Institute News

On April 1, Isabell Stamm took up a professorship in the sociology of organizations at the Technical University of Berlin after having headed the “Business, Ownership, and Family Wealth” research group at the MPIfG from 2021 to March 2025. more

Dustin Voss, a senior researcher at the MPIfG, was awarded the Best Paper Prize by the journal Socio-Economic Review in April 2025. In “Sectors Versus Borders: Interest Group Cleavages and Struggles Over Corporate Governance in the Age of Asset Management,” published in 2024 in Socio-Economic Review 22 (3): 1071–94, Voss examines the role of global asset managers such as BlackRock in the context of a reform to co-determination in Germany. more

Matthias Thiemann, Professor of European Public Policy at Sciences Po (Paris) and this year’s MPIfG Scholar in Residence, will give a three-part lecture series entitled “Technocrats, State Agency, and the Rise and Continued Expansion of the Shadow Banking System” during his three-month research stay in Cologne (April to June 2025). In his lectures, Thiemann will analyze how technocrats and government agencies have influenced the rise of shadow banking more

The MPIfG and Universidad Central de Chile (UCEN) have signed a new cooperation agreement aimed at intensifying academic exchange between the two institutions. It builds on a Max Planck Partner Group established in 2020 at UCEN which draws to a close at the end of this year, continuing. The new agreement continues this cooperation and institutionalizing the connection between the two partners. more

Tobias Arbogast successfully defended his dissertation, “Navigating by the Stars: The Role of ‘Natural Rates’ in Monetary Policy,” at the University of Cologne at the end of March. In his study, Arbogast examines the significance of the “natural rates” of unemployment, interest, and output for independent central banks’ monetary policy. 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

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 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

Over a century ago, Georg Simmel noted that the need for secrecy unites the nobility with criminal gangs in their quest for power and resources. This insight finds its most vivid contemporary expression in the offshore financial system, where trillions in private household wealth – totaling at least 12 percent of global GDP – circulate largely outside the rule of law. The talk will offer a sociological analysis of the agency and mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, drawing on both a long-term ethnography of the offshore system and Big Data network analysis of its characteristics – including its hidden vulnerabilities. more

The main cause of the climate crisis is the burning of fossil fuels. This talk will turn the question around and aim at identifying the social problems that were meant to be solved by burning fossil fuels, looking in particular at critical junctures in human history. more

What is trust and how should it be studied? In his talk, Gil Eyal argues against conventional approaches to studying trust in the social sciences and proposes an alternate strategy focused on “trust methods.” Instead of treating trust as a static property that can be measured by close-format survey questions, he conceptualizes trusting as a skillful act that is highly context-dependent and attuned to temporal variables such as speed, duration sequence, and timing. To illustrate this approach, Eyal draws on interviews with long Covid patients focusing on how they account for who, what, when, and how they distinguish responsible trust from blind faith. more

We live in an age of migration, and of migration control. Global mobility and the political responses it has engendered have impelled governments in many countries to strengthen border policing and crack down on unauthorized migrants. These practices offer a vantage point for analyzing the development and operation of state power. In her talk, Kimberly Morgen will discuss the extensive buildup of border policing and immigration enforcement in the United States since the start of the 2000s as an example of state expansion. She will analyze how and why governing power has been mobilized and deployed in this way, and what larger ramifications this has for how we theorize and study states. more