N Bandelj
Biographic Data
| ID | 14277 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Bandelj |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Bandelj |
| SIGNATURE | BANDELJ N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7103-7252 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 621 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Alloparenting the investment child
Emotional economies of late capitalism
This essay, based on the 2024 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Presidential Address, interrogates the role of emotions in economies of late capitalism. Scholars of the interplay between economy and society have recently been preoccupied with the study of economization of life. I argue that we have largely missed how these processes interact with what I call emotionalization of life, or developments that have made emotions our compas…
The social life of money for children
Inspired by Nigel Dodd's The Social Life of Money, this article proposes an analysis of entangled economic lives, that is, how meaning, structures and politics jointly shape the flow of monies within households. The past decades have marked a shift from "childrearing expenditures" to "parenting investments" that align with new visions of both children and parents. The new social life of money for children revolves less around what Viviana Zelizer…
Pricing the priceless childcare
This article connects Viviana Zelizer's theory of the social meaning of money to family studies, using the case of American parents’ spending on children. We investigate how money spent on the youngest children—babies and toddlers—reflects the growing expert emphasis on the importance of parental investment in the critical early period for child development. First, we review literature on expert knowledge to trace the shift in increasing emphasis…
Economic marginalization of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe
How has identification and differentiation based on ethnicity shaped the economic experience in postsocialist Europe? We propose that creation of neoliberal capitalism in the context of ethnic conflict led to a sense of economic marginalization of East European ethnic minorities. Findings from Life in Transition Survey analysis show greater economic discontent by ethnic minorities in 2006 than in 1989 and persistent discontent in 2016, controllin…
Raising Children, Rising Debt
American households owe more than $12 trillion in mortgages, which represents the main source of a family's debt. Scholars connect mortgages to the desire of families, especially better-off households, to seek housing in neighborhoods with good schools for their children, which tend to be more expensive. Although this perspective assumes a children-mortgage link, we do not know whether having children actually increases mortgage, nor whether and …
The Great Separation
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Parental investment and the economization of parenting
We argue that economists, as well as other social scientists, have increasingly focused on parenting as a means of building children’s human capital and reducing poverty. This is reflected, in part, in the use of the concept of ‘parental investment’ to study parenting, which has gained prominence over the past thirty years. This intellectual program is also evident in interventions targeting low-income parents to change parenting behavior to refl…
America's Parenting Economy
The American parenting economy is built around the notion that raising children is a matter of private parental investment. This essay outlines briefly the features of what is best characterized as, not family‐friendly, but rather family‐hostile policy in the United States, before it proposes two reasons for why the ideal of parental investment holds its grip. The first is the historical political entanglement of neoliberalism with neoconservatis…
Pricing the priceless child 2.0
This article takes Viviana Zelizer's (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child to the new millennium. Zelizer documented the transformation between the 19th and 20th century from an "economically useful" to an "emotionally priceless" child. She observed that by the 1930s, American children were practically economically worthless but invested with significant emotional value. What has happened to this emotionally priceless child at the dawn of the new mi…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Investment, Saving, and Borrowing for Children
Nina Bandelj a, Angelina Grigoryeva b, Investment, Saving, and Borrowing for Children: Trends by Wealth, Race, and Ethnicity, 1998–2016, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 3, Wealth Inequality and Child Development: Implications for Policy and Practice (August 2021), pp. 50-77
The Unexpected Legacy of Charles Tilly
This essay is part of a special section entitled “Legacies of Sociology’s Past." My work addresses the contributions of Charles Tilly
Gendered Relational Work
We link the theory of gender performance to the perspective on the social meaning of money and relational work. Using longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on young adult women and men, ages 18 through 24 in the US, we examine survey responses to different money-related situations. We question the expected gender-typical meanings of money, offering a more contextual understanding. Specifically, we find that when asked about the present…
Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries
