Leon Wansleben
Sociology
– not available as an advisor for new IMPRS doctoral students in 2025 –
Leon Wansleben
Research Group LeaderLeon 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 on Contested Ecologies at the MPIfG, Wansleben investigates institutional and organizational processes in politics and the economy that are unleashed by decarbonization as a demand, challenge, opportunity, and actual development. 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