Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Are International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South? I argue powerful actors structure markets in ways exacerbating climate change. This works through the IMF's imposition of market coercion—specifically, currency devaluation, global openness and fiscal pressures from austerity. Countries respond to these conditions through extractivist strategies and productive growth to increase exports. To investigate this relationship, I use instrumental variables and difference-in-difference analyses for 130 countries between 1980 and 2018. Results show emissions increase from structural lending conditions but not when conditions afford borrowers more flexibility. This effect takes several years to manifest. While there is no single sector responsible for this change, agriculture, land-use changes and, to some extent, industry, have notable emission effects following an IMF program. Global South emissions are partly rooted in imposed austerity which raises important political questions about the climate crisis, development and international finance.

AbstractAmerican families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families suffered the preponderance of income losses from the crisis, although the crisis shifted income losses towards more privileged working families. In fact, middle-income working families now have the same level of income precarity as the working poor, and families in the top income quintile continue to have elevated precarity levels. This result indicates that the middle class continues to bear a growing share of economic risk and that all working families are experiencing heightened insecurity in the post-crisis era.

AbstractOrganizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the "society of organizations" in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizations that contrasts with Perrow's idea of individuals being "absorbed" by organizations. Despite this hollowing out, there is a persistence of concentrated economic power or "concentration without centralization." Organizational power in this landscape is increasingly exercised at a distance, not only geographically but also in the sense of moving across organizational boundaries and through technologies of valuation. Three bodies of research exemplify different types of power at a distance. (a) Research on global production networks shows how power travels across geographic and network distances. (b) Research on financialization and its consequences shows how power is mediated by frames and metrics. (c) Emerging research on big data and Artificial Intelligence shows how power is encoded into seemingly neutral technologies and made to seem inevitable. This work helps to update the sociology of organizations and opens up new research questions.

Abstract
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer–employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 European countries. We find a strong asymmetry in the effect of upswings and downswings in finance on earnings inequality, a weak, if any, mitigating effect of capital requirements on finance's contribution to inequality, and a restructuring but no absolute effect of the bonus cap on financiers' earnings. We suggest that while rising financiers' wages increase inequality in upswings, they are resilient in downswings and thus downswings do not contribute to a symmetric decline in inequality.