Significance Understanding the causes of rising inequality is of concern in many countries. Using administrative data, we find that the share of inequality that is between workplaces is growing in 12 of 14 countries examined, and in no country has it fallen. Countries with declining employment protections see growth in both between- and within-workplace inequalities, but this impact is stronger for between-workplace inequalities. These results su…
Amplified Decoupling in the Global Economy
Developing countries adopt global policies in their quest for economic development. Studies show that such policies are decoupled from their intended effects, or that over time, they become more effective. But what if the opposite happens and policies, which were initially efficacious, become increasingly decoupled with time? We recognize this phenomenon as amplified decoupling. Combining historical and quantitative analysis, we examine a case of…
Contextualizing Anti-Immigrant Attitudes of East Europeans
This paper article examines attitudes toward immigrants by analyzing data from the 2010 and 2016 waves of the EBRD’s Life in Transition Survey among respondents from 16 East European countries. Logistic regressions with clustered standard errors and country fixed effects show significantly higher anti-immigrant sentiments after the 2015 immigration pressures on the European Union borders compared with attitudes in 2010. Almost two thirds of the r…
Emotions and Economy
Sociologists have long considered emotions as central to social life, but their investigations have remained largely outside of the subfield of economic sociology. This entry takes a wide lens to the topic of emotions and economy. It begins with a brief reflection on the statements of classical sociologists and political economists before reporting on research on emotion work, the central sociological concept in the intersection of economy and em…
Relational Work in the Economy
In her groundbreaking scholarship on intimacy and economy, Viviana Zelizer coined the concept of relational work, or efforts in matching social relations with economic transactions and media of exchange. This article reviews the conceptual advances and empirical applications of relational work over the past two decades. I first trace the origins of the concept and discuss how it is distinct from the idea of embeddedness. I then identify variants …
Immigrant socioeconomic mobility in the United States
We review recent social science research on the socioeconomic mobility of immigrants to the United States by focusing on the educational, occupational, and income attainments among immigrant adults, the first‐generation, and the educational attainment of their children, the New Second‐Generation. Existing research has identified significant inequalities in educational attainment between second‐generation Asian and Latinx immigrant groups. Researc…
Academic Familism, Spillover Prestige and Gender Segregation in Sociology Subfields
All About Profit? How Economics and Finance Experts Disseminate the Instrumental Market Logic to Family Businesses
East European Discontent
Rise of populist and right-wing tendencies in Eastern Europe has been linked to people’s increasing dissatisfaction with the economy and growing inequality. Using Life in Transition Survey, we examine East Europeans’ attitudes on these economic issues. In contrast to views that the 2008 economic crisis prompted dissatisfaction, we find that even before the crisis, East Europeans were not convinced that their economic situation was better at that …
Economic Expectations of Young Adults
In uncertain economic times, who are those young adults that show positive expectations about their economic future? And who are those who worry? Based on previous stratification research and extending economic sociology insights into the realm of young people's economic expectations, we focus on the impact of family class background and a sense of current meaningful community relations on young adults' general and job-specific economic expectati…
Introduction. Advancing Money Talks
Relational Work and Economic Sociology
This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept's utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretica…
Relational Work in the Economy
In her groundbreaking scholarship on intimacy and economy, Viviana Zelizer coined the concept of relational work, or efforts in matching social relations with economic transactions and media of exchange. This article reviews the conceptual advances and empirical applications of relational work over the past two decades. I first trace the origins of the concept and discuss how it is distinct from the idea of embeddedness. I then identify variants …
Emotions in economic action and interaction
How do emotions influence economic action? Current literature recognizes the importance of emotions for economy because they either help individuals perform economic roles through emotion management or enhancement of emotional intelligence, or because they aid rationality through their influence on preference formation. All these strands of research investigate the link between emotions and economy from an atomistic/individualistic perspective. I…
How Socio-Economic Change Shapes Income Inequality in Post-Socialist Europe
Although income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe was considerably lower during socialism than in other countries at comparable levels of development, it increased significantly in all Central and East European states after the fall of communist regimes. However, some of these countries managed to maintain comparatively low inequality levels 10 years into the transition period while inequalities have skyrocketed in others. What explains th…
Foreign Investment and Income Inequality
