Matthew Soener

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Sociology

Decarbonization is the most important challenge of our time. Though quite modest, states are taking more climate action. How should we approach these efforts? Sociologists have paid less attention to decarbonization overall but frameworks in political sociology can make sense of state power and climate politics. In this review, I first discuss two...

Are International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South? I argue powerful actors structure markets in ways exacerbating climate change. This works through the IMF’s imposition of market coercion—specifically, currency devaluation, global openness and fiscal pressures from austerity. Countries respond to t...

We ask how an increasing share of women or migrants in the workplace affects wages for different groups depending on market‐based or relational outcomes. Using data on nearly every French employee and workplace, we propose four theoretically informed outcomes. We do not find an increase in the share of women or migrants provokes a wage backlash but...

Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing thi...

Has global financial integration allowed firms in the so-called “Global South” to profit from financial activity? Financialization researchers have either neglected these countries and the international economic order in general or neglected firm-level dynamics, a broad sample of emerging markets, and a theoretical and historical explanation for th...

The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer–employee...

The ‘financialisation’ of the economy is considered a key phenomenon of our time, but we lack large-scale empirical evidence of it. Has financialisation in the non-financial corporate sector really taken off in recent decades? To answer this question, I marshal data on all available publicly traded corporations in the largest 37 countries from 1991...

The urgency of climate change means we need to correctly diagnose the immediate causes of it. Economic growth is a principal factor. However, there are sharp disagreements over how growth matters and how it should be addressed. Leading establishment institutions call for sustainable “green growth” while other, more radical advocates, call for “de-g...

From Mitterrand’s “rigueur” to Hollande’s “mandate,” Bruno Amable charts the transformation of French capitalism and reveals the making of a political crisis. Bruno Amable’s Structural Crisis and Institutional Change in Modern Capitalism provides a detailed historical analysis of the French economic model over the past 50 years that can help us und...

Economic growth is a key contributor to climate change, but undergirding growth is capitalist profitability. In this article, I refine this long‐standing relationship between growth and emissions by estimating if the profit rate and the “exploitation rate” (surplus profits / wages and salaries) predict greenhouse gas emissions. I do so in a sample...

Corporations are typically identified as the primary organization for producing and redistributing resources. They continue to be important but are not alone. Since the early 1990s, there has been a substantial rise in the number of limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited partnerships (LPs) in the United States. These flexible legal-organiza...

Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the...

American families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families su...

The 2008 financial crisis revealed significant frailties within global capitalism. How did the political response shape the ensuing decade? In his book, economic historian Adam Tooze narrates the key events over this period, from financial sector bailouts to geopolitical shifts worldwide.

In recent decades, financialization has significantly restructured American capitalism. Social scientists have offered several accounts to explain financial markets' ascendance, but this work often portrays financialization as a totalizing force and is conducted within divergent theoretical paradigms—political economy and neo-institutionalism—with...