Power and Influence of Economists. Contributions to the Social Studies of Economics

Livres

Le nouveau livre co-édité par les membres de l’OBELIS Thierry Rossier et Pierre Benz est désormais disponible en open access.

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledge and influence which has led economics to be both a source and beneficiary of widespread power and influence.

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La sélectivité sociale du nouveau Conseil communal de Lausanne (2021)

Article

Par Roberto Di Capua, Université de Lausanne

Composition partisane et renouvellement

La nouvelle composition du Conseil communal de Lausanne à l’issue des élections du 7 mars 2021 témoigne d’une relative stabilité politique en termes de rapports de force entre le centre-gauche et le centre-droite. On observe toutefois certains changements au sein de ces blocs. On note par exemple que les Vert·e·s gagnent 7 sièges de plus qu’il y a cinq ans (de 17 à 24 sièges) au détriment des socialistes qui en perdent 4 (de 33 à 29 sièges). Ensemble à Gauche gagnent deux sièges supplémentaires (de 11 à 13 sièges). À droite, le PLR conserve ses 21 sièges mais l’UDC lausannoise en perd 5 (de 12 à 7 sièges). Les Verts’libéraux font leur entrée au Conseil communal de Lausanne avec leur propre liste et 6 élu·es dont 4 sortant·es anciennement membres de la liste Le Centre (PDC) qui disparaît du Conseil suite à ces élections (Figure 1).

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The transformation of professors’ careers: standardization, hybridization, and acceleration?

Article

Article de Pierre Benz, Felix Bühlmann et André Mach dans la revue Higher Education.

Abstract

Over the recent decades, the turn to managerial governance has thoroughly transformed the European university systems and, by extension, the careers of university professors. Scholars postulated that professors’ careers have undergone an increasing formalization, that disciplinary careers have been hybridized, and that new modes of selection and recruitment (through assistant professorship) have been introduced. This article, based on a case study of the EPFL Lausanne, one of the leading European technical universities, aims to understand these changes by conducting a sequence analytical study of the actual trajectories of professors. By studying the careers of 351 professors who were nominated between 1969 and 2010 at the EPFL, we first develop a typology of professors’ careers. We distinguish between “direct careers,” “seniority careers,” “conversion careers,” and “parallel careers.” We then examine, based on a series of binomial logistic regression models, how career types vary according to the nomination cohort, the discipline, and the recruitment mode. Our results show that slower “seniority careers” within academia have become more important in recent cohorts, that disciplinary logics still shape professors’ careers, and that new recruitment mechanisms, such as assistant professorship, do not necessarily lead to accelerated careers. This article contributes to the literature by showing that beyond the analysis of the institutional setting of academic careers, it is also important to study their actual progression.

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How to Study Elites’ “International Capital”? Some Methodological Reflections

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Chapitre de Felix Bühlmann dans le livre « Researching Elites and Power » de François Denord, Mikael Palme et Bertrand Réau

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the methodological implication of the use of “international capital” or “cosmopolitan capital” in quantitative studies of national elites and national fields of power. In the wake of the globalization and transnationalization of formerly “national” elite fields, these concepts have become important to understand how international networks, international exchanges and international migration have come to reconfigure national elites. Following an overview of the conceptual approaches and uses of international capital, we discuss some definitional issues and show how international capital relates to other forms of capital in Bourdieu’s framework. In order to expose the problems and pitfalls of the quantitative measurement of “international capital” we rely a on string of studies on the economic elites, on top bankers and on academic elites in Switzerland and other European countries. We rehearse some methodological challenges related to the concept of international capital and discuss how its value can be best studied.

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