Center for Organizational Research (COR)

A talk of interest to the COR community…

Professor Kate Brown, MIT

“Chernobyl in the Age of the Anthropocene”

Date and Time: March 4, 2019 | 2:00 PM-3:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1010

Kate Brown is an award-winning historian of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (W.W. Norton) is forthcoming in 2019 . Her previous book, Plutopia, won seven academic prizes. She splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dear COR colleagues,

Please join us for a colloquium with Professor Kathrin Sele (Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland)

“When the Food you Order Ends Up Ordering You: A Rhythmanalysis Perspective on Temporal Order(ing)”

February 22, 2019
12:00-1:15pm
SBSG 1321

RSVP by February 15, 2019 to cor@uci.edu
Lunch will be provided

Abstract: Organizing is a matter of time, but could we see it as a matter of rhythms? Building on the biological notion of entrainment, existing research suggests that rhythms should be accounted for when studying how organizations synchronize their activities and (re)produce order. However, rhythms tend to be portrayed as something that organizations, industries, or the economic environment at large just have. Accordingly, they are conceptualized as entities or relatively stable organizational features. Following a larger turn toward temporal aspects and the subjective nature of time in organization and management studies, we advocate to study rhythms as a relative rather than an absolute concept and as something that organizations “do”. We build on Henri Lefebvre (1999; 2004) who defines rhythms as “movement and differences within repetition” to capture their role in the continuous enactment and reproduction of social order. This rhythmanalysis perspective enables us to study rhythms as “lived” and to approach the temporal unfolding of practices as rhythmic performances. To understand how rhythms “order” practices and thus become a source of social order empirically, we draw on an ethnographic study of household food collectives in Finland. The results of our study suggest that the everyday performance of the different practices that make up these food collectives are characterized by the flow, beat, and regularity of rhythms that overlap, exist in parallel, and at times, collide. We show how biological, material and idealistic aspects embedded in human action nurture and influence the rhythms at play leading to enhancement (eurythmia) and/or disruption (arrhythmia). Finally, we elucidate how food collectives deal with this polyrhythmicity by introducing what we call embodied qualities of rhythmic engagement that are necessary for continuous social order and, hence, the everyday ordering of practices.

Bio: Kathrin Sele is an Assistant Professor in Organization and Management at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on organizational routines and their role in innovation and strategy making with a particular focus on sociomaterial and temporal aspects as well as on discursive practices and rhetorical strategies and their role in emergence and legitimation processes of new technologies, research paradigms, and strategies. For her PhD, she conducted a 3-year ethnographic study at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich based on which she recently published a study that elucidates the generative nature of routine interactions. After completing her PhD at St. Gallen University in 2012, Kathrin was an assistant professor at the Toulouse School of Management in France. During her stay at UCI, Kathrin will be working with Professor Martha Feldman at the School of Ecology.

A talk of interest to COR community…

“Borrowing Credibility: Global Banks and Monetary Regimes.”

Professor Jana Grittersova
University of California, Riverside

Friday, January 25, 2019

2:00-3:30pm

Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

*Graduate students are encouraged to meet with Prof. Grittersova immediately following her talk in SSPB 5226, 3:30-4pm.*

Abstract:

Nations with credible monetary regimes borrow at lower interest rates in international markets and are less likely to suffer speculative attacks and currency crises. Whereas scholars typically attribute credibility to either domestic institutions or international agreements, I argue that when reputable multinational banks, headquartered in Western Europe or North America, open branches and subsidiaries within a nation, they can enhance its monetary credibility. Such multinational banks enhance credibility in several ways. First, they promote financial transparency in the local financial system. Second, they improve the quality of banking regulation and supervision in host countries. Finally, the banks serve as private lenders of last resort. Reputable multinational banks provide an enforcement mechanism, ensuring that publicized economic policies will be carried out. I examine actual changes in government behavior in nations trying to gain legitimacy in international financial markets and the ways international perceptions of these nations change because of the presence of multinational banks. I test my credibility theory by combining statistical analyses of more than eighty emerging market economies over the period from 1995 to 2009 with comparative case studies of credibility building in Estonia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Argentina, and Ukraine, as well as the global financial crisis of 2008 drawing upon 120 field interviews. The book illuminates the complex interactions between multinational banks and national policymaking that characterize the process of financial globalization and reveals the importance of market confidence in a world of mobile capital.

Bio:  Jana Grittersová is an associate professor of political science and a cooperating faculty in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia. She has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, and has worked at the European Commission in Brussels and the central bank of Slovakia. Her published and ongoing research focuses on the sources of government reputation in international markets, political perceptions of monetary policy, the impact of interest groups on monetary and financial policies, global banking, the role of non-market coordination in financial-system development, and the political economy of reform. Her book Borrowing Credibility: Global Banks and Monetary Regimes (University of Michigan Press, 2017) explores how countries with new histories, failed economic policies, and weak institutions establish monetary credibility in international financial markets. She has received grants from the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, the Russel Sage Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Political Science Association, and the British Chevening award, among others.

Dear COR colleagues,

***Friday, January 18, 2019, 12-1:30pm, SBSG 1321

Erin Lockwood, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UCI

Discussants: Professor Bill Maurer (Social Sciences), Professor David Min (Law)

Title: Regulating Risk: Explaining the Unchecked Growth of Financial Derivatives

Abstract: This paper begins from the question of how the market for financial derivatives was allowed to grow as large as it did on the eve of the crisis in the absence of public regulation. The answer, I contend, can be found in the history of how derivatives markets evolved in close relationship with changing regulatory views of risk: what it is, who are the legitimate bearers of risk, and which actors deserve public protection from downside risk. Drawing on public regulatory documents, speeches, and testimony about derivatives from the early 20th century to the early 21st century, I trace the process through which derivatives came to be seen as legitimate financial products and the derivatives market as capable of self-regulation. The resulting analytical narrative shows that regulatory views of risk change in response to financial innovation, shifts in beliefs about the appropriate relationship between states and financial markets, and financial crisis. Regulatory understandings of risk have shaped how regulators have interpreted and regulated derivatives: financial innovations, which commodify risk itself. This analysis has important implications for understanding the regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis and directs our attention to the conditions of possibility for future, potentially more effective, change in financial governance.

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by January 11 to receive the paper to read before the workshop.

Light lunch will be provided.

Best wishes,

Nina Bandelj and Melissa Mazmanian
COR Co-Directors