How does foreign direct investment (FDI) affect income inequality? We bring evidence from the natural experiment of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to bear on a hotly debated topic. We begin by outlining the literature on the effect of FDI on income inequality, and the serious critiques offered by Firebaugh that raised doubt on previous research. We then discuss the ways in which CEE countries provide a natural experiment with which to contribut…
The Global Economy as Instituted Process
I argue that economic globalization, indicated by the tremendous rise in world foreign direct investment (FDI) in recent decades, is not driven simply by investor considerations of economic risk and return, but is significantly shaped by the construction of demand for foreign capital by receiving states. States signal this demand through the levels of formal and substantive legitimacy they grant to FDI. They institutionalize globalization in form…
From Communists to Foreign Capitalists
From Communists to Foreign Capitalists explores the intersections of two momentous changes in the late twentieth century: the fall of Communism and the rise of globalization. Delving into the economic change that accompanied these shifts in central and Eastern Europe, Nina Bandelj presents a pioneering sociological treatment of the process of foreign direct investment (FDI). She demonstrates how both investors and hosts rely on social networks, i…
Embedded Economies
Foreign direct investment (FDI) is considered a powerful catalyst in market transition. However, FDI flows vary greatly across Central and East European transition countries. I compare and contrast current approaches, which consider country characteristics as determinants of FDI, with a relational approach that emphasizes institutional, political, economic, and cultural connections between investor and host countries. Regression analyses of FDI f…
Investment, Saving, and Borrowing for Children
Nina Bandelj a, Angelina Grigoryeva b, Investment, Saving, and Borrowing for Children: Trends by Wealth, Race, and Ethnicity, 1998–2016, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 3, Wealth Inequality and Child Development: Implications for Policy and Practice (August 2021), pp. 50-77
Economic Expectations of Young Adults
In uncertain economic times, who are those young adults that show positive expectations about their economic future? And who are those who worry? Based on previous stratification research and extending economic sociology insights into the realm of young people's economic expectations, we focus on the impact of family class background and a sense of current meaningful community relations on young adults' general and job-specific economic expectati…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Academic Familism, Spillover Prestige and Gender Segregation in Sociology Subfields
Economic objects as cultural objects
Bringing together perspectives from economic sociology and cultural sociology, this paper proposes that because economic phenomena are imbued with meaning they can be studied as cultural objects. This approach includes first identifying the content of people's understanding of economic phenomena and then tracing out what is it that structures their interpretations. The paper applies the cultural objects analysis to the public debates surrounding …
Hostile Worlds or Connected Lives? Research on the Interplay Between Intimacy and Economy
Economic sociologists have devoted most of their attention to the activities of individuals and firms in markets. However, recent attempts have pushed for a better understanding of the relationship between intimacy and economy. Such efforts have been inspired, in large part, by Viviana Zelizer (2000, 2005). In her inquiry on the purchase of intimacy, Zelizer proposed seminal differentiations between the “hostile worlds,” “nothing but,” and “conne…
Work and Neoliberal Globalization
This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization’s impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while othe…
How EU Integration and Legacies Mattered for Foreign Direct Investment into Central and Eastern Europe
This essay uses the case of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Central and Eastern Europe to stipulate how European Union (EU) integration affected the economic globalisation of the post-socialist region. Existing studies argue that expectations of impending EU membership had a direct effect on raising FDI inflows because they reduced perceived investment risks for potential investors. In contrast, I show that the EU accession process worked thro…
Pricing the priceless child 2.0
This article takes Viviana Zelizer's (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child to the new millennium. Zelizer documented the transformation between the 19th and 20th century from an "economically useful" to an "emotionally priceless" child. She observed that by the 1930s, American children were practically economically worthless but invested with significant emotional value. What has happened to this emotionally priceless child at the dawn of the new mi…
Negotiating Global, Regional, and National Forces
The article examines foreign investment in Slovenia to study the interplay between global investment flows, pressures from regional associations, and national protectionist efforts and resistance to foreign ownership. Using content analysis of policies and parliamentary debates, the author investigates how the newly established Slovenian state institutionalizes its attitudes toward the participation of foreigners in the national economy in the of…
On postsocialist capitalism
Structures of globalization
