asian Capitalisms
The basic idea of this first area network within SASE is to make Asia a central field of investigation for theories of institutional change and diversity of capitalism.
Network R: Islamic Moral Economy and Finance
This network aims at bringing scholars and practitioners together to consider and discuss the role of Islamic moral economy and Islamic finance in achieving its stated ideals by highlighting the tension areas as well as the dynamism observed in the practice of Islamic finance.
Network S: Environment and Climate Change
This Network aspires to advance a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical dialogue on the interactions between the economy, society, and the environment.
Network T: Health
This network focuses on the social scientific study of health and medicines, broadly defined. It explores four key areas: the embeddedness of health and medicines within broader economic, political, and social structures and systems; health equality and equity, including access to medicines; organizing and the organization of health; and innovation in and pricing and valuation of health and medicines.
Network U: Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire
This network is devoted to engaging the connections between imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery, and capitalist expansion and global socio-economic development.
Network V: Geoeconomics
This network explores the intersection between geopolitics, international political economy, and national capitalist systems in an era of ongoing global transformation.
Mini-Conferences
Mini-conferences consist of a minimum of three panels and a maximum of five panels, featured as a separate stream in the conference program. Submissions are open to all scholars on the basis of an extended abstract of up to 1,000 words.
If an abstract is accepted, mini-conference organizers recommend that participants submit a full paper by 10 June 2024. If a paper proposal cannot be accommodated within a mini-conference, organizers will forward it to the most appropriate research network as a regular submission.
To submit an abstract to a mini-conference, please follow the regular submission process detailed on the conference website.
MC01 Working Time Reduction: Toward a More Balanced, Just, and Sustainable Economic Life
Organizers
Agnieszka Piasna, Juliet Schor, Orla Kelly, David Frayne, Daiga Kamerāde, Jean Yves Boulin, Brendan Burchell
MC02 The “New” Political Economy
Organizers
Neil Fligstein, Steven Vogel
MC03 Insecurity: Its Neoliberal Drivers, Embodied Experiences, and Political Effects
Organizers
Lorenza Antonucci, Elena Ayala Hurtado, Albena Azmanova
MC04 Towards Sustainable Work in the Digital Care Economy
Organizers
Ivana Pais, Caroline Murphy, Anna Ilsøe
MC05 Failures and Dilemmas: Exploiting Disruptive Interventions in Neoliberalism
Organizers
Gary Herrigel, Adriana Mica, Ann Mische
MC06 Connecting Global Capitalism and National Capitalisms
Organizers
Fulya Apaydin, Arie Krampf, Andreas Nölke, Merve Sancak
MC07 Elites and Power Structures
Organizers
Christoph Houman Ellersgaard, Elisa Reis, Thierry Rossier, Elisa Klüger, Bruno Cousin, André Vereta Nahoum, Kevin Young, Robyn Klingler Vidra
MC08 Online Advertisement Economies: Ad Tech, Platforms, and Stack Economization
Organizers
Koray Caliskan, Annmarie Ryan, Addie McGowan
MC09 Global and Local Formations of Race and Capital
Organizers
Mishal Khan, Nabila Islam, Mo Torres, Ross Goodman Brown
MC10 Welfare States and Gender Inequality: Regional and Global Perspectives
Organizers
Ieva Zumbyte, Dorota Szelewa
MC11 Digital Work Ecosystems, Connected Workers, and Fractious Connections
Organizers
Jacqueline O’Reilly, Mark Stuart, Esme Terry, Rachel Verdin, Steve Rolf
MC12 Interfaces, Technology, and Power in Illegal Markets
Organizers
Matías Dewey, Gabriel Feltran
MC13 Intellectual Property Rights Contested: Control Over vs Access to Knowledge
Organizers
Sigrid Quack, Antoine Dolcerocca, Christian Bessy, Konstantin Hondros
Featured Events
The SASE 2024 Annual Conference, held June 27 to 29 at the University of Limerick in Ireland, featured keynote addresses, presidential remarks, panels, and book salons highlighting current debates in socio economics, political economy, and social change.
Featured Speakers
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Keynote: Platforms and Publics
Jean Monnet Theatre, Main Building Level 0
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Her work examines inequality, technology, higher education, and public life. Her book THICK: And Other Essays received the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
Isabella Weber
Keynote: Inflation in Times of Overlapping Emergencies: The 2021–2023 Episode as Dress Rehearsal
Jean Monnet Theatre, Main Building Level 0
Isabella Weber is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Associate in Research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center. Her research focuses on inflation, industrial policy, and economic stability. Her book How China Escaped Shock Therapy has received multiple academic awards.
Paul Pierson
Keynote: The Political Foundations of Bidenomics
Jean Monnet Theatre, Main Building Level 0
Paul Pierson is the John Gross Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His work centers on American political economy, inequality, and institutional change. He is co author of Let Them Eat Tweets and Partisan Nation.
Corina Rodríguez Enríquez
Keynote: Towards a More Inclusive Economy: Contributions from a Global South Feminist Economics Perspective
Jean Monnet Theatre, Main Building Level 0
Corina Rodríguez Enríquez is a researcher at CONICET and CIEPP in Argentina and a leading scholar in feminist economics in Latin America. Her research addresses care work, fiscal and social policy, inequality, and development finance.
