I attended the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