Leon Wansleben
Sociology
Leon Wansleben (affiliated member)
Head of the Research Group on the Sociology of Public Finance and Debt at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of SocietiesLeon Wansleben's scholarly interests are in political sociology, economic sociology, financialization, and sociological theory. His broader aim is to analyze changes in specific social fields in conjunction with broader capitalist transformations. For that purpose, his research combines different strategies for investigation, including ethnographic studies of organizations, markets, and policy-making areas and (comparative) historical methods. In the past, he has employed these methods to investigate how regimes of expertise in financial markets change with the rise of asset-manager capitalism. He has also used them to study how organizational practices at the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank have been transformed since the 1970s, turning these central banks into powerful macroeconomic policy-makers.
With his research group at the MPIfG, Wansleben investigates public finance and debt. This is a field of policy and market practices where changing relations of power crystallize and where structural decisions are taken that shape the future of democractic capitalist states. He especially welcomes dissertation projects within this field, but also supervises PhD projects in the sociology of finance and projects that address shifting boundaries between political and financial realms.
Research Fields:
- Sociology of finance
- Financialization studies
- Public finances and debt