Title of presentation: The Creation of Actors of Socio-Economic Development

Jerzy Hausner, is former Minister of Labor and Social Policy in the Government of Prime Minister Leszek Miller, and since January 8, 2003, after the fusion of the Ministry of Labor with the Ministry of Economy, he is Minister of Economy, Labor and Social Policy.

He is a graduate of the Economic Academy of Cracow, and since 1972 has held a research and teaching position there. In 1994 he received the title of professor ordinarius-the highest scientific title in Poland. He holds a chair of economics and public administration at this Academy.

From 1986 to 1989 he was secretary for science and academics at the regional Cracow Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party.

From 1994 to 1996 he served as Director-General of the Prime Minister's Office. In that capacity, he was in charge of a group of advisors to Grzegorz Kolodko-then Deputy Prime Minister responsible for the economy. He coordinated preparatory work on and the implementation of the "Strategy for Poland"-at the time the key government program of economic and social development of the country. He also prepared the outline for the "Compact for Silesia"-a program of economic renewal of that crisis-stricken industrial region. He further served as commissioner to establish the Government Center for Strategic Studies. In February 1997, in the Government of Prime Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, he was appointed Undersecretary of State at the Prime Minister's Chancery and Government's Commissioner for Social Security Reform. He was charged with developing an implementation timetable for the social security reform, establishing the operational principles of pension funds, as well as with an ex ante evaluation of the implementation costs of the new social security system, and with designing a financing scheme.

In his research, he is interested in the interaction of economy and politics (political economy, public economy and public administration). He has authored 231 publications, including 48 books and monographs, 58 journal articles, and 38 chapters in books. He holds membership in the Polish Economic Association, the Scientific Association of Organization and Management, and the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.

He is Member of the 4th Sejm (Parliament) of the Republic of Poland.

Title of presentation: Why Economics Dominates Policy and Sociology Does Not: A Study of Academics and Transition Policy

Bruce Kogut is Professor at INSEAD. Until December 2002, he was the Dr. Felix Zandman Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania where he headed the Reginald H. Jones Center. Bruce Kogut has been a visitor at the Ecole Polytechnique, Stockholm School of Economics, Wissenschaftszentrum, and Santa Fe Institute. He works in the area of international direct investment, governance, technology policy, and privatization. He currently also acts in the capacity of a research director for the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management and as the editor of the European Management Review. In recent years, he has published on small worlds and Germany, privatization and the IMF, why good science can be poor value, and generative rules and knowledge in such journals as Management Science, American Sociological Review, Strategic Management Journal, International Monetary Fund Staff Papers, Gerer et Comprendre, and Industrial and Corporate Change

Title of presentation: Nonprofits, Membership Associations, and the Institutional Foundations of Democratic Civil Society

Theda Skocpol is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, and Director of the Center for American Political Studies, at Harvard University. Skocpol has served as President of the Social Science History Association (1996) and of the American Political Science Association (2002-03). She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Social Insurance, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Skocpol's first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge University Press, 1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. A leader in historical-institutional and comparative research, Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985). For the past fifteen years, Skocpol's research has focused on U.S. politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her wide-ranging analyses of U.S. public social programs are collected in Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1995). Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1992), won five scholarly awards.

Skocpol's most recent books include Boomerang: Clinton's Health Reform and the Turn Against Government (W.W. Norton, 1997); Civic Engagement in American Democracy, coedited with Morris P. Fiorina (Brookings Institution Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 1999); The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy (W. W. Norton and The Century Foundation, 2000); and Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).

Active in civic as well as academic life, Skocpol was included in policy discussions with President Bill Clinton at the White House and Camp David. She writes for scholarly journals and publications appealing to the educated public. She appears on television and radio, and is frequently quoted by journalists. At Harvard, Skocpol is coordinating a major research project on civic engagement in American democracy, considering the rise and development of voluntary associations from 1790 to the present.

Title of presentation: The Facts of the Matter: Globalization as a Form of Efficiency

Nigel Thrift was recently appointed Head of the Life and Environmental Sciences Division at the University of Oxford. Professor Thrift is one of the world's leading human geographers and social scientists. Awarded many prizes and commendations recognising his research, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. Prof. Thrift sits on a number of advisory committees for the UK Government, and is a member of the ESRC Research Priorities Board.

About his research interests, Professor Thrift writes: My main research interests cover a range of linked topics. I am continuing my longstanding interest in finance, working especially on the use of space and time by financial markets. My other longstanding interest - in the history of time - is also continuing. Paul Glennie and I have nearly completed a book on the subject, the outcome of more than ten years of concerted research.

My other interests are of three kinds. First, I am concerned with the future impacts of information and communications technology. I have become particularly interested in current developments in robotics and software which may allow a new kind of animal to come about, and how we might have relations with these new inhabitants. I have also tried to consider how the world will be changed by the development of locational tagging of almost every object that exists, producing an environment which is able to know itself and cognize. Second, I continue to work on what I call nonrepresentational. theory, especially by expanding on a set of issues. So far as my interest in time is concerned, this has led me towards trying to work on a geography of the precognitive realm, on what shows up in the half second or so between action and cognition. More generally, I have been working on how style, affect and politics intersect. Third, I have been trying to present an account of modern capitalism as a new kind of formation which has as a theoretical knowledge of the economy at its heart but uses this theory as practice. In every case, what I am striving for is to use empirically rich theory to ask new kinds of question.

More information about Nigel Thrift's publications are available on his website.