MWP Newsletter 2 - Fall 2011
Max Weber Programme for
Postdoctoral Studies

The following is the translation of an article that appeared on 9th December 2011 in El País. Even if you now know how historical that day was, we thought it would be good to reprint it since not everything was solved and it refers to the Nobel Prize lecture of a Max Weber Lecturer.

Today is a historic day for Europe, the European Union and, more particularly, the Eurozone. European citizens hope that the European Council today will go down in history as the beginning of the end of the 21st century euro crisis, and not as a day of missed opportunity. If this is the beginning of the end, it will be because today the European Council will have laid the groundwork for a new European Constitution redefining the fiscal policies of the member countries of the EU or the Eurozone. Read More

The 2011 deadline for applications for the Max Weber Programme for the academic year 2012-2013 has recently passed. There was a steady increase in the number of applications until 2010 when they peaked at 1139 and then declined in 2011 by 10.3%. The total number of applications this year was 1022 compared to last year's 1139. When looking at the applications by continent it appears that the decrease from European candidates has been marginal, namely 5.4 %, while the biggest decrease was from American candidates which was almost 30%. The US and Canadian application have declined from 141 to 91 which may indicate that the US market has started to pick up after 2 years of stagnation. The other regions seem to have settled at the 2009 level. Read More

In 2010-11, the MWP-ACO, in collaboration with the European Economic Association, the European Sociological Association and the European Consortium for Political Research, carried out separate surveys of economists, sociologists and political scientists. The survey is in two parts.
Part I analyses the sociology of each profession, assessing the respondent’s current working position. Part II focuses on the research funding experience of the respondents and on their subjective perceptions of the funding application processes. Read More

During 2011 the Academic Careers Observatory launched two different surveys, one called "The MWP Follow-up Survey to Former Fellows" and "The MWP Evaluation Survey to Former MWP Applicants". The results of the two surveys are currently being elaborated, and will aim to show the effectiveness of the programme in helping Fellows in the advancement of their academic careers. The results will be disseminated through a forthcoming report.

The Max Weber Programme is keeping track of where its former Fellows go after the Fellowship. To show the impact of the Max Weber Fellows in international academia and social science research, the MWP has created an interactive network map of all its former Fellows’ new affiliations around the world. The Fellows may be searched by cohort, region or discipline – please have a look here: The Max Weber Fellows Network Map.
To the fellows: To update your current affiliations, please contact Sarah Simonsen.

Modern societies congratulate themselves on their high health and safety standards and excellent healthcare systems that enable them to reduce significantly the risk of accident-induced fatal injuries among the populace. We are constantly reassured that a great deal of effort and funding is directed towards devising and employing means to protect us from sudden death or injury as we go about our daily lives. On a more general level, we like to believe that one of the facets of modernity is the absence of the multiple hazards that haunted our ancestors in the pre-industrial world. While it is probably safe to argue that a sixteenth-century farmer was more likely to die as the result of an unfortunate accident than his twentyfirst-century counterpart, it seems that popular understanding of living and working conditions in the distant past is based to a greater degree on general assumptions and anecdotal evidence than on hard facts and statistical data. Read More

From 15-16 November 2011, Andrea Wechsler co-organized and participated in a China-EU School of Law training of Chinese prosecutors on the issue of criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights at the National Prosecutors College of the P.R. China in Beijing.

Over the last thirty-year period of China's opening-up, and its economic reform, towards "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics", intellectual property protection and enforcement have attained a prominent role in Chinese industrial policy. While enormous progress has been made in establishing a comprehensive legal framework for the protection of intellectual property, deficiencies have remained in particular in the area of enforcement. One of the most topical questions has therefore become the issue of criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights in China. Read More

I get up in the morning and remember that there is a lecture on Italy and its Fascist Past at NYU's Villa La Pietra that I want to go to. Its at 11 and so I get ready to leave my apartment around 10. Outside everything is peaceful and I suddenly remember that today is a holiday: the Day of the Immaculate Conception. Making my way to the bus-stop I realize that public transport will be running on a holiday schedule and that I need to buy a new ticket. Most places are closed, but the lady at San Marco is working and sells me a new ten-ride-pass. I join the group of people waiting for bus 24 and soon enough it pulls around the corner and off we go, me feeling lucky. Read More

"In the aftermath of the Arab Spring" Multidisciplinary Research Workshop,
12 October 2011

by Virginie Collombier, Max Weber Fellow2011-2012

Since the end of 2010, the Arab world has been experiencing dramatic and unexpected change. Peoples who had long been regarded as apathetic have been mobilizing en masse and standing up for their dignity. Leaders who had been clinging to power for decades, relying on over-developed security apparatuses, have been ousted and are to be held accountable for their actions. The consequences of these events have been manifold, be it in the Arab world or beyond. They are of course political, but also diplomatic, economic and social. The workshop organized on 12 October as part of the Max Weber Programme activities aimed to shed light on some of these repercussions and spark debate among researchers from varied disciplinary backgrounds. Read More

Intellectual property rights: What are they good for? Absolutely nothing?
Multidisciplinary Research Workshop with David Levine, Wednesday 9 November 2011, Villa La Fonte: "Protecting Intellectual Property Rights or Creativity?"

