Programme full

Stream Plenaries and Special Sessions
WEDNESDAY 15 APRIL 2015 17:45-18:45
doing good’. The social impact of social finance will, we argue, be less benign than its champions assert—as private
social wealth is harnessed to finance social projects, the (waged and unwise) labour performed in the social sphere
will be harnessed in the pursuit of profit, making such activities not only ‘productive’ but subject to financial
discipline. Since financial markets function as a set of mechanisms that forces different forms of labour to compete
with one another, social finance and the social investment market will subsume a whole new swathe of activities within
the logic of value commensuration and competition across society.
Material Returns: Cultures of Valuation, Biofinancialisation and the Autonomy of Politics
Lilley, S., Papadopoulos, D.
(University of Leicester)
Along with many other commentators, our focus is less on a specific ‘crisis’ that we might shorthand as the GFC; more
with understanding the implications of the perpetual crisis in which we seem to have lived since the 1970s; an
understanding in which the GFC appears as but one particularly frothy moment amongst many. Both cause and
consequence of this perpetual crisis is an ever more ubiquitous culture of (financial) valuation that subjects all manner
of things – goods, ideas, activities, social productions and reproduction, feelings, spaces, times (including, particularly,
futures) – to techniques of valorisation that seek commensuration, and hence tradability, through a measure of money
that lies at the core of an imperial process of ‘biofinancialisation’. With commons increasingly at the heart of that which
is valorised and traded, the question arises as to where one might seek to stand against biofinancialisation and it
is question which we struggle to answer with confidence. Instead we content ourselves for now with indexing and
assaying some of the facts, factions and fictions that might give us some sort of handle on what now is to be done.’
Workers Self-management and the Sociology of Work
Ozarow, D., Croucher, R.
(Middlesex University)
Analysing the sustainability of Argentina’s worker recovered companies (WRCs) vis-à-vis their principles of equity
and workers’ self-management from the inception of the movement of factory recoveries after the 2001-2 economic
crisis, we posit these developments against four key sociological themes to assess the extent to which these
developments challenge some tenets of sociology of work. The number of worker recovered companies has
increased, they represent a viable production model, they have maintained their central principles and flourished—all
of this occurring despite the global economic crisis, legal and financial pressures to adopt capitalist practices and
management structures, the risk of market absorption, and against state attempts of co-optation, demobilisation and
depoliticisation of the movement. Such experiments, we argue, today function as a much-needed international beacon
of an alternative vision for labour and that integration of their experience has potential to revitalise sociology.
Chairs: Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (University of Bath); Dr Gregory Schwartz (University of Bristol); Dr Graham Taylor
(University of the West of England)
33 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University