WINIR Symposium "The Nature and Governance of the Corporation"

World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR) is a non-profit, research and educational association of social scientists and other interested scholars, devoted to the international promotion and development of research into the nature, function, evolution, and impact of social institutions and organizations. The Institute of Law and the Faculty of Economics from the Università della Svizzera italiana will host the First WINIR Symposium in Lugano from 22th to 24th April 2015. The Symposium has planned attendance of 80 scholars. Contributions and participants will come from all disciplines and perspectives that can enhance the understanding of the nature and governance of corporations, with an appeal to scholars of institutions and institutional approaches from at least three of the following: economics, history, law, philosophy, politics, and sociology.Four leading researchers from four different disciplines (law, management, economics, and philosophy) will deliver their keynote speeches at WINIR symposium in Lugano:-Simon Deakin (Law, University of Cambridge) - Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge, specializing in labour law, private law, company law, EU law, law and economics, law and development and empirical legal studies. He is also Director in the Centre for Business Research (http://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/) and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He has given the ILO Social Policy Lectures (Budapest 2002), the Tanner Lectures (Oxford, 2008), and the Mike Larkin Memorial Lecture (Cape Town, 2009). In 2003 and 2008 he was a Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia University and in 2004 a visiting fellow in the Department of Law, European University Institute, Florence. Since 2004 he has been Omron visiting fellow at Doshisha University, Kyoto. In 2012-13 he was Francqui Visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp and in September 2013 he gave a course of lectures on corporate governance at Moscow State University. He is editor in chief of the Industrial Law Journal and a member of the editorial board of the the Cambridge Journal of Economics. He was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2005 and in 2012 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Catholic University of Louvain. He is a recipient of the ECGI and Allen & Overy prizes for corporate governance research. (http://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/sf-deakin/22) -Colin Mayer (Management, University of Oxford) - Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School, and the former Peter Moores Dean of the School between 2006 and 2011. He is an expert on all aspects of corporate finance, governance and taxation, and the regulation of financial institutions. He has consulted for numerous large firms and for governments, regulators and international agencies around the world. He teaches the elective course on Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructurings on the MBA and the Masters in Financial Economics, and the Principles of Financial Regulation on the Masters in Law and Finance. Colin has served on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals and assisted in establishing prestigious networks of economics, law and finance academics in Europe at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He was a founding editor of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy and a founding co-editor of the Review of Finance. Colin was a director and chairman of Oxera between 1986 and 2010, and was instrumental in building the firm into what is now one of the largest independent economics consultancies in Europe. Colin is an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and St Anne’s College, Oxford, and he is a Professorial Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He is an Ordinary Member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal, and a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute. (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/community/people/colin-mayer)-Ugo Pagano (Economics, University of Siena, and Central European University Budapest): Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Siena (Italy) and Director of the PhD programme in Economics and President of S. Chiara Graduate School. Pagano was the President of the Italian Association for the Study of Comparative Economic Systems and member of the Council of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. He is former founding editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics. He is visiting professor at Central European University where he served as head of department. He is a partner of the 6th European Framework Programme REFGOV (Reflexive Governance in the Public Interest). He was University Lecturer and a Fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. In 1997 he was awarded the Kapp Prize for the essay ‘Transition and the Speciation of the Japanese Model’ by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. (http://www.deps.unisi.it/it/dipartimento/personale/docenti/ugo-pagano) -Philip Petit (Philosophy, Princeton University, and Australian National University): Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002. From 2012-13 he will be spending Spring semester for each of a numbers of years in the Australian National University as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010 and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2013; he has long been a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary professorships in Philosophy at Sydney University and Queen's University, Belfast and has been awarded honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Lund University, Universite de Montreal and Queen's University, Belfast. He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. (http://www.princeton.edu/~ppettit/)Moreover, it is expected the attendance of leading scholars like Katharina Pistor (Columbia Law School) and Geoffrey Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire). Katharina Pistor is the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the Director of the School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation, and has served as a member of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought since its inception. She previously taught at the Kennedy School of Government, and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany and the Harvard Institute for International Development. In 2012 she received the Max Planck Research Award for her contributions to international financial regulation.Geoffrey Hodgson is a Research Professor of Business Studies in the University of Hertfordshire, and also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics. He is recognized as one of the leading figures of modern critical institutionalism. In 1988 Hodgson was involved in setting up the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE). He was its General Secretary until 1998. The international scientific quality committee is composed by leading scholars from different disciplinary background: Peter Boettke (George Mason University – economics), Simon Deakin (University of Cambridge – law), Geoff Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire, economics), Timur Kuran (Duke University – economics), Uskali MAKI (University of Helsinki – philosophy), Katharina Pistor (Columbia University – law), Sven Steinmo (European University Institute – politics), and Wolgang Streeck (Max Planck Institute Cologne – sociology).