Existing sociological theories of international relations yield contrasting predictions for their structure that range from an increasingly dense and universally tied network to networks in which ties tend to concentrate within or between certain types of economically, politically or culturally defined blocs. We contribute to this growing body of empirical research by analyzing original data on the complete worldwide network of bilateral investme…
Economic Culture in the Public Sphere
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Networks as Resources, Organizational Logic, and Change Mechanism
The Great Separation
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
The Unexpected Legacy of Charles Tilly
This essay is part of a special section entitled “Legacies of Sociology’s Past." My work addresses the contributions of Charles Tilly
Gendered Relational Work
We link the theory of gender performance to the perspective on the social meaning of money and relational work. Using longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics data on young adult women and men, ages 18 through 24 in the US, we examine survey responses to different money-related situations. We question the expected gender-typical meanings of money, offering a more contextual understanding. Specifically, we find that when asked about the present…
Embedded Economies
Foreign direct investment (FDI) is considered a powerful catalyst in market transition. However, FDI flows vary greatly across Central and East European transition countries. I compare and contrast current approaches, which consider country characteristics as determinants of FDI, with a relational approach that emphasizes institutional, political, economic, and cultural connections between investor and host countries. Regression analyses of FDI f…
Particularizing the Global
Exploring the relationship between global forces and local practices, this article examines the reception of global investment flows in an East European transition country, Slovenia. Using content analysis of legal regulations and policies, the article investigates how global pressures impact the official foreign investment policy regime in Slovenia. Examples of foreign investment transactions illustrate economic practice. The analysis shows that…
Negotiating Global, Regional, and National Forces
The article examines foreign investment in Slovenia to study the interplay between global investment flows, pressures from regional associations, and national protectionist efforts and resistance to foreign ownership. Using content analysis of policies and parliamentary debates, the author investigates how the newly established Slovenian state institutionalizes its attitudes toward the participation of foreigners in the national economy in the of…
The Sociology of the Economy
Networks as Resources, Organizational Logic, and Change Mechanism
Economic objects as cultural objects
Bringing together perspectives from economic sociology and cultural sociology, this paper proposes that because economic phenomena are imbued with meaning they can be studied as cultural objects. This approach includes first identifying the content of people's understanding of economic phenomena and then tracing out what is it that structures their interpretations. The paper applies the cultural objects analysis to the public debates surrounding …
Foreign Investment and Income Inequality
How does foreign direct investment (FDI) affect income inequality? We bring evidence from the natural experiment of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to bear on a hotly debated topic. We begin by outlining the literature on the effect of FDI on income inequality, and the serious critiques offered by Firebaugh that raised doubt on previous research. We then discuss the ways in which CEE countries provide a natural experiment with which to contribut…
Economic Sociology of Work
The objective of this volume is to apply the economic sociology perspective to issues of work broadly defined. Economic sociology is a vibrant area of research investigating how social structures, power allocations and cultural understandings shape the production, consumption, distribution and exchange of goods and services. The volume consists of three parts. Contributors of this title include prominent senior scholars and promising junior resea…
The Global Economy as Instituted Process
I argue that economic globalization, indicated by the tremendous rise in world foreign direct investment (FDI) in recent decades, is not driven simply by investor considerations of economic risk and return, but is significantly shaped by the construction of demand for foreign capital by receiving states. States signal this demand through the levels of formal and substantive legitimacy they grant to FDI. They institutionalize globalization in form…
Emotions in economic action and interaction
How do emotions influence economic action? Current literature recognizes the importance of emotions for economy because they either help individuals perform economic roles through emotion management or enhancement of emotional intelligence, or because they aid rationality through their influence on preference formation. All these strands of research investigate the link between emotions and economy from an atomistic/individualistic perspective. I…
How EU Integration and Legacies Mattered for Foreign Direct Investment into Central and Eastern Europe
This essay uses the case of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Central and Eastern Europe to stipulate how European Union (EU) integration affected the economic globalisation of the post-socialist region. Existing studies argue that expectations of impending EU membership had a direct effect on raising FDI inflows because they reduced perceived investment risks for potential investors. In contrast, I show that the EU accession process worked thro…
