Annette Bernhardt is Senior Policy Analyst, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. A leading expert on lowwage labor markets, Bernhardt has focused on helping national and local efforts to develop viable responses to the changing nature of work in the U.S., with particular emphasis on the service sector. Bernhardt has organized several conferences on these topics, presented at numerous sociology and economics meetings, and published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the Journal of Labor Economics, among others. Most recently she was lead author of Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility in the New American Labor Market, which documented for the first time the marked deterioration in upward mobility over the past three decades, and won Princeton University's Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations, 2002. Bernhardt received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1993.

Hugues Bertrand is professor of economics at the university of Paris 7. He is director of the CEREQ (Centre of studies and researches on employment and qualifications), which leads studies and researches useful for public and private bodies organising and reshaping the relationships between training, work and employment. His first areas of research were institutional and historical macroeconomics, and the conditions of long term growth. He then took the responsibility of the economic sector of the CFDT, one of the leading french trade union, and turned to labour economics (for instance in English : The wage labour nexus in Regulation theory: the state of art, La Découverte), to human resources development (for example : La gestion des ressources humaines dans les banques en Europe, or La gestion des competences, Economica), and to European industrial relations (Les enjeux de l’Europe sociale). He is now dedicated to the relations between education, training, work and employment, which are the main domains of investigation of the CEREQ.

Title of presentation: Life long learning: from rhetoric to implementation

Robert Boyer is Senior Researcher at CNRS, Professor at EHESS, and an Economist at CEPREMAP. Boyer's primary areas of research interest are: institutional and historical macroeconomics, innovation and growth analysis, labour markets and wage labour nexus, international comparisons of "régulation" modes and European integration. His recent publications include: The Regulation School : A Critical Introduction; The Returns to Incomes Policy (with Ronald Dore & Zoe Mars); After Fordism (with Jean Pierre Durand); States Against Markets: The Limits of Globalization (with Daniel Drache, Eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: The Embededness of Institution (with Rogers Hollingsworth, Eds.); Between Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer and Hybridization of Productive Models in the International Automobile Industry (with Elsie Charron, Ulrich Jurgens et Steven Tolliday, Eds); Japanese Capitalism in Crisis (with Toshio Yamada Eds.); and Regulation Theory: The State of Art (with Yves Saillards Eds.). His objectives for SASE are to develop an interdisciplinary approach with professional economists; to diffuse the results of some institutional research elaborated by economists to social researchers of other disciplines; and to promote the participation of French and European scholars in the networks and annual meeting of SASE. Boyer is an Honorary Fellow of SASE and has served on the Executive Council.

Title of Presentation: The Power and the Limits of Human Altruism

Ernst Fehr is Professor in Microeconomics and Experimental Economics at the University of Zürich. He is director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zürich and of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the Analysis of Economic Growth in Vienna. Fehr graduated at the University of Vienna in 1980 where he also earned his doctorate in 1986. His research focuses on the proximate patterns and the evolutionary origins of human altruism and the interplay between social preferences, social norms and strategic interactions. He has conducted extensive research on the impact of social preferences on competition, cooperation and on the psychological foundations of incentives. More recently he has worked on the role of bounded rationality in strategic interactions. He is on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Public Economics, Experimental Economics and the Journal of Socio-Economics. He won the Gossen Price of the German Economic Association in 1999 and the Hicks-Tinbergen Medal of the European Economic Association in 2000. He has given several keynote lectures, among them the Frank Hahn Lecture at the annual congress of the Royal Economic Society 2001, the Schumpeter Lecture at the annual congress of the European Economic Association 2001 and an invited Lecture at the 8th World Congress of the Econometric Society in 2000. He is president of the Economic Science Association for the years 2003-2005.

Tentative title of presentation: The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries: How Cultural Definitions of Social Membership Shape Inequality

Michele Lamont is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. During 2002-2003, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She has published widely in the fields of cultural sociology, inequality, race and immigration, comparative sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and contemporary sociological theory. Her most recent book, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000; French translation, Presses de Science Po, 2002), won the 2000 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2001 Mattei Dogan Award for the Best Comparativist Book, Society for Comparative Research. It was also selected as "Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics" by the Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University. In the last few years she also published Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (with Laurent Thévenot, Cambridge University Press, 2000) and edited The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries (University of Chicago Press and Russell Sage Foundation 1999).She is currently serving as Chair-Elect of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Science Foundation, and is co-director of the research program on "Successful Societies" at the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research.

Title of presentation: Communication and Knowledge: How is the knowledge base of an economy constructed?

Loet Leydesdorff reads Science & Technology Dynamics at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He has published in the philosophy of science, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation. His studies of communication in science, technology, and innovation enabled him to specify theory and methods for understanding the self-organizing dynamics of the knowledge base of social systems. He is co-organizer of the series of workshops, conferences, special issues, etc., entitled "The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations." He received the Derek de Solla Price Award 2003 for his work in scientometrics. Recent publications are available at the Internet at www.leydesdorff.net. A monograph entitled A Sociological Theory of Communication: The Self-Organization of the Knowledge-Based Society. Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers, 22003, is available at www.upublish.com/books/leydesdorff.htm.

Title of Presentation: Knowledge as a Good That Has to be Socially Learned

Pierre Livet is Professor of Philosophy and Epistemology at the University of Aix Marseille I. Previously has was at the University of Besançon. He is a member of the CREA (Paris), the Seminar of Comparative Epistmology (Aix) and chairman of the Doctoral School Cognition, Language, Education. His publications include: Penser le pratique, La communauté virtuelle, Editions de l'Eclat, L'éthique à la croisée des savoirs, Argumentation, droit et sciences sociales, (dir), De la perception à l'action, La révision des croyances, (ed.), Traité de sciences cognitives, Emotions et rationalité morale. He has also published paper in several subject areas including: epistemology of social sciences and cognitive sciences, philosophy of action and emotion, social philosophy.

Title of Presentation: Businesses Mobilize Production Through Markets: Parametric Modeling of Path-dependent Outcomes in Oriented Network Flows

Harrison C. White is professor of Sociology at Columbia University. White has also taught the University of Arizona-Tucson, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Chicago, Edinburgh University, and Harvard University and has worked in several applied research organizations and business schools. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned doctorates at MIT (theoretical physics) and Princeton (sociology) and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. One line of his current research melds economic sociology with mathematical modeling (Markets from Networks, Princeton University Press 2002); another meshes social network with discourse analyses. The theoretical foundation of both was laid in Identity and Control, published in 1992. He teaches courses also in the sociology of art. White collaborates with an INRA interdisciplinary team in field studies of how the Languedoc-Rousillon wine sector has been evolving.

Hermann Schmidt is Professor at the University of Duisburg and a consultant to national and international agencies on vocational education. He is on the Board of Directors of the Center for Research in Innovation and Society, the Board of the National Center on Education and the Economy, and the Advisory Forum of the European Training Foundation.