How professionals in economics, finance, tax and law gain and practice expertise and authority.
Over the last couple of years, we have started building a network of researchers that inspire us and that we believe can develop new insights and promising research avenues by coming together and discussing their work within the framework of the topic Money professionals. These are researchers from a range of fields and using different theoretical and methodological approaches all the while they have in common that they help gain new insight into the role and power of professionals or experts working with money. As the previous meetings and contacts have been both engaging and pleasant, we wish to follow up with a new workshop in Paris on March 11th-13th to consolidate and expand the network, and to explore the possibility of a common publication.
Sociology of the professions, sociology of expertise, sociology of law, sociology of the state and economic sociology approach the power of experts in different ways. In this workshop, we aim at combining questions and knowledge from these different fields to gain new insight on the role and power of a certain group of experts in society. Whereas studies of expertise, often within the field of political science, have often focused on the role of experts in the state apparatus and the shaping and implementation of policies, recent work in the sociology of professions and economic sociology has shed new light on the role of new types of experts within finance (Benquet et al. 2020; Boussard 2017; Lebaron 2023). In particular, new light has been shed on professionals or experts operating in international arenas and thus challenging traditional forms of organisation and power exertion (Harrington and Seabrooke 2020; Seabrooke and Tsingou 2021; Seabrooke and Wigan 2016). Furthermore, whereas some research networks focus on legal professionals and the specificities of their organisations and practices, other networks focus on the role of economists in public administration (Christensen 2017; Angeletti 2021), as well as other forms of expertise that yield authority in the state apparatus (Mangset and Asdal 2019). In the world of money, things may change quickly: new products appear, and new groups of professionals or experts compete to be perceived as the legitimate managers of those products (Cornut St-Pierre 2017; 2019; 2022); new relationships between the public and the private sector develop (Angeletti and Lemoine 2022; France and Vauchez 2017), and new needs for regulation and control are identified. Understanding new legal tools, rising groups of legal professionals and new entanglements of legal and economic expertise are also key to understanding power relations in contemporary societies (Avril 2020; Dezalay 1993; Pistor 2013; 2019). New occupations, new possibilities to influence administrative and political practices are revealed.
The world of money professionals poses new questions on how to delimit professional groups and forms of expertise, not only due to some of these groups’ supranational fields of practice. Such questions are key to the sociology of professions, be it inspired by functionalism, interactionism, neo-weberian, marxist or Andrew Abbott’s focus on jurisdictional struggles (1988) and linked ecologies (2005). Nevertheless, as these professional groups’ areas of practice, their competences, the relevant educational paths are often difficult to delimitate, they may offer a good case to reflect on how a professional group constructs itself, develop and maintain their place in a broader landscape and on whether the analytical tools that we have are well suited to understand them. For example, we may ask: Who are “the economists” in France? When Norwegian tax experts in public administration and partners specialized in tax law in private firms have exactly the same education, what role does formal education play in defining these professional groups? Do money professionals share knowledge, practice, authority, responsibility or influences that could contribute to constitute something like a professional community across countries? Do the various professional groups of “money professionals” demonstrate the need for new analytical tools and theory development? Comparing similar professional groups across different contexts (Fourcade 2009; Korsnes 2000; Maurice et al. 1979), national like institutional, may also reveal a need for new concepts to grasp these groups’ role in society. Further, money professionals may work fruitfully as a prism for studying the relationships between the market and the state, and between economics, law and politics.
By bringing together scholars working on these different fields, we aim at shedding new light on how different types of professionals specialising in the handling of money gain and exert authority. Furthermore, bringing these different approaches together open up new opportunities to study the relationship between the state and the market, or between public and private interests. The money professionals under study are key actors in structuring that relationship, and by studying their practices, we may reach a more nuanced understanding of what kind of oppositions and concurrences that characterise it.
The workshop is organised by the group behind TAXLAW, a research project funded by the Research Council Norway, directed by Marte Mangset at the department for sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo in cooperation with Helle Dyrendahl Staven (SPS, OsloMet), Jérôme Pélisse and Corentin Durand (Centre de sociologie des organisations, Sciences Po/CNRS) and Len Seabrooke (Dept. of Organization, Copenhagen Business School). This project studies the expertise and role of tax lawyers in the public and private sectors across countries (France and Norway). Experts in the field of tax are a particularly interesting professional group for the study of state-market relationships as they represent key experts in both sectors.
Whereas the relationship between international and national frameworks are quite central in the field of tax, professionals in finance tend to operate at a rather exclusively international level. This is also true for larger part of private law firms. Recent work in sociology of professions and economic sociology focus on the tools, devices, and practices of finance professionals, and how they contribute to boundary drawing, constructing jurisdictions and build authority. Sociology of professions has often focused on the national level, and the regulations and forms of influence that take place at that level. By focusing on how professionals operate at international levels, scholars have had to introduce new analytical approaches to understand possibilities, strategies and constraints in a market not that regulated by states. As several money professionals, and indeed tax professionals, still operate in a rather nationally regulated context, it is interesting to ask/discuss whether some of the analytical tools employed in the study of international finance professionals would be fruitful to transpose to a national context, and vice-versa.
Within expertise studies, several scholars have focused on economists, and indeed on how much power they have, in particular within the state apparatus. However, there is still need for research that studies how economists work in practice, and how they exert their influence in different institutional contexts. There is also need for more work on how economists compete with – or work in concordance with – other expert groups within the state apparatus. Are there any other expert groups that contradict them, or are they always supported? And, when in competition with other expert groups, such as legal professionals, do the economists always win? What is even to win, or even to have influence for its own profession, which is not to homogenise too much, or for public policy orientations?
Not only within the state apparatus, but also in the private sector, the role of legal professionals would gain from being studied in new ways. Traditional sociology of professions held up legal professionals as one of their key examples, together with medicine, but few attempts have been made at really describing what legal expertise is, notably in the domain of money, business and taxes. We also need to understand better how legal professionals operate in a more internationalised context – both in the private and the public sector. Finally, whereas sociology of law provides methodologically and theoretically significant insight on how lay people conceptualise the law, very few have employed similar conceptually open approaches to study legal professionals’ understandings of the law.
In this workshop, we wish to bring together scholars all interested in empirically well-founded and theoretically developing scholarship on professionals working with money in different institutional contexts and different fields of expertise.
The workshop will be an opportunity to present work in progress that will address these themes from various angles and using a variety of data (e.g. quantitative, interviews, ethnographies, document studies). For example, questions of boundaries, between public and private, between distinct professional groups with similar or potentially overlapping jurisdictions, or, on the contrary, between experts in the same field but with a priori opposed interests or from distinct disciplines around the "money" object (in the field of law, economics, finance) could be addressed.
Important dates
February 1st: Deadline for submitting abstracts (max 400 words)
February 6th: Announcement of decision on participants
March 4th: Deadline for submitting manuscripts (work in progress at all stages are welcome)