Earlier this December, sociologist Jens Beckert sat down with Santiago Mandirola, sociology PhD student and former Heilbroner graduate student fellow, to talk about his latest book Imagined Futures by Harvard University Press, his current project on wealth, inheritance, and inequality, and his larger research agenda after being awarded the Leibniz Prize, the most prestigious research award in Germany that provides its recipients with up to 2.5 million euros in research funding.
Jens Beckert is the Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (Cologne), and 2019-20 Theodor Heuss Professor at The New School for Social Research (NSSR). Beckert received his MA in Sociology from NSSR and his Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a visiting researcher at Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and SciencesPo in Paris. Beckert works in the fields of economic sociology and investigates primarily questions of market development. His book Imagined Futures (HUP 2016) examines the role of expectations for economic growth and crises.
Santiago Mandirola is a Ph.D. student in sociology and historical studies at NSSR. His research examines how the sophistication of methods and technologies of consumer credit scoring in South America generated the conditions of growth and expansion of these consumer credit markets. His project will address how the management of consumer information was refined in South American credit bureaus since the 1990s, the role of these changes in the incorporation of new sectors to the consumer credit market, and how this process opened up new possibilities of gain for all the actors involved.