- Saskia.Sassen

 saggio, 2009

Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism

 http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/too-big-to-save-the-end-of-financial-capitalism-0

The misnamed "Group of Twenty" (G20) meets in London on 2 April 2009 to discuss how to save the global financial system. It is too late. The evidence is in: we don't have the resources to save this system - even if we wanted to. It has become too big to save: the value of global financial assets is several times the size of global gross national product (GDP). The real challenge is not to save this system but to definancialise our economies, as a prelude to move beyond the current model of capitalism. Why should the value of financial assets stay at almost four times the overall GDP of the European Union, and even more of the United States. What do everyday citizens - or the planet - gain from such excess?

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 saggio, 2008

New York City's Two Global Geoghraphies of Talk

 http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte./book_sassen.pdf

Scritto per l'evento NYTE - New York Talk Exchange Two 24-hour geographies.

Both are actually rolling, but one is the same actors as they move across the globe, the other is a geography of countries of origin, a roving talk machine that moves across the globe. They capture globalization in action – talking. Global talk happens largely among those at the top of the economy and at its lower end. This point is one of the striking pieces of evidence coming out of the data analyzed here. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally, albeit in highly variable geographies. Occuring at the top is increasingly, though not fully, a permanent twenty-four hours of talking, with rapidly shrinking ‘nights.’ This is the network of the forty or so global cities around the world where financial instruments are traded, new accounting models devised, mergers and acquisitions executed, and new ways of extracting profit invented. Traders today start at 04.00 or go on until midnight in some parts of the world so as to catch the end or the beginning of the day on the other side of the globe. The idea of the 24-hour financial center, awake and ready to trade with the whole world, took much longer to take shape than forecasters expected. In fact, it is still only a partial reality. But night-time as downtime is definitely a much shorter part of the 24-hour cycle than it used to be. And daytime as the time when all systems are going is definitely a brutally extended part of the cycle.

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 saggio, 2004

Electronic Markets and Activist Networks: The Weight of Social Logics in Digital Formations

 http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu/ElectronicMarkets.pdf

Interactions between digital technology and social logics can produce a third condition that is a mix of both. When this mixed domain gets structured in electronic space we call it a digital formation (see Latham and Sassen, this volume). This chapter focuses on two such formations, the global market for capital, and global electronic activist networks. In both cases my organizing question concerns the operation of social logics and how they shape and are in turned shaped by these technologies. The focus is, then, on both the transformative capacities of these new computer-centered technologies as well as their limits, limits partly set by social logics. The two very different types of cases examined in this chapter make legible the variable ways in which this socio-technical interaction produces outcomes.

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 centro di ricerca,

The Transnational Project

 http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu/index.html

Transnational flows of capital, people, information and images are transforming our worlds; they are also challenging researchers to develop new theoretical and methodological practices to study and account for them. The TransNationalism Project takes on this challenge. An interdisciplinary research group of faculty and students under the direction of Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, the TNP aims to foster collaborative and innovative research into these dynamics through the development of new theoretical perspectives and methodological frameworks. Toward this end, the TNP provides several forums -- workshops, an annual conference, and informal discussion groups -- for junior scholars studying transnational flows and processes.

The Transnationalism Project's current research projects are the following:

• Global Governance - The multiplication of cross-border governance mechanisms: implications for democracy and global order, and
• Migration - The interdisciplinary study of international migration, conducted in conjunction with the Human Rights Program

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