Fri 15th
15:30 - 17:00 |
Room G317
Newman Building |
"Policy Experts and the War of Ideas in America and Europe"
- John L Campbell, Professor of Political Economy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College, USAJohn L. Campbell is a Professor of Political Economy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Professor of Sociology, Dartmouth College, USA. His research & teaching interests include Political, Economic, and Comparative Sociology, Institutional Analysis & Globalization.
Current Research
• Knowledge Regimes and Comparative Political Economy:
Where do the ideas come from over which policy makers fight? Political sociologists and political scientists know surprisingly little about this. To answer this question, this project examines the development and operation of knowledge regimes in the United States, France, Germany and Denmark over the last twenty years. A knowledge regime is a national field of policy research organizations (e.g., think tanks, government research units) that generates and disseminates policy analyses and recommendations. This project pays special attention to how change in the surrounding political-economic environment has affected knowledge regimes and whether the organizations that constitute them have grown more or less similar to each other since the late 1980s. Data are being collected through in-depth interviews with leaders from a variety of policy research organizations in each country as well as documents from each organization. The project is funded by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-0813633) and is affiliated with the Social Science Research Council in New York City.
• Nationalism and the Political Economy of Small States:
Why do small and often culturally homogeneous advanced capitalist countries tend to be especially successful in today's global economy? This project examines the proposition that their success stems in part from the fact that they have developed strong national identities (based on common linguistic, ethnic and religious characteristics) and, in turn, institutional capacities for manoeuvring successfully in an increasingly volatile international economy. The importance of national identity and the nationalism more generally has been neglected by most economic sociologists and comparative political economists. Quantitative analysis of OECD data as well as detailed historical case studies of a few OECD countries are used to develop and test the argument. Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland are featured cases.
• Roots of the U.S. Financial Crisis:
The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst economic catastrophe to hit the United States since the Great Depression eighty years ago. What caused it? This project tackles this question. It shows that a long string of regulatory decisions stretching back to the 1980's created the institutional conditions that set the stage for the crisis. Once these conditions were in place, a collapse of the housing market triggered a chain reaction that tore rapidly through the financial services industry and brought it — and the entire economy – to its knees. These regulatory decisions involved government officials as well as private actors who were responsible for monitoring the industry’s operation.
Recent Publications:
• Campbell, John L. and Ove K. Pederson. 2011. "Knowledge Regimes and Comparative Political Economy." Pp 167-90 in Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, edited by Daniel Béland and Robert Cox. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, John L. 2010. "Neoliberalism in Crisis: Regulatory Roots of the U.S. Financial Meltdown." Research in the Sociology of Organizations 30B:65-101.
• Campbell, John L. 2010. "Institutional Reproduction and Change." Pp. 87-115 in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis, edited by Glenn Morgan, John L. Campbell, Colin Crouch, Ove K. Pedersen, and Richard Whitley. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, John L. 2010. "Neoliberalism's Penal and Debtor States: A Rejoinder to Löic Wacquant." Theoretical Criminology 14(1)59-73.
• Campbell, John L. and John A. Hall. 2010. "Defending the Gellnerian Premise: Denmark in Historical and Comparative Context." Nations and Nationalism 16(1)89-107.
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