Institute News

A new book edited by Benjamin Braun and Kai Koddenbrock, Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance (Routledge, 2023), is the latest title to be included in the MPIfG Books series. In an analysis of how global financialized capitalism operates and reproduces itself, the book explores the financial sector’s remarkable ability to maintain its dominance through even the most severe economic crises. more

In January 2023, Andreas Eisl successfully defended his doctoral dissertation at Sciences Po, Paris. In “The Politics of Budgetary Constraints: An Ideational Explanation for the Variation in National Fiscal Frameworks in the Eurozone” he explores these sets of fiscal rules and institutions and the significant and persistent variation that exists in their stringency, design, and timing between different countries in the eurozone. more

Isabell Stamm, leader of the Business, Ownership, and Family Wealth research group at the MPIfG, has been appointed as the deputy chair of the Kohli Foundation for Sociology‘s board of directors. Founded in 2022 by the German sociologist Martin Kohli, the independent private foundation is dedicated to promoting sociology and its interdisciplinary connections and raising public awareness of sociology’s potential. more

The Sociological Review has named Lisa Suckert’s “The Coronavirus and the Temporal Order of Capitalism: Sociological Observations and the Wisdom of a Children’s Book,” published in the journal in 2021, its “Journal Article of the Year.” The jury praised Suckert‘s approach to examining temporality, with one jury member describing it as “the most imaginative and insightful commentary I have read arising from the COVID-19 pandemic; a sociological parable for modern times.” more

In December 2022, Annika Holz was awarded her doctorate by the University of Cologne. In her dissertation, “Politische Konditionalitäten in der EU: Vom Aufstieg neuer Governance-Instrumente in den Europäischen Struktur- und Investitionsfonds,” she explores the transformation of EU cohesion policy from a convergence-orientated redistributive policy into an instrument for the coordination of economic policies. more

Arianna Tassinari more

Düzgün Arslantaş more

Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer, Erik Neimanns more

Lisa Suckert, wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, plädiert für eine differenziertere Wahrnehmung der Brexit-Kampagne und der ökonomischen Identität Großbritanniens. Doch auch die EU sei gefragt: Sie müsse sich verändern, um die Bedürfnisse von Austrittsbefürwortern innerhalb der EU besser zu verstehen, gegenzusteuern und den europäischen Zusammenhalt zu stärken. more

Seit jeher versuchen Menschen, die Zukunft vorherzusehen: aus Träumen, aus den Sternen oder mithilfe von Karten und Würfeln. Heute scheinen die Bedingungen für verlässliche Vorhersagen dank großer Datenbanken und computergestützter Auswertung besser denn je. Akos Rona-Tas warnt jedoch vor zu viel Vertrauen in die neuen Prognosetechniken. Der Soziologieprofessor an der University of California San Diego, der im Sommersemester 2018 Scholar in Residence am Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Köln war, befasst sich mit den Schattenseiten moderner Wahrsagung. more

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From Occupy Wall Street and the Panama Papers to the Russian oligarchs, their yachts and real estate – in recent years, the rich and super-rich as well as the finance industry and the services they offer to the rich have become the subject of much public and academic debate. more

Do your own research! Type “NESARA GESARA” and see what you learn. Or try “OPPT UCC” instead. You will access ideals of sovereignty, emancipation, life, money, and wealth; tutorials on the codes and procedures that are needed in order to subvert the dominant order and lead to financial salvation; and lessons on the spiritual menaces and economic enmities that justify this newly found path. Mixtures of millennialism, esotericism, conspiratorialism, populism, antisemitism, libertarianism, and nationalism can indeed be observed in a number of contemporary movements of economic redemption. These can sometimes find expression in troubling ways: in a cult, perhaps, or in violence,as in the case of “sovereign citizen” extremism. Other times, they translate into innocuous pastimes, mundane skepticism, or dodgy investment schemes. Documenting these practices furthers understanding of the financial element that is at work in the culture of contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse. But it also opens up a promising lead for the anthropology of finance, as it exposes the delirious potentials of ordinary concepts of money, finance, wealth, and value. The case of “OPPT” (One People’s Public Trust) provides a testbed for a critical inquiry into the demons inherent in financial imagination. more

During the 2010s, the European project suffered a series of crises that underlined both a shift in geopolitics as well as the decline of the previous consensus around the single market and the single currency. The decade showed the different attitudes of national elites towards the reigning consensus and the limits of the EU’s macroeconomic regime that was no longer compatible with certain national growth models. more

Today, as the pandemic eases, we might ask what a social politics of inequality will look like in an apparently “new” urban context that, in reality, contains the same public “bads” that existed before. While a “capture” of the city by the rich will continue, it may be that systemic constraints and public anger propel the taming of wealth. more

Karen Shire | University of Duisburg-EssenScholar in Residence Lecture Part 3While the discussion of regulatory pathways in this series of lectures so far has attributed challenges to gaps in international conventions and national/sectoral regulations, in this domain, international rules and normative principles are extensive and widely shared. Moreover, extreme exploitation is not confined to the institutionally thinner labor market contexts of the developing world. The available statistics suggest that a large share of trafficked labor is situated in Europe and occurs between the EU member states.Download SlidesTalk ReferencesDownload Podcast more