The WINIR Symposium on Corporations features keynotes by Simon Deakin (University of Cambridge, UK), Colin Mayer (University of Oxford, UK), Ugo Pagano (University of Siena, Italy) and Philip Pettit (Princeton University, USA & Australian National University, Australia).
The First WINIR Symposium was held in Lugano, the largest town in Ticino, the southernmost canton of the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. Surrounded by the mountains of the Southern Alps, the town lies in a bay on the northern side of the beautiful Lake Lugano.
WINIR SYMPOSIUM ON THE CORPORATION (LUGANO, SWITZERLAND, APRIL 2015) — Questions of corporate governance and corporate responsibility have been heightened by a number of corporate scandals and other events leading up to the financial crash of 2008. In the meantime, philosophers and lawyers have been questioning the very meaning of corporate agency and responsibility, while progress by economists in the theory of the firm is widely perceived to have slowed.
WINIR-WSES WORKSHOP ON THE FUTURE OF ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY (MADISON, WISCONSIN, APRIL 2025) — In its prime, economic sociology was premised on the moral and communal contours of economic life, with research centered on questions of embeddedness, relational work, and performativity. But in recent years, the limits of these perspectives have become apparent. Many now rehearse the same tired stories of social capital or accumulate still more evidence of our “financialized” lives.
WINIR WORKSHOP ON REGULATION & THE COMMON GOOD (SHEFFIELD, UK, OCTOBER 2023) — For better or for worse, in a range of policy areas, justifications for regulation are framed in the language of market failure or its counterpart government failure. By contrast, the point of departure of much socio-legal scholarship is the recognition that societal issues cannot be reduced to this dichotomy.
WINIR WORKSHOP ON POLYCENTRICITY, MARKETS & FIRMS (ONLINE, DECEMBER 2021) — Markets have been associated with polycentricity since Michael Polanyi formulated the concept, and this connection was at the heart of the Bloomington School’s analysis of competition in public service industries. Despite this long history, markets have received surprisingly limited attention by scholars of polycentricity during its renaissance over the past 20 years. And in the course of this renaissance, very little attention has focused on firms and other kinds of corporate entities.
WINIR WORKSHOP ON REPUGNANT BEHAVIOURS (ONLINE, FEBRUARY 2021) — Formally introduced in economics by Nobel laureate Alvin Roth, the concept of repugnance arises in the debate among philosophers (e.g., Elizabeth Anderson, Michael Sandel, Debra Satz) and other social scientists (e.g., Kristie Blevins, Amitai Etzioni, Kimberly Krawiec, Amartya Sen, Philip Tetlock) about how and why moral concerns, taboos and sacred values place, or ought to place, limits on market transactions.
WINIR PANEL ON MEASURING INSTITUTIONS (ONLINE, MAY 2022) — The statement “institutions matter” has become almost a mantra in today’s academic and policy debate. In recent years, many studies have attempted to substantiate this claim empirically. But despite a substantial scholarly literature in economics, law, political science and sociology devoted to this topic, the question of how we can or should measure different kinds of institutions across space and time remains elusive.
WINIR PANEL ON LAW & POLITICAL ECONOMY (ONLINE, JANUARY 2022) — Law & Political Economy (LPE) is hailed as a new analytical project that situates the study of law within a broad political economy tradition, overcoming the perceived shortcomings of the economic analysis of law, in particular its tendency to abstract from power relations and focus on efficiency rather than social justice. The LPE movement began in leading US law schools but has since spread to law schools in Europe, South America and elsewhere.
WINIR PANEL ON THE GREAT ENRICHMENT (ONLINE, DECEMBER 2020) — What was more important for the Great Enrichment? Institutions or ideas? How much did the institutions associated with the financial and commercial revolutions matter? And how much did the grand ideas associated with liberalism matter? These are some of the most important, and indeed some of the most difficult, questions that institutionalists and historians must contend with.