50404 - Risk and Uncertainty in the New Economy, from Labor to Finance

Description

The papers in this session investigate an economic landscape of uncertainty and risk. How do workers and investors navigate uncertainty in new and evolving contexts? How can we better understand the broader macro transformations underlying the new economy? One paper establishes empirically the process and pathways through which the US economy has privatized since the 1970s and its devastating consequences for labor and economic inequality. The other papers examine how workers and financial actors experience and manage economic risk and uncertainty, and what some of the consequences are. Papers illuminating this theme include the following topics: how Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce has propelled US brick-and-mortar grocery stores to invest in a digital assembly line of warehouse-like jobs with degraded conditions; how south Korean Tesla investors motivate themselves to maintain volatile Tesla shares through meaning-making strategies resembling religious practice; how activist short sellers attempting to shift financial markets craft a different kind of story depending on the audience they are trying to convince; and how high-performing content creators learn from algorithms to contradict their own taste and maximize their metrics by producing viral “cringe” content. The session as a whole highlights how workers, investors, and employers draw on a range of social, cultural, and technical strategies to maximize their position amidst privatization, state withdrawal, and the individualization of risk.

Sub Unit

• Economic Sociology

Presider

• Patrick Sheehan, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• A Revolution at the Last Mile: How Logistics is Shaping Work in the Grocery Industry - Katy Habr, Columbia University

• Privatization: Documenting Government Retrenchment from Production and Analyzing the Distributional Consequences - Nathan Meyers, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Navigating the Classificatory Void: Why Activist Short Sellers Tell Messy Stories - Georg Rilinger, MIT Sloan School of Management; Brad R. Turner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• The Labor of Cringe: Value Capture and the Performativity of Algorithms in Online Cultural Production - Ashley E. Mears, University of Amsterdam

• When Investment Becomes Religion: How Household Investors Persist with Risky Investments Amid Uncertainty - Kyungmo Chun, University of Texas-Austin

Session Organizer

• Kathleen Griesbach, University of Texas-Austin