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Or­gan­iz­a­tions, Mar­kets and Gov­ernance (OMG)

OMG ex­plores how mar­kets are con­struc­ted and gov­erned by com­bin­ing in­sights from so­ci­ology, polit­ic­al eco­nomy, and or­gan­iz­a­tion stud­ies. The group works em­pir­ic­ally with both qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive meth­ods and act­ively en­gages in in­ter­na­tion­al re­search net­works and con­fer­ences.

About OMG

'OMG’ hosts scholars who work in the areas of:

  • International Political Economy
  • Economic Sociology
  • Economic Geography
  • Organization Studies

The persistent theme in the group is how markets are constructed and governed, with a focus on establishing links between macro-meso and micro-meso level interactions between organizations and actors.

The group draws on:

  • Institutional theory
  • Institutional economics
  • The sociology of professions
  • Social network theory
  • Field-theoretic analysis
  • Other bodies of theory

Empirical focus

The group’s work concentrates on empirical cases, developing cases on socio-economic phenomena in Denmark and also internationally and transnationally.

These cases are typically built on both qualitative and quantitative foundations.

Methodological approach

Qualitatively, we rely on:

  • Interviews
  • Participant observation
  • Archival research

Quantitatively, we have a strong interest in computational approaches, including:

  • Social Network Analysis
  • Multiple Correspondence Analysis
  • Sequence Analysis
  • Text Analysis
  • Other techniques available in the sociological toolkit

Academic environment

We hold regular seminars focused on work-in-progress papers.

Research

Current research topics include:

  • Transnational professionals (e.g. in consultancies, global professional service firms, standard-setters, advocacy networks, sustainability networks);
  • National and international elites (e.g. Danish power elites and their career trajectories and backgrounds, transnational elite groups);
  • International organizations (e.g. organizational dynamics in IMF, OECD, global public policy hybrid organizations);
  • Corporate interlock networks (e.g. among chemical producing corporations);
  • Global Innovation Networks (e.g. energy systems, research and development networks);
  • Global Wealth Chains (e.g. tax avoidance schemes; networks of professional advisers);
  • Market Emergence (e.g. cross-national fertility markets);
  • Organizational inequalities (e.g. labor market stratification, social inclusion/exclusion);
  • Professional ecologies (e.g. strategies of professional control in financial and environmental governance). 

Top journal publications in recent years have included articles in the following: Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Environment and Planning A, New Political Economy, Organization, Organization Studies, Public Administration, Regulation & Governance, Review of International Political Economy, Social Networks, Socioeconomic Review, Sociology, The Sociological Review, and other venues where socio-economic phenomena is debated. 

Conference participation

The group is active in attending conferences and association meetings. The most common are: 

  • ASA - American Sociological Association
  • Dansk Sociologi forening
  • EGOS –European Group for Organizational Studies
  • ESA – European Sociological Association
  • ISA – International Sociological Association
  • ISA – International Studies Association
  • SASE - Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics

Pro­jects

OMG is act­ive in rais­ing ex­tern­al funds for ori­gin­al re­search. Pre­vi­ous grant sources have in­cluded the European Re­search Coun­cil, the European Com­mis­sion, Carls­berg, the In­de­pend­ent Re­search Fund Den­mark, the Lu­min­ate Found­a­tion, the In­sti­tute for New Eco­nom­ic Think­ing, the Velux Found­a­tion and oth­ers.

Cur­rent pro­jects in­clude:

Ac­count­ab­il­ity and Audit

Project period: December 2019 – December 2019
Funder: Omidyar Network Services
Type: Private (International)

Recent high profile corporate failures in the United Kingdom have raised the issue of the effectiveness of audit and weaknesses in the audit market to the fore. This project investigates the institutional drivers of apparent increased levels of audit failure.

Explanation of increased levels of audit failure rests in the configuration of economic, cultural, regulatory arrangements that create unaccountable opportunity spaces where audit failures may take place.

The causes of audit failure therefore must be understood in organizational, institutional and historical context. The emphasis in the project is on the relations and interactions which lead to audit failures.

Project Participants

Coordinator: Duncan Wigan

Cor­por­ate Ar­bit­rage and CPL Maps: Hid­den Struc­tures of Con­trols in the Glob­al Eco­nomy (CORPLINK)

Project period: December 2016 – November 2020
Funder: Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
Type: EU
Collaborative partners: City, University of London

Political science conceptualises state-market relations as balancing acts between the public sphere (the state or government) and the private sphere (the market, dominated by large corporate bodies). The expansion of the global market has been led by the rise of large and highly mobile multinational firms.

Since many of these companies command turnover comparable to the GDP of middle size states, globalisation is often seen as a global shift of power from states to markets, where corporate power stems from centralisation of resources, capital and structural influence over politics and society.

Yet over the past three decades, large firms have been strategically dividing themselves into hundreds and even thousands of multi-unit, multi-layered and multi-jurisdictional cells. Typically constructed to maximise flexibility and opportunity, such de-centring of the global firm over time has increased, not decreased, the power of the corporation in world politics, society and economy.

Such practices amount to a new dimension of corporate power, arbitrage power, which is the main concept underpinning this project. Arbitrage power can be defined as the capacity of economic agents to capitalise on the gaps in the institutional and legal framework of the global economy.

Traditional approaches to power analysis which conventionally prioritise individual agents or clusters of interests, are of limited help when engaging with the complex ecology of a de-centred firm.

CORPLINK has two aims:

  1. to develop a theoretical framework to study the processes of ‘arbitrage power’ as a distinct facet of economic power;
  2. to develop a novel transferable methodology for the investigation of corporate arbitrage power, CPL maps (Corporate Processes and Linkages maps).

