Keynote Lecture

Neil Fligstein is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California. He is also the Director of the Center of Culture, Organization, and Politics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California. He is the author of numerous papers and books including The Transformation Of Corporate Control (Harvard University Press, 1990); The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of 21st Century Capitalist Societies (Princeton, 2001), Euroclash: The European Union, European Identity, and the Future of Europe (Oxford, 2008), and A Theory of Fields (with Doug McAdam, Oxford, 2012). He has written extensively in the fields of economic sociology, organizations, political sociology, social stratification, and European economic and political integration.

Neil Fligstein is most well-known for his work on the sociology of markets. His work combines elements of political economy, organizational theory, and field theory, to propose how to think about the dynamics of markets. He is currently working on studying different aspects of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. He is also engaged in a project exploring how financialization has affected household attitudes towards debt and investment.

In his works, he embraces long-term financial transformations and, inspired by the work of Alfred Chandler, seeks to inscribe major economic transformations in the dynamics of large American companies. He is also attentive to the historical, economic and institutional frameworks in which the actors in the companies evolve, and the way in which the positions of the actors in the fields place them in a set of power relations which form the basis of economic relations on the various markets.

Neil Fligstein is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, and a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio.