Donato Di Carlo (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies)
Anna Mori (Università degli Studi di Milano)
The study of the relationship between states, societies and markets lies at the core of social sciences.
Yet, this relationship is in constant flux. During Europe’s “golden age” the active Keynesian state
took on an unprecedented role in the promotion, regulation and governance of domestic markets,
through active fiscal and industrial policy and the expansion of welfare programs as well as state
bureaucracies. With the deepening of the European regulatory state, the spread of the New Public
Management paradigm, and increasing globalization of product and financial markets, nation states’
authority has been increasingly challenged since the 1980s. As a result, over the last thirty years of the
XX century, the capacity of the state to govern markets has gradually eroded under the blows inflicted
by permanent austerity, privatizations and market-enhancing structural reforms.
The global financial crisis first, and the COVID-19 pandemic later have, once again, demonstrated the
state’s centrality for the governance of our contemporary societies and markets. Over the last decade,
the state has thus witnessed a comeback as the provider of public goods, essential services and social
protection in hard times. This has generated renewed interest and a reappraisal of its key role in
today’s European mixed market economies. As if this were not enough, the disruption to energy
markets caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced European states to experiment with old
and new ways to regulate the process of wage and price formation across the economy – while having
to compensate households and firms from the shock of ever mounting inflation.
Has the accumulation of these successive shocks brought about a new compromise in the states-
markets nexus in Europe? In trying to tackle this broad question, the session calls for multidisciplinary
contributions examining the role of the state and the public sector in its multifaceted and multilevel
functions; not only in the current transition phase – in midst of an emerging stagflation scenario – but
from a broader, diachronic, perspective. The session welcomes contributions in Italian and English on
the following topics:
the state intervention to pilot and coordinate the post-pandemic recovery, including the
implementation of the national Recovery and Resilience Plans;
the state intervention in the economy and in the labour market in the aftermath of the
Pandemic and the recent war in Ukraine;
theoretical contributions on the political economy of the public sector;
theoretical and empirical contributions on the reform of the public administration, including
the digitalization of the public services, new forms of work organization in the context or
remote working;
the regulation of labour and employment relations in the public sector, including the role of
the trade unions.