Specifically, the project innovates a new tool for the study of the firm as a political actor that navigates through complex networks and modalities of the global system of governance.

Project Participants

Partner: Leonard Seabrooke 
Participant: Duncan Wigan 

Glob­al In­nov­a­tion Net­works and Sus­tain­able En­ergy

Project period: February 2017 – December 2020

Funder: Sino-Danish Center

Type: Public (National)

Collaborative partners: Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development (CASTED), University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

This proposed PhD project is planned to be integrated into the ongoing SDC research project ‘Global Innovation Networks and Sustainable Energy’ within the Innovation Management theme of Social Science.

‘Global Innovation Networks and Sustainable Energy’ includes researchers from CBS, Aalborg University, DTU (RISØ and UNEP divisions) in Denmark and UCAS, Tsinghua and CASTED (think tank under the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology) in China.

Over the past decade, China has emerged as a leading global actor in renewable energy technologies. The Chinese market for renewable energy is almost doubling every year, and the Chinese renewable energy industries are currently growing much faster than fossil-fuel-based energy sectors.

Furthermore, the recent Chinese policy focus on sustainable transition and sustainable energy investments has become one to emulate by other countries around the world (Mathews & Tan, 2014).

This proposed PhD project is planned to contribute to the analyses of causes and consequences of China’s rise in sustainable energy technologies, in particular as they relate to internationalisation of innovation, national and global governance, and emerging global innovation networks in sustainable energy technologies.

Project Participants

Coordinator: Stine Haakonsson

Lon­git­ud­in­al Elite Net­works (LONGLINKS)

Project period: June 2018 – May 2021

Funder: Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond

Type: Public (National)

Collaborative partners: Gads Forlag

Elites are the subject of a rapidly growing international research field. Speaking to this field, LONGLINKS brings into focus the relationship between the long-term development of Danish elite relations and the Danish political economy, i.e. civil society, business and state.

The project hypothesises that, over the past century, the composition and internal organisation of the elite have changed significantly under the influence of both gradual changes in the Danish political economy and in the face of major external shocks such as the German occupation under World War Two.

Drawing on a unique data source in the form of the biographies of more than 20,000 individuals portrayed over the 1910–2017 period in the reference work Kraks Blå Bog (the Danish equivalent to Who’s Who), LONGLINKS addresses the following overall research question: What is the long-term relationship between changes in the political economy and changes in the composition and internal organisation of the Danish elite?

Project Participants

Coordinator: Hubert Buch-Hansen 

Participant: Joachim Lund 

Participant: Anders Sevelsted 

Participant: Anton Grau Larsen 

Participant: Jacob Lunding 

Ca­reers through Com­plex Net­works – Net­Ca­reers (Net­Ca­reers)

Project period: July 2020 – December 2022

Funder: Carlsbergfondet

Type: Private (National)

The NetCareers project asks: what characterizes the careers of individuals that rose from the bottom to the top?

Theoretically and methodologically, NetCareers will break new ground in pushing for a more dynamic and complex understanding of social mobility. New administrative data allow us to track population cohorts through their entire school and workplace careers.

The challenge is to make sense of the mobility of entire population cohorts through complex career networks.

Over the last two decades the fields of computer science, physics, and complexity studies have become increasingly interested in complex network models, leading to multiple scientific breakthroughs. But, we are yet to learn how these models reveal protracted social mobility processes at the time-scale of life courses and generations.

Using massive data sets on mobility careers from several countries, the project assembles an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the sciences and social sciences to model the complex network dynamics of social mobility.

Project Participants

Coordinator: Lasse Folke Henriksen 

Ex­pert Niches: How Loc­al Net­works Lever­age Mar­kets (NICHES)

Project period: December 2017 – December 2021

Funder: VELUX Foundations

Type: Private (National)

Collaborative partners: University of Massachusetts

Denmark has an excellent reputation for its high-end niche markets. Copenhagen’s unique and high quality dining scene as an example has made it a city break destination. Organic food provision is known as a mass phenomenon. Furniture design is synonymous with elegance and craftsmanship developed over generations. Danish sperm banks attract both local and foreign clientele based on genetic quality control and legal exceptionalism.

What environments permit those with expertise to create markets with global influence? Studies of market innovation focus on how collaborative networks are formed across organizations, permitting science and capital to intersect (Powell et al. 1996). Such networks are orchestrated by dominant firms that are centrally placed (Dhanaraj and Parkhe 2006), and form intense clusters to foster creativity (De Vaan et al. 2015). When well located, network and clustering effects permit higher levels of expert learning and market innovation (Gulati 1999; Zander 1999). This has long been the prevailing logic, and such theories have developed as the common sense for policy-making.

The Expert Niches project (NICHES) calls for a new wave of theorizing about how experts and environments interact to develop new markets. It is assumed that expert networks can be leveraged to influence markets if the broader environment permits this, and if governance institutions allow it.

The project departs from current thinking in two ways. The first is to challenge the assumption that the primary activity of actors is competition or cooperation over common resources. Lessons from evolutionary biology tell us that actors do compete and cooperate over common resources, but most of their activity is spent constructing niches of non-competition (Odling-Smee et al. 2003).

The primary activity is not a ‘war of all against all’ or network collaboration but changing and adapting to environments that permit their particular type to flourish. Environments carry genes (functional units of inheritance for particular traits) and memes (semantic information that is shared culturally) that enable actors to engage in niche construction rather than a survival of the fittest depiction of market competition.

Project Participants

Coordinator: Leonard Seabrooke 
Participant: Eleni Tsingou
Participant: Kevin Young
Participant: Jacob A. Hasselbalch

Staff at OMG

Oth­er staff at OMG

Emil Begtrup-Bright, PhD fellow