Presidential Address
Nina Bandelj
Capitalized, With Passion: On the Emotional Economies of Late Capitalism
University Concert Hall, FG042
Featured Panels
SASE’s Past, Present and Future: The Legacy of Founder Amitai Etzioni (1929–2023)
Moderator: Nina Bandelj
Panelists: Wolfgang Streeck, Nancy DiTomaso, Katherine Chen
University Concert Hall, Foundation Building Basement
Can Finance Get Climate Right?
Moderator: Daniel Beunza
Panelists: Rishikesh Bam Bhandary, Emanuele Campiglio, Rebecca Elliott, Neil Fligstein
University Concert Hall, Foundation Building Basement
Featured Book Salons
2023 Alice Amsden Book Award winner: Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street, by Megan Tobias Neely (University of California Press, 2022) – FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall), Saturday, 29 June, 2024 – link to program listing
The Ordinal Society, by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy (Harvard University Press, 2024) – Thursday, 27 June, 2024, FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall) – link to program listing
Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do To Fix It, by Adia Harvey Wingfield (Harper Collins, 2023) – Friday, 28 June, 2024, FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall) – link to program listing
The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality and Capitalism, by Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian (Stanford University Press, 2023): Thursday, 27 June, 2024, FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall) – link to program listing
The Dollar: How the US Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina, by Ariel Wilkis and Mariana Luzzi (University of New Mexico Press, 2023) – Friday, 28 June, 2024, FG042 – Foundation Building Ground Floor (University Concert Hall) – link to program listing
The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World, by Allison J. Pugh (Princeton University Press, 2024) – Friday, 28 June, 2024, FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall) – link to program listing
How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change, by Jens Beckert (in German by Suhrkamp, 2024, in English by Polity Press, 2024) – 28 June, 2024, FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall) – link to program listing
Social Sciences for the Real World
Roundtable 1 – What role for social science academics in tackling the climate emergency?
Link to program: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/4988/session/110162
16:15-17:45 Saturday, 29 June, 2024, FB028 – Foundation Building Basement (University Concert Hall)
Abstract
Academics have been said to be living a “double reality” (Thierry et al 2023). On the one hand, academics are aware of the existential nature of the threats posed by climate change. On the other, they are, for the most part, silent on the climate emergency in their teaching, research, publications, and public engagement. What does it take to break such “climate silence” (Scoville and McCumber 2023), and to do what? Some, like climate scientist Michael Mann, call for those who have an audience to use that privilege to raise awareness and trigger action. Others, like Latour, have called on academics to support all who are striving to live back “down to Earth”, by working with them rather than telling them what to do (Latour 2018).
Moderator: Dr Janina Grabs, University of Basel
Academic participants:
- Dr. Laura Horne, Roskilde University
- Dr. Fergus Green, University College London
- Dr. Andrew Jackson, University College Dublin
Practitioner participants:
- Dr. Julien Etienne, independent consultant
- Dr. Alison Hough, Head of the Access to Justice Observatory at the Environmental Justice Network of Ireland
Roundtable 2 – What should be regulation’s role in the Anthropocene?
Link to program: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/4988/session/110163
Abstract
Regulation has been an enabler of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) that has put Earth on its current path of growing uninhabitability. In spite of calls to rethink regulation and policy design on the basis of planetary boundaries (Parker and Haines 2018; Tsermer et al. 2019), regulatory scholarship and regulatory practice remain dominated by the same tropes of the past decades: economism (Short 2023), risk-based frameworks, technological neutrality, etc. Meanwhile, the rapidly multiplying extremes of a broken climate and crumbling biodiversity have begun wiping out decades of progress on housing, working conditions, public health, food security, all of which are regulated issues.
Moderator: Julien Etienne, independent policy consultant
Academic participants:
- Prof Megan Bowman, King’s College London
- Dr Janina Grabs, University of Basel
Practitioner participants:
- Dr Larry O’Connell, Director of the National Economic and Social Council
- Dr Desmond O’Mahony, Scientific Officer at the Environment Protection Agency
- Vincent Murray, Director for Limerick Planning, Environment and Place-Making
Program
The up-to-date program is online: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/4988/program
A PDF program can be downloaded here (up to date as of June 6, 2024 – the online program above is the most up-to-date).
A few important points:
- When viewing the program, note the “calendar view” and “list view” buttons on the top right – the list view is much easier to navigate.
- Note the “Track” menu item on top – this allows you to filter the program by theme track, so you can just see events for your network, for example.
- If you sign in (top right corner), you can bookmark events you would like to attend to create your own custom schedule.
- You can download a pdf of the program. You can set the filters at the top (track and bookmarks) so this pdf file will only show the sessions you have chosen.
Local Organizing Committee
2024 Limerick organizing committee
- Prof. Tony Dundon (chair)
- Dr. Tish Gibbons
- Prof. Noreen Heraty
- Dr. Jonathan Lavelle
- Dr. Caroline Murphy
- Dr. Michelle O’Sullivan
- Prof. Aidan Regan (School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe), University College Dublin)
- Dr. Lorraine Ryan
- Dr. Majka Ryan
All members, unless otherwise noted, are in the Work & Employment Studies Department, Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick.
Featured Speakers
Joseph Wong
Michelle Holder
Erin A. Cech