How Socio-Economic Change Shapes Income Inequality in Post-Socialist Europe
Although income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe was considerably lower during socialism than in other countries at comparable levels of development, it increased significantly in all Central and East European states after the fall of communist regimes. However, some of these countries managed to maintain comparatively low inequality levels 10 years into the transition period while inequalities have skyrocketed in others. What explains th…
From Communists to Foreign Capitalists
From Communists to Foreign Capitalists explores the intersections of two momentous changes in the late twentieth century: the fall of Communism and the rise of globalization. Delving into the economic change that accompanied these shifts in central and Eastern Europe, Nina Bandelj presents a pioneering sociological treatment of the process of foreign direct investment (FDI). She demonstrates how both investors and hosts rely on social networks, i…
Work and Neoliberal Globalization
This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization’s impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while othe…
Relevance of nationality in cross-border economic transactions
How relevant is nationality in global economic behavior? The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the relevance of nationality affiliations and nationality conceptions in cross-border economic transactions, using the case of foreign investment exchanges. In particular, I examine how nationality affiliations may shape the types of commitments that actors will want to realize through foreign investment transactions, and how nationality categorization…
Relational Work and Economic Sociology
This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept's utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretica…
Structures of globalization
Existing sociological theories of international relations yield contrasting predictions for their structure that range from an increasingly dense and universally tied network to networks in which ties tend to concentrate within or between certain types of economically, politically or culturally defined blocs. We contribute to this growing body of empirical research by analyzing original data on the complete worldwide network of bilateral investme…
Capitalist diversity on Europe's periphery
East European Politics ISSN: 2159-9165 (Print) 2159-9173 (Online) Journal homepage: http://rsa.tandfonline.com/loi/fjcs21 Capitalist diversity on Europe's periphery Nina Bandelj To cite this article: Nina Bandelj (2013) Capitalist diversity on Europe's periphery, East European Politics, 29:4, 546-547, DOI: 10.1080/21599165.2013.834425 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2013.834425 Published online: 01 Nov 2013. Submit you…
Eastern E urope
This entry reviews scholarship on race, ethnicity, and nationalism in Eastern Europe. First, it examines nationalism both during and after socialism, and, in particular, its role in the dissolution of multiethnic states. Then, it proceeds to review the empirical evidence on the ethnic versus civic nationalism debate, and contrasts it to the research grounded in the alternative, constructivist and cognitive, approaches to ethnic identity. In the l…
Global Economic Networks
Globalization can be most concretely captured in an investigation of global economic networks. In this essay, we review foundational and cutting‐edge research on global economic networks, including economic ties that result from trade, investment, finance, and remittance relations between corporations and/or citizens from different nations; through flows of people due to migration and global tourism; and via international institutions that govern…
Culture and Economy
Hostile Worlds or Connected Lives? Research on the Interplay Between Intimacy and Economy
Economic sociologists have devoted most of their attention to the activities of individuals and firms in markets. However, recent attempts have pushed for a better understanding of the relationship between intimacy and economy. Such efforts have been inspired, in large part, by Viviana Zelizer (2000, 2005). In her inquiry on the purchase of intimacy, Zelizer proposed seminal differentiations between the “hostile worlds,” “nothing but,” and “conne…
Signalling Demand for Foreign Investment
A unique dataset on bilateral investment treaties provides a novel source of evidence on the link between neoliberal globalisation and market transition. We argue that postsocialist countries of Europe and Eurasia, more than other developing regions in the world, signed such treaties to signal demand for foreign investment in the spirit of neoliberalism. We calculated the density of the whole BIT network since its inception in 1959 to 2009, and d…
Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
Ten years after European Union (EU) enlargement, democracy in the East European new member states is still a topic of discussion. This paper focuses on the initial years of democratisation in these countries, and asks what economic, political, and social processes explain its variation. Cross-sectional time series analysis (1990-2002) shows the impact of political orientation of ruling parties to reform, electoral institutions, size of ethnic min…
Economic Culture in the Public Sphere
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Economics (43 works) · Political science (34 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (16 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (12 works) · Economic system (11 works)