Money, Markets, and Governance

Dear all,

Please join us for our last meeting of Money, Markets, and Governance Workshop for the Winter quarter, on coming Tuesday, 3/7, in Social Science Research Building classroom 401, at 5 pm – 6:30pm. 

Whitney Johnson
PhD Candidate,  Sociology, The University of Chicago

Learning to Listen:
Textual Value Devices in Auditory Culture

Discussant:  Alessandra Lembo
Ph.D. Student, Sociology, The University of Chicago

Abstract:  Sound art is a subfield of auditory culture running parallel to art music yet within the organizational domain of galleries and museums. This paper sets out to establish sound art’s tendency toward conceptualism and the contingent reliance on language to communicate these concepts to audiences. Though the data are limited to 79 interviews with practitioners and administrators in auditory culture, as well as 3.5 years of ethnographic observation in New York City and Chicago, the relationships between auditory culture and visual culture have emerged, as well. After a look at the countervailing ideals of concept and form in the gallery arts and in art music, the necessity for textual value devices becomes evident in the subfield of sound art. These devices appear as artist statements, wall text, program notes, grant applications, online platforms, and critical response, constructing value for works that otherwise might be mistaken alternately as music or visual art. Three possible explanations for the linguistic valuation of sound art will be explored: art-historical paths, technical maladaptation, and sensory learning. The last of these has implications for the relationship between the body and value in other fields of cultural economy, as well as for linguistic valuation processes more generally to dominate the sensory perception of social subjects.

Questions about the workshop or accessibility concerns can be addressed to amburkeen {at} uchicago {dot} edu.

Please join us for our next meeting of Money, Markets, and Governance Workshop, which we are pleased to hold in collaboration with the Urban Workshop, on coming Tuesday, 2/21, in Social Science Research Building classroom 106, at 12pm – 1:30pm.
Please note the change in location and time from our usual meetings. 

Kaya Williams
PhD Candidate,  Anthropology, The University of Chicago

Public, Safety, Risk: Captive Logics and Speculative Investments of Pretrial Incarceration in America

Abstract: In the United States criminal justice system, there are three primary forms of incarceration: incarceration as punishment for a crime, incarceration while awaiting the outcome of a case in criminal court, and incarceration while awaiting the outcome of an immigration case. This paper deals with the second of these forms: pretrial incarceration in local jails. Based on ethnographic research conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana from 2011 to 2015, the paper interrogates the logics of public safety and risk at work in U.S. practices of pretrial incarceration; arguing that attempts to combat the growing scale and brutality of American practices of captivity cannot themselves succeed while held captive by these logics. I trace ethnographically two attempts to reduce New Orleans’ reliance on incarceration: first, the introduction of a pretrial risk assessment into pretrial release decisions and second, the attempt to limit the use of commercial bail for municipal offenses. In both cases I examine the ways in which arguments for less incarceration and arguments for more are held equally captive by logics of public safety and risk that presume the necessity of holding large numbers of poor people of color and extremely poor whites in violent captivity despite their innocence in the eyes of the law. I trace the histories of these logics in U.S. legal and financial history, highlighting the investments in whiteness and white power built into American conceptions of the public, of safety, and of risk and tracing the structures of credit and debt on which the U.S. criminal justice system relies and which it serves to perpetuate.  

Questions about the workshop or accessibility concerns can be addressed to yanivr {at} uchicago {dot} edu

Dear all,

Please join us for our next meeting of the Money, Markets, and Governance workshop TOMORROW, Tuesday, 1/24, in Social Science Research Building classroom 401, at 5pm – 6:30pm.

Rachel Geoffrey
PhD Student, Booth School, University of Chicago

The Monitoring and Corporate Governance Effect of Proxy Statements Dissemination on Heterogeneous Investors

Discussant: Anya Nakhmurina
PhD Student, Booth School, The University of Chicago

Abstract: This paper looks at the effect of the distribution and dissemination of proxy statements on monitoring and corporate governance. An important monitoring activity is participation in shareholder meeting voting. Investors have heterogeneous information processing and search costs for different methods of information dissemination. If these information costs associated with proxy information are high enough, then investors might disengage with the shareholder process. Retail investors are more likely to be disenfranchised by high information costs as they are typically less sophisticated that institution investors and because free rider issues place them closer to the margin between participating and not participating.  The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) required companies to choose between two proxy statement distribution systems, the “full access” system and the “notice and access system,” with a staggered implementation based on size.  Large accelerated filers had an effective regulation date of January 1, 2008, and companies with public floats less than $700 million had an effective regulation date of January 1, 2009.  The “notice and access system” reduces costs for disseminators whether they are the firm or activist investors; however, it potentially increases information costs for retail investors.  I test how the SEC’s e-proxy regulation effects participation by retail investors.  I also look at how net corporate governance changes due to the SEC’s e-proxy regulation.

Questions about the workshop or accessibility concerns can be addressed to yanivr {at} uchicago {dot} edu

Please join us for the next meeting of Money, Markets, and Governance, in collaboration with Politics, History, and Society on Tuesday, Jan. 17, at 5 – 6:30 in classroom 401 at Social Science Research Building.

Wan-Zi Lu
PhD student, Sociology, The University of Chciago

Authority Structures and Founding of Financial Institution:
Credit Unions Across Indigenous Communities in Taiwan, 1965-2014

Discussant: Austin Kozlowski
PhD student, Sociology, The University of Chicago

Abstract: Economic sociologists have repeatedly demonstrated that social relations affect economic activities such as market formation and the adoption of novel institutions. This claim also generates expectations about transition to modern economies, processes during which traditional societies adopt credit unions and institutionalized peer lending arrangements. However, this existing embeddedness approach has yet explained both the variation in organizational founding across communities and the divergent paths of economic transitions. To assess the relationship between types of traditional authority structures and the adoption of new economic forms, this study compares the establishment of credit unions in aboriginal communities in Taiwan. These communities are organized by one of two possible authority structures – chief and big man, characterized by difference in nature of power inheritance, leadership competition and stability, trust between common people, and openness to novel institutions. Regression and event history analyses show the influence of authority structures on the establishment of credit unions. Communities with ascribed power and inherited hierarchy (i.e. chief villages) are less likely and slower to adopt credit unions; their credit unions, when established, are less durable than those in communities whose leadership is determined by individual talents and achievement (i.e. big man villages). The traditionally decentralized power structure of big men villages also explains why church settlement has a stronger effect on credit union founding than in chief communities.

The paper is circulated in the workshop’s mailing-list, and can be requested from the coordinators.

For accessibility or any other concerns please e-mail yanivr {at} uchicago {dot} edu