Description:

Buffett Center Faculty & Fellows Colloquium
Credit Ratings, Quantification, and Global Economic Governance

Bruce Carruthers is the Director of the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies. His areas of interest include comparative and historical sociology, economy and society, sociology of law and sociology of organizations. Carruthers is also involved in the graduate Comparative Historical Social Science (CHSS) program, and the undergraduate Business Institutions Program (BIP).

His current research projects include a study of the historical evolution of credit as a problem in the sociology of trust, regulatory arbitrage, what modern derivatives markets reveal about the relationship between law and capitalism, and the regulation of credit for poor people in early 20th Century America. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/ quantitative distinction is worth fighting over. Northwestern is Carruthers' first teaching position.

Carruthers has authored or co-authored five books, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton, 1996), Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States (Oxford, 1998), Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000), Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (Stanford, 2009), and Money and Credit: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press, 2010).