Market Square - The Policy, Economy and Society [2011-2013]

About

The market square used to host economic exchange, but also political life and social interaction. Likewise, Market Square – The Polity, Economy and Society Cambridge Research Group is a forum for researchers studying society in its overlapping economic, political, and organisational aspects. The idea behind Market Square is that social scientists can contribute to the public debate by pointing to possibilities, perspectives and solutions that go beyond received schemes and dichotomies, but are grounded in what is achievable in a given social context.

Understanding contemporary societies requires conceptual resources and empirical tools from across the social sciences and humanities. It requires the ability to recognise potential for integration, as well as to appreciate differences and contexts of relevance. The focus of Market Square is on the development of new categories for the analysis of society through a process of blending rooted in the multi-faceted diversity of the social sciences and humanities.

This year’s theme is “Economic Politics and Economic Policy.” By economic politics we mean the view of markets as economic domains of political interaction between groups whose political and economic strategies often overlap. Economic policies are the decisions taken in those domains, which are the result of a compromise between common objectives and particular interests. Through this theme, we aim to deepen and generalise the line of research of last year’s theme, “Market Politics in Context.” We shall deepen it by exploring economic politics and economic policy as two fundamental coordinates of market politics. We shall generalise it by widening the context of application, i.e. by extending the insights of last year’s analysis of “Welfare States in Context” to other policy domains in which our theoretical and intrinsically multidisciplinary approach looks promising. In each term we shall organise reading groups and invited lectures on a subtheme. The combination of reading groups and lectures will define the framework for a final workshop, whose subthemes will be the same as those of the terms’. Specifically, by adopting a comparative and historical perspective, we shall investigate the following themes:

Michaelmas Term: Austerity, Expansion and the Restructuring of the Political Domain

Lent Term: Politics of Inequalities: Dynamic Asymmetries between Groups and Countries

Easter Term: The New Geography of Economic Power: Actors, Regions and Conflicts

The final workshop, to be held in Easter Term, will bring together the terms’ subthemes.