By Chris Colvin and Andrea Wechsler,
Max Weber Fellows 2011-2012

In a workshop on the future of intellectual property rights, a multidisciplinary panel of EUI Ph.D. researchers, post-doctoral Fellows and faculty quizzed David K. Levine (Professor of Economics at Washington University of St. Louis, and visitor at the EUI's Department of Economics) on his mission to convince the world that abolishing patents and copyrights will improve economic prosperity for all and lead to more, not less, innovation.
Co-author, with Michele Boldrin, of the influential polemic Against Intellectual Monopoly (Cambridge, 2008), Levine is one of the leaders of a growing movement of academics opposed to the world's current intellectual property rights regime.
The workshop, which was structured along the lines of a UK Parliamentary Select Committee hearing, paid special attention to the feasibility of Levine's policy recommendations. Read More

Max Weber Lecture by Chris Pissarides,
19 October 2011

On 19 October 2011 Nobel Prize Winner for Economics Prof. Chris Pissarides of the London School of Economics gave the first Max Weber Lecture of the year entitled “Employment in Europe”. Read the abstract of the lecture on the MWP webpage and view part of the Lecture on the MWP YouTube Channel.

Max Weber Lecture by Pierre Rosanvallon,
16 November 2011

Prof. Pierre Rosanvallon, Collège of France, gave the second Max Weber Lecture this academic year on 16 November. His Lecture was entitled “Rethinking Equality in an Age of Inequalities”. Read the abstract and view the full lecture on our Youtube channel.

Max Weber Lecture by Avinash Dixit,
14 December 2011

The third Max Weber Lecture is with Prof. Avinash Dixit from Princeton University. Prof. Dixit is John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus. On 14 December he gave a lecture entitled: "Governance, Development and Foreign Direct Investment". Read the abstract for the lecture on the MWP homepage.

Read more about the recent Max Weber Lectures and the Speakers

Multidisciplinary Research Workshop
"2011, a Year of Euro Crisis in perspective"
14 December 2011

On 14 December 2011 the Max Weber Programme in collaboration with the ECO Department had organized a Multidisciplinary Research Workshop entitled “2011, a Year of Euro Crisis in perspective” with the participation of Prof. Charles Wyplosz, the Graduate School, Geneva, Josep Borrell, President, EUI, Youssef Cassis, HEC Department, EUI, Ramon Marimon, Director MWP, EUI and Nathan Marcus, MWF, EUI.
The euro-zone’s financial crisis dominated the headlines in 2011. Initially a sovereign-debt crisis limited to certain euro-zone countries with growing budget deficits and high levels of sovereign debt, it gradually evolved into a general crisis of confidence in the entire euro-zone. Read more

Upcoming Events

Max Weber Lecture with Kathleen Thelen
18 January 2012

Kathleen Thelen, Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT and Permanent External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies will give the first Max Weber Lecture in 2012. Kathleen Thelen studies the origin, development, and effects of institutional arrangements that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism” across the developed democracies, and is the author of How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, The United States and Japan.

See all Max Weber Lectures for the Academic Year 2011-2012.

MWP Classics Revisited Conference
2 May 2012

This year the MWP Classics Revisited conference will be on Karl Polanyi with the preliminary title “The embeddedness of Markets today: Returning to Polanyi to think development, markets & the financial crisis”.
In the context of an extended economic crisis in the Western world that crowned two decades of economic growth with worsening income inequality, Karl Polanyi’s economic thought has gained new prominence. This conference seeks to bring together Fellows, EUI faculty, and researchers with leading scholars around the world relying critically on Polanyi for understanding and working through the normative implications of contemporary capitalism and its current crisis.
Programme and list of speakers to be announced on the MWP Webpage at a later stage. Read More

For more information about other upcoming events see the Activities page on the MWP website

Stelios Bekiros, Max Weber Fellow 2008-2009
Received the Best Reviewer Prize/Award for 2010 by the prestigious European Journal of Operational Research.

Elise Dermineur, Max Weber Fellow 2010-2011
2011, Received a Bernadotte Schmitt Grant from the American Historical Association for her project on "Indebted peasants and their emotions in early modern France, 1700-1789".

Tina Freyburg, Max Weber Fellow 2011-2012
March 2011: Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) International Geneva Award (CHF 5.000) for co-authored article on EU democratic governance promotion published in Democratization 18(4). The Jury selects the prize-winning article on the basis of its originality, the direct relevance for International Organizations and the strength of the methodology applied.
February 2011: European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Award (USD 100) for best paper presented at the 2009 international conference in Los Angeles.

Laura Magi, Max Weber Fellow 2009-2010
has been honoured by the Italian Society of International law for the best article written by a young scholar (article: "Sull’attribuzione ad una organizzazione internazionale dell’attività di società private che operano per suo conto”).

Quinton Mayne, Max Weber Fellow 2009-2010
2011, Received two dissertation awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA): the Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award from the European Politics and Society Section of APSA and the Best Dissertation Award from the Urban Politics Section of APSA.

Violet Soen, Max Weber Fellow, 2008-2009
2011, on 10 December received the Award Erik Duverger of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten) for her dissertation on noble and Habsburg peace attempts during the Dutch Revolt. It is a distinction for historical studies based on comprehensive archival research.