Market economies go through wild swings. They erratically shift gains and losses and go through ups and downs. 20th century societies have developed elaborate repertoires to make sense of market swings. They can be in sync across industries or specific to particular fields or regions. There are stories of agency when it comes to understanding market movements, whereas some of them are said to be caused by structural forces, technology, or cyclical forces. The talk presents a comparative sociological analysis of the emergence of one of the most influential schemes to make sense of economic change in capitalism – deindustrialization. Based on a wide range of archival material from federal governments and legislatures in Germany and the United States, it shows how elites developed distinct notions of industrial decline and postindustrial modernization in the process of coping with series of industrial crises.
Timur Ergen is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and an interim professor of sociology at the University of Wuppertal. He was a 2022–2023 John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University. Ergen co-organizes the SASE Research Network Digital Economy and has been a member of SASE’s Executive Council since 2020. His research investigates energy transitions, industrial and technology policy, and the postindustrial economy.
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