We invite doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, master students and other academics to submit abstracts for participation in the international summer school and workshop, The Business of the State, taking place from August 27–30, 2025, at the scenic Moulin d’Andé in France.
Organized by an interdisciplinary team of scholars within sociology, political science, political economy, socio-legal studies and history, this summer school aims to explore the dynamics of expertise, professional practices and tools of governance (legal, financial, economic) that shape the evolving boundaries between public and private sectors.
This summer school will provide a platform to systematize and compare research on:
- The types of knowledge involved in governance, competition, and compliance
- The technical and legal instruments (e.g., contracts, prospectuses, extraterritorial mechanisms) that define public actors’ rights and obligations
- The transformation of key concepts such as sovereignty, law, zones, and territory
Several professional groups will be central to our discussions, including consultants, business lawyers, in-house legal teams, tax experts, and senior officials from financial, legal, and diplomatic institutions. We will also focus on critical processes at the intersection of law, sociology, and political science, such as privatizations, public procurement, outsourcing, consulting markets, investment arbitration, and bond issuance.
The summer school will be organized around three main themes:
1. Public-Private Struggles for the Right to Regulate and Enclaves of Legal Sovereignty
This session explores how regulatory power—whether through laws, judicial rulings, or administrative decisions—has become a marketable asset subject to negotiation. We will analyze how governance today relies on experimentation, partnerships, and legal exemptions, effectively transforming regulatory power into a subject of public-private bargaining.
Guest Lecturer: Kristin Surak, London School of Economics
2. Money professionals and the redefinition of the public-private frontier
Circulation of elites, revolving doors, porosity and new ways of regulating the public-private frontier (consulting firms, investors, business lawyers and economic intelligence).
This second section will focus on the professions and private industry that do business with the State, for whom public power and sovereignty are objects, investment vehicles, clients, targets, partners, allies or adversaries. For example, we'll be looking in detail at money professionals (economists, corporate lawyers, tax advisors, fund managers and financial directors) and how they acquire and exercise expertise and authority, but also distribute resources: they can decide who is authorized, and under what conditions, to access credit. The world of public-private money professionals raises new questions about how to delimit professional groups, and raises the issue of demarcating the boundaries between the public and private spheres.
Guest lecturer: Anna Tyllström, Institute for Future Studies/Uppsala University
3. The State as a financial player in a globalized world
This third theme will be devoted to the study of new forms of government action and financial intervention. Indeed, while public authorities play the role of issuer of debt securities and provide the private financial sector with a whole range of vehicles for investing their capital (the invested state), states and public organizations also act as investors through various channels: sovereign wealth funds and public investment banks (the investor state). The aim is to understand any tensions between these different roles, and to see how the practices and roles of the investor state and the invested state are affected by the norms, codes and practices specific to global financialization.
Guest lecturer: Cornel Ban, Copenhagen Business School
Target audience: The selected audience will be masters students, doctoral students, post-doctoral students and scholars working in Europe and beyond on topics at the crossroads of political sociology, political economy and socio-legal studies, with a focus on knowledge, professionals, tools and infrastructures at the frontier between the public and private sectors.
The summer school lasts 4 full days and will take place at scenic site Moulin d'Andé (125 km North-West of Paris). It will be given exclusively in English. Each course will be organized around two different formats:
- A morning plenary session featuring experienced international researchers presenting the state of the art and the theoretical and methodological challenges of a particular research theme.
- An afternoon structured around the presentation and discussion of young researchers’ own work.
One of the evenings will be organized around a screening-discussion of a documentary.
A final discussion may be organized with the young researchers and the instructors at the end of the summer school, to build a proposal for a publication.
Proposals are due by May 15th and should include a CV, a summary of current research (one word page) and be sent to Marte Mangset (marte.mangset@sosgeo.uio.no), Antoine Vauchez (antoine.vauchez@uni-paris1.fr) or Benjamin Lemoine (benjamin.lemoine@ens.psl.eu).
Organizers: Benjamin Lemoine (CMH, CNRS), Marte Mangset (Centre universitaire de Norvège, UiO), Antoine Vauchez (CESSP, CNRS)
Invited speakers and discussants: Cornel Ban (Copenhagen Business School), Kristin Surak (London School of Economics), Anna Tyllström (Institute for future studies/Uppsala University)