Jens Beckert, Professor of Sociology and Director, The Max Planck
Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Director of the Max
Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Richard Bronk, Visiting Senior Fellow, European Institute, London
School of Economics and Political Science
Jens Beckert is director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. In 2018 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his work reinvigorating the social sciences with an interdisciplinary perspective, especially at the intersection of sociology and economics. His research focuses on the fields of economic sociology, sociology of inheritance, organization theory, and social theory.
Richard Bronk is a Visiting Senior Fellow in the European
Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
He spent seventeen years working in the City of London and the Bank
of England before teaching political economy at LSE from 2000-2007.
His research now focuses on the role of imagination and language in
economics, the dangers of analytical and regulatory monocultures,
and the epistemology of markets.
"An edited volume is usually less than the sum of its parts. It is
the other way round in the case of the volume edited by Jens
Beckert and Richard Bronk. The intellectual heavyweight of an
introduction frames the other, conceptual and empirical, chapters.
It gives the reader an elaborate language for describing the
phenomena that constitute uncertain futures and distils what the
chapters find out about the ways agents deal with fundamental
uncertainty . . . The real point about uncertain futures is that
what generates uncertainty is not "out there" but generated inside
the system to which it refers." - Waltraud Schelkle (LSE), Economic
Sociology
"Collectively, the essential introduction and the selected chapters
form a powerful and well-developed contribution to current
knowledge about the economy in the social sciences. Indeed, what is
most striking in this volume is that it successfully offers 'an
unashamedly interdisciplinary' (ix) outlook towards economic action
under conditions of uncertainty, bringing together several
disciplines, from sociology, political economy and anthropology, to
social psychology and economics... Whatever the uncertain future
may hold for it, Beckert's and Bronk's Uncertain Futures is highly
recommended for a wide range of readers, being able to speak to
economic sociologists, anthropologists, political economists,
psychologists and, why not, economists, too." - Dylan Cassar, The
British Journal of Sociology
"Uncertain Futures is a thought-provoking and analytically helpful
book. It corrects some established assumptions in economics and
sociology and proposes directions for further research in such
important fields as decision-making under uncertainty, economic
microfoundations and sociology of expectations." - Ekaterina
Svetlova, LSE Review of Books
"Uncertain Futures is a stimulating and diverse collection of
papers about the consequences of radical uncertainty and how they
are managed in practice. As the clear and comprehensive
introduction by the editors explains, devices such as narratives,
stories, conversations and 'imaginaries' give shape to expectations
of the future. .. . Radical uncertainty is not a new concept, but
it nevertheless receives less attention than it really deserves.
Uncertain Futures is a very welcome and interesting antidote. It
left this reader with an enhanced understanding of the expedients
that are customarily used as means of either overcoming or else
tacitly ignoring radical uncertainty, and of the dangers that a
flawed but superficially persuasive narrative can wreak. Mindless
positivity is just as dangerous as mindless negativity. For that
alone, Uncertain Futures is well worth reading." - William A.
Allen, Visitor, National Institute of Economic and Social
Research
"Economic theory is built on how people make decisions, and in real
life all decisions are made under some degree of fundamental
uncertainty - people simply do not know what future they face.
Uncertain Futures shows that people use works of imagination, or
they use narratives, or calculative practices such as business
plans, to act in spite of uncertainty. Economics - thanks to
Beckert and Bronk - can build upon a much more realistic human
foundation than before. A first-rate contribution to the field." -
W. Brian Arthur, author of Complexity and the Economy
"Especially when uncertainties produced by innovation are
compounded by second-order uncertainties about the reactions of
others, what should one do when rational calculation of
probabilities based on past data is ineffective in predicting the
future? From a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, the
essays in this collection creatively explore the role of
imagination - long studied as a source of innovation, but until now
neglected as a response to uncertainty." - David Stark, Columbia
University and author of The Sense of Dissonance
"We all have to take decisions with long-term consequences, with
little knowledge of what the future may bring. The future is
inherently uncertain, so we cannot even estimate probabilities in
most cases. The editors of this book have put together a collection
of papers by economic sociologists, economists, a psychologist, and
an anthropologist to explore the various calculative techniques,
narratives, and imaginaries that we use in practice. It is all a
far cry from the precise mathematical techniques of the rational
expectation world of mainstream DSGE modelling, but none the worse
for that." - Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor of Economics at
the London School of Economics and former member of the Monetary
Policy Committee of the Bank of England
"How do people make sense of the unknown - perhaps unknowable -
future? It is becoming increasingly clear that this question is
central to our understanding of economic life. The fine collection
of studies in this book is a crucial contribution to this vital
debate." - Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh and author of
An Engine, Not a Camera
"I commend this perspective to economists. This is exciting
intellectual territory and seems to me rather important at a time
when the future seems more uncertain than ever." - Diane Coyle,
Bennett Professor of Public Policy, University of Cambridge, and
Director of Enlightenment Economics
"Questions about how best to characterise the practical grounds of
economic agency and the epistemic tools for interpreting it, remain
absolutely wide open. They are posed throughout Uncertain Futures
in a variety of interesting forms, making this edited volume by
Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk an important contribution to current
debates on these fundamental economic issues that deserves to be
widely read and constructively criticised." - Samuel Sadian,
University of Barcelona
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
