Geoffrey Ingham is Emeritus Reader in Sociology and Political Economy, and a Life Fellow at Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge (UK). His work in economic sociology and political economy focuses on the institutional nature of money and capitalism. He is the author of Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development (Macmillan, 1984), The Nature of Money (Polity, 2004), Concepts of Money: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Economics, Sociology and Political Science (Edward Elgar, 2005) and Capitalism: With a New Postscript on the Financial Crisis (2nd ed., Polity, 2011). A festschrift was recently published in his honour by Jocelyn Pixley and G. C. Harcourt (eds), Financial Crises and the Nature of Capitalist Money: Mutual Developments from the Work of Geoffrey Ingham (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and the Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University (USA). His research focuses on social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions, and the economic and legal history of the Middle East. He is the author of Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press, 1995), Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press, 2004) and The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2011). He is the President of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies, as well as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association. Professor Kuran is an Honorary President of WINIR and served on the WINIR Scientific Quality Committee.
Katharina Pistor is Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia Law School (USA), Director of the School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation, and a member of the Board of Directors of the European Corporate Governance Institute. An expert on the impact of globalisation on the transformation of legal institutions in the areas of finance, property rights and transnational regulation, she is Principal Investigator of the “Global Finance and Law Initiative” funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She is the author of Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal About Legal Systems and Economic Development Around the World (with Curtis J. Milhaupt, University of Chicago Press, 2008). In 2012 she received the Max Planck Research Award. In 2014 she was awarded the Allen & Overy Law Prize for her article “A Legal Theory of Finance” (J. Comp. Econ.). Professor Pistor is President of WINIR.
Barry Smith is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Julian Park Chair of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo (USA), and Director of the National Center of Ontological Research. With groundbreaking contributions in numerous areas of theoretical and applied ontology, his research currently focuses on the application of ontology in biomedicine and biomedical informatics. He is the author and editor of over 400 works, including John Searle (Cambridge University Press, 2003), The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality (co-edited with David Mark and Isaac Ehrlich, Open Court, 2008) and Applied Ontology: An Introduction (co-edited with Katherine Munn, Ontos, 2008). In 2002 he received the Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2010 he was awarded the University of Turin’s first Paolo Bozzi Prize in Ontology.
Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT (USA). A prominent contributor to the literature on institutional change and labour market institutions, she is the author of How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-editor of Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (with Wolfgang Streeck, Oxford University Press, 2005) and Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power (with James Mahoney, Cambridge University Press, 2010). In 2003 she received the Max Planck Research Award. How Institutions Evolve was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association in 2005, and the Mattei Dogan Award of the International Political Science Association. Professor Thelen is an Honorary President of WINIR