The New Political Economy Initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIM-K), hosted the first edition of the Economy & Society Winter School as part of its Social Structures of the Economy Research Cluster from December 9-21, 2024, at IIM Kozhikode.
The New Political Economy Initiative is aimed to nudge sociology and social science scholarship in India and the Global South to study how the material aspects and economic facets of life are produced and reproduced through social and political processes, and be attentive to the mutual embeddedness and symbiotic relationships between markets, states, societies, and cultures.
Similarly, there is a lack of academic studies that examine how shifts in institutions shape and influence the context and results of economic actions. One of the reasons for this absence is the lack of courses/papers/modules in economic sociology in most undergraduate and master’s programmes in the country. The Economy & Society Winter School aims to make up for this absence and in the process incubate a scholarly community in the Global South locales to take these new approaches to the study of economy and society more formally in their own research and work.
In this winter school, many scholars from different parts of the world actively participated to give their lectures. Simone Polillo, professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia in the United States was one among them. He works on globalisation, markets, finance, and expertise, with a particular focus on financial economics. His work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and the Review of Social Economy, among others. He has written two books: Conservatives vs. Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict (Stanford, 2013), and The Ascent of Market Efficiency: Finance that Cannot be Proven (Cornell, 2020).
He is currently working on a historical sociology of crisis and economic exceptions, both in theoretical terms, and with a more substantive focus on how Italy’s Central Bank developed new forms of crisis expertise after the Second War World to navigate and shape this consequential period in the country’s economic and political development.
Excerpts from an interview with THE WEEK:
Q/ You said that in the future we can't imagine economic policies without considering the poor. Can you explain this in detail?
A/ We cannot imagine economic policies without considering the poor and marginalised for many reasons. Some can be characterised as political: the poor and marginalised always mobilise against systems of oppression and exploitation, form social movements to put pressure on the status quo, and react in myriad ways to the harms done to them by the market. This point was forcefully made by political economist and anthropologist Karl Polanyi in the 1940s and continues to hold today. Ignoring the poor and marginalised means creating an economic and political system that is fundamentally unstable. But there are other reasons too that can be understood in a more economic than strictly political way. The poor and marginalised contribute enormous value to the economy through their work, and this means that creating more inclusive financial and economic systems that truly harness this potential will make the economy as a whole stronger and more robust, as was as fairer and more humane.
Q/ Sociological implications in economic policies are getting more importance now. How the world reached this point, and what persuaded the world to consider this sociological side in a serious manner?
A/ There are important historical reasons why attention to the sociological dimensions of the economy is becoming more central to public debate. The 2007-08 global financial crisis put in question the neoliberal consensus that had informed economic policy over the previous three decades. But new forms of knowledge are yet to be fully consolidated. What we know is that economists as suppliers of policy-relevant expertise have lost some of their credibility. We also know that important governing agencies (like certain central banks) and private sector organisations and firms have started including environmental and social governance indicators as part of their economic and financial strategies. We see this, though in different degrees and through different configurations, in places like the EU and China. And third, we see the emergence of new forms of cooperation and articulation of shared interests and concerns among countries in the Global South. Finally, during the COVID pandemic, it became clear how consequential government interventions into people’s economic lives can be. Rich but extremely market oriented countries like the United States implemented temporary forms of universal basic income. This all amounts to the possibility of a reframing of what we consider economic and what we consider to be on the outside of the economy. Sociologists know that the “economic” is not something that corresponds to a fixed reality out there—to an economy that the “economic” simply describes. Rather, we know that the very framings and calculations that we devise to describe and manage the economic, in important ways, actually turn the economic into a reality. As the social becomes more central to the economic, even if for relatively short periods marked by crisis and emergency, this opening creates new possibilities for political imagination.
Q/ What is your opinion on Kerala model of development?
A/ I am not an expert on the Kerala model, but my impression as an interested and concerned social scientist is that the Kerala model is about engaging the people in the very processes through which the “economic” is understood, framed, and constituted, thereby creating new forms of participation and cooperation that better prepare policy-makers face economic and political challenges. Among other things, the capacity of the Kerala government to respond to and manage crisis (like it did during the pandemic, or in the case of disastrous floods) is enhanced by the political legitimacy it gains through democratic engagement. The fact that Kerala achieves this despite scarcity of resources make it an original and exemplary model.
Q/ But, conflict, and discrimination towards women, children and the poor, continue. How can we expect an equal world for all and how can persuade them all to such a world?
A/ I wish I had an answer to this question! Let’s frame it in terms of we can move away from military buildup and conflict towards more peaceful and inclusive ways of mobilising society’s resources. One way of doing this is through preparing more flexible and dynamic societal responses to crisis, repurposing the tools and language of war towards the collective solution of urgent societal problems. For too long, preparation for crisis, response to crisis, management of crisis have been used to further exploit and oppress. Devising new ways to make crisis-response a programme of government that protects rather than harms, and includes rather than excludes and marginalises, can become a crucial way to address discrimination and violence.
Q/ Your opinion on this special session at IIM Kozhikode?
A/ I gave the first three lectures at the IIM winter school to offer a broad overview of the field of economic sociology: how it is different from political economy for its focus on social relations and social networks; what methodologies it draws from and develops, specifically concerning social network analysis; and new developments that focus more sharply on the cultural construction of the economy through devices and representations.
