Events:
What is Capitalism? Reading & Discussion Group
Friday February 28, 2025 at 3pm EST; noon Pacific, 8pm/20:00 UK Time Kimberly Kracman will present her article (and related research), Code as Constitution: The Negotiation of a Uniform Accounting Code for U.S. Railway Corporations and the Moral Justification of Stakeholder Claims on Wealth, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 89 doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2021.102376 (2022). Register here.
Looking at a critical moment in corporate history, this article “describes how railway accountants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States worked with the first federal regulator of corporations, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), to create a uniform accounting code for the nation’s first large corporations.”
The ICC’s Director of Statistics and Accounts, political economist Henry Carter Adams, aimed to use the code as means of peaceably arbitrating between the conflicting interests of stakeholders in the railway system, promoting economic democracy through the promulgation of rules for the valuation and distribution of corporate assets and profits. The article uses an orders of worth theoretic to show how, while facing different constraints and incentives, both federal regulators and railway officers used a moral logic of contribution to justify their arguments about how claims on assets and profits should be determined. The article describes Adams’ attempts to use the accounting code as a “cognitive constitution” for stakeholders in the railway industry and shows how financial statements created by accountants served as moral narratives used by stakeholders to justify a particular distribution of wealth.
Kimberly Kracman is Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University.
We’ll begin with a 10 minute introduction by the author, followed by extended conversation with participants. For questions, contact appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org
Friday March 28, 2025 at 3pm ET: Paul Cammack, Politics and Political Economy of Post-Reproduction Societies (forthcoming paper).
Friday, April 25, 2025 at 2 pm ET: Katherine Moos, University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics, will discuss her current book project. Register here.
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ANNOUNCING: CALL FOR EMERGING SCHOLAR SUBMISSIONS
Law and Political Economy Meets Heterodox Economics:
Power, Freedom, Institutions, and the Law
Saturday, April 12, 2025
9:00am–5:00pm ET
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511
At our Spring 2025 workshop, we seek to feature multi-disciplinary and intersectional emerging scholarship reflecting on the relationships between politics, law, and economics, and society. We welcome papers both on and beyond the general workshop theme of “Power, Freedom, Institutions, and the Law.”
Students and emerging scholars interested in presenting law-and-political-economy-informed analysis of class, gender, race, imperialism, and more, are welcome to submit a 100–300 word abstract with titles by March 9, 2025, via the following link: https://bit.ly/4b0hAxa. In keeping with a commitment to methodological pluralism, research utilizing quantitative or qualitative methods, analytic or institutional approaches, and other techniques from a variety of disciplines, will all be considered. We are especially interested in soliciting abstracts that cut across disciplinary lines involving economics, law and institutionalism, politics, history, etc.
We encourage proposals and projects at every stage of their development; completed papers are not necessary at the time of the workshop. If you are unsure if your proposal fits the submission guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers by mailing to appeal@politicaleconomylaw.org.
This workshop will take place alongside a one-day conference on “Comparative Legal and Political Futures: South Africa and Palestine”. The joint two-day event thus begins on Friday, April 11, at 9:00 am, and ends with the APPEAL workshop the following day. Friday’s panels will focus on lessons from South Africa and Palestine on the law and political economy of compartmentalization, law and political praxis, and gender and apartheid. Other panels will reflect on South Africa 30 years after apartheid and Palestine in Middle East politics. Saturday’s workshop will begin with a plenary panel on Third World internationalism today, and a masterclass on methods in law and political economy. We invite those interested in attending or presenting at the Saturday emerging scholar symposium to also attend the Friday conference.
If you are interested in presenting or attending, please note that, while the workshop and conference are free of charge and will include lunch and refreshments, we are unfortunately unable to provide support for travel or lodging.
Co-organizers and Sponsors:
The Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), a program of the LPE Collective;
Yale Law and Political Economy Student Group;
John Jay College Economics Department;
John Jay College Law and Political Economy Society;
With New School for Social Research students and faculty; and
UMass Amherst LPE Group