Léna Pellandini-Simányi

Dr. Pellandini-Simányi is Associate Professor in the Institute of Marketing and Communication Management. After studying Economics and Marketing (MSc), she earned her PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is director of the "Business, Markets and Society" BA specialization and co-chair of the Swiss Sociological Association's Economic Sociology Research Committee and of the "N: Finance and Society" network of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).

She is Principal Investigator of the SNSF project "Social patterning of economic subjectivities and the digital transformation of retail finance in Switzerland" and of the SNSF Lead Agency project "Investing in meaning: How symbolic meanings shape lay investors stock choices" (co-applicant: Adam Hayes, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and is project partner of the "Young people and finance" SNSF project (Principal Investigator: Fabrice Plomb, University of Fribourg).

Dr. Pellandini-Simányi's research looks at the interrelations between markets and moralities, combining sociology, marketing and organization theory. Her work examines both the consumer and the organizational side of markets, drawing on economic sociology, performativity, practice theory and consumer culture theory, and has focused on financial markets, debt and political consumerism. She is author of the book Consumption Norms and Everyday Ethics and her work has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research; Economy and Society; Organization Studies; Consumption, Markets and Culture; the Journal of Consumer Culture; Sociology, and the British Journal of Sociology, among others.

Her current research project, 'Social patterning of economic subjectivities and the digital transformation of retail finance in Switzerland', funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation project grant, examines how digital finance reshapes social classes and economic subjectivities. Her previous projects looked at the financialization of everyday life (individual grant, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation), the development of the mortgage market and the financial crisis in Hungary (principal investigator, funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) and shifting notions of the consumer in post-crisis financial consumer regulation in Switzerland, the UK and Hungary (Bolyai grant, funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences).

Current working group:

Yesim Akmeraner Kokat (postdoc)

Cristina Paradiso (PhD student)

Robert Musil (PhD student)

Laura Bruschi (visiting PhD student)