Institute News

The MPIfG marked its 40th anniversary this year with a symposium on “Exploring Societies in Transition” on May 15 and 16. The celebrations began on Thursday evening with a lecture by Marion Fourcade (University of California, Berkeley) on how the use of algorithms promotes new forms of social organization and inequality. more

Dustin Voss, a senior researcher at the MPIfG, has received the 2025 Journal Article Prize of the Society of Friends and Former Associates of the MPIfG. The award was presented during the Institute’s 40th anniversary celebrations in May for Voss’s article “Sectors Versus Borders: Interest Group Cleavages and Struggles Over Corporate Governance in the Age of Asset Management,” published in Socio-Economic Review (22 [3]: 1071–94) in 2024. more

June sees the publication by Oxford University Press of  The Game: The Economy of Undocumented Migration from Afghanistan to Europe by Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the MPIfG. Based on her award-winning dissertation, the book offers an in-depth ethnographic insight into the experiences of Afghan refugees en route to Europe.  more

Luuk Schmitz, a senior researcher at the MPIfG, and Timo Seidl, a professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have been awarded the Best Paper Prize 2024 by the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) for “Moving On to Not Fall Behind? Technological Sovereignty and the ‘Geo-Dirigiste’ Turn in EU Industrial Policy” (JEPP 31 [8], 2147–74, 2024). more

Danielle Pullan, a former doctoral researcher at the IMPRS-SPCE, is to join Georgia College & State University, a small liberal arts university in the US, in August as an assistant professor of political science with tenure track. more

For long-term stability, Germany should not only focus on exports, but also strengthen its own domestic market. more

Jens Beckert more

Arianna Tassinari more

Düzgün Arslantaş more

Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer, Erik Neimanns more

40 Jahre MPIfG more

MPIfG at 40 more

MPIfG at 40 more

MPIfG at 40 more

MPIfG at 40 more

The European constitutional navigation of the noughties succeeded in stipulating that European integration had ushered in European society (Article 2 TEU). This choice remains underexplored. In light of current European uncertainty, the lecture explores the meaning and promise of European society. more

In her lecture, Valeria Pulignano introduces a theory of the politics of unpaid labor, advancing our understanding of inequality within the context of precarious work. She establishes a crucial link between unpaid labor’s political dimensions and its role in fueling emerging forms of precarious work that are characterized by persistent inequalities in a context of labor market reforms, societal shifts, and technological changes. She shows how these seemingly disparate elements intertwine, connecting the intricate dynamics of the social system's micro-level components to larger macro-level structural patterns. Advancing the current discussion on how unpaid labor contributes to inequality in precarious work, she will establish the characteristics differentiating employment from self-employment, and how these lead to a revised definition of unpaid labor. She further illustrates that unpaid labor is both shaped by class and serves to reproduce class interests, revealing ongoing changes in welfare, employment, and state institutional policies. Finally, she considers the necessity to establish conditions within the labor market that are conducive to genuinely cultivating and honoring the diversity of human capabilities and actions within labor structures and promoting their manifestation. more

Beliefs about the future shape attitudes, experiences, and priorities in the present. This lecture explores the relationship between democracy and the expected world to come. As it argues, visions of the future are an important resource for democratic politics, as a way to put the present in critical perspective, to aid in the formation of a collective agent, and to consolidate commitment in adversity. Indirectly, they contribute also to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, shaping the exercise of citizenship and the capacity to contend with the flaws of representation. The democratic significance of the imagined future becomes all the more visible in today’s age of skepticism towards future-regarding politics, where speculative modes of thinking run up against the desire for certainty and precision. more

This introductory lecture lays out the main object of study of the lecture series, the shadow banking system, its wider importance for the understanding of the contemporary political economy, and the dominant explanations for its rise as well as its positive and detrimental effects. The shadow banking system – the generation and trading of credit outside of the banking system, financed with short-term deposits – and its rise after WWII, is identified in the contemporary literature as a major factor in the process of financialization that unfolded from the 1970s and in the diffusion and impact of the Transatlantic Financial Crisis as it unfolded from 2007. As such, it is closely linked to the central banks’ rise to the heights of macroeconomic policy and the credit-based growth model more

The second lecture pursues the theme of agency of state actors in an attempt to explain the rise of the shadow banking system in the US by focusing on the establishment of the core market for liquidity provision to the shadow banking system, namely the repo-market in the US after WWII. It introduces the crucial concept of the liquidity triangle between the fiscal agent, the central bank, and private market-makers in order to develop the reasons that drove state actors to lay the foundations for the expansion of the shadow banking system. It documents how the Federal Reserve consciously and against prevalent legal interpretations started to enter into the provision of liquidity to broker dealers via the repo-market. more