Professor David Soskice, London School of Economics

4.00 to 5.30 pm, Tuesday 25 November 2014, Committee Room 2, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL

 This seminar will address the ways in which the Information Technology revolution has substantially changed desirable skill sets, associated with: massive changes in employment characteristics; education participation at different levels; the social and economic role of women;  the structure and function of major cities; and in terms of rewards, inequality and poverty. Advanced societies have moved from a Fordist world driven by small elites to a world in which large proportions of younger cohorts go through some form of higher education. Yet despite (or because of) advanced democracy – and a gendered reconfiguration of political parties and welfare states – levels of redistribution in favour of the many losers from these changes have declined. This is true also of coordinated economies, although to a lesser extent. Over the next decade it is likely that we will see an increase in the pace of change; and particularly in the UK and USA, it is unclear as to how prepared we are for this further shift.

David Soskice has been LSE School Professor of Political Science and Economics since 2012. From 2007 to 2012 he was Research Professor of Comparative Political Economy at Oxford University, and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, as well as Research Professor in Political Science at Duke University. Prior to that he was research director at the WZB in Berlin since 1990; and before that economics fellow at University College, Oxford. His main research is on patterns of advanced capitalism, democratic politics and macroeconomics in the advanced nations with Torben Iversen, with whom he has written a sequence of articles in APSR, World Politics and QJE. He worked with Peter Hall on Varieties of Capitalism (OUP, 2001). With Wendy Carlin he has just published Macroeconomics: Instability, Institutions and the Financial System (OUP, 2014), and he is currently working with Nicola Lacey on crime and punishment in the US and the UK.

The seminar is free to attend, but prior registration would be helpful: to register, please contact llakesevents@ioe.ac.uk