Jens Beckert

Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is well known for his work in the field of economic sociology in which he explores the correlations between economic processes and social and cultural structures. In recent years he has studied the role of expectations in markets and has demonstrated the importance of imagined futures, fictions generated by markets, and consumer decision making, a perspective which tends to relegate theories on rational calculations to the background. He has published several books, among them The Worth of Goods: Valuation and Pricing in the Market (co-edited with Patrick Aspers, Oxford University Press, 2011), Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives, and Calculation in the Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018).