Wednesday, April 19, 11:00am-12:00pm ET
Zoom link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/92491232615
Following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, as well as the forced acquisition of Credit Suisse, banks are back in the headlines. This panel considers recent events in light of the flowering of sociological research since the financial crisis of 2008. Sociologists have mapped the networks that tie financial actors together, investigated the institutional structures of banks and regulatory agencies, and studied the materiality of trading floors. Fifteen years after Lehman Brothers, the financial system has come under stress yet again, raising a number of theoretical and policy questions. How do sociological perspectives help illuminate the current situation? What are similarities with and differences to earlier crises? For instance, how have the network dynamics of bank runs changed with the rise of venture capital investors? How does organizational culture at banks help explain recent events, e.g., the downfall of Credit Suisse? This panel brings together six sociologists for an early attempt at making sense of the most recent crisis.
Organizers:
Daniel Beunza
Bayes Business School, City University London
Author: Taking the Floor: Models, Morals, and Management in a Wall Street Trading Room
Princeton University Press, 2019
Pierre-Christian Fink
Visiting Scholar, Harvard University
Author: “Caught between Frontstage and Backstage: The Failure
of the Federal Reserve to Halt Rule Evasion in the Financial Crisis of 1974”
American Sociological Review, 2023
Additional Panelists:
Neil Fligstein, University of California, Berkeley
Author: The Banks Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis
Harvard University Press, 2021
Kim Pernell, University of Texas, Austin
Co-author: “The Hazards of Expert Control: Chief Risk Officers and Risky Derivatives”
American Sociological Review, 2017
Gillian Tett, Financial Times and Provost-Elect of King’s College, Cambridge
Author: Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life
Simon and Schuster, 2021
Matthias Thiemann, Sciences Po
Author: The Growth of Shadow Banking: A Comparative Institutional Analysis
Cambridge University Press, 2018
Cornelia Woll, Hertie School of Governance Berlin
Author: The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparison
Cornell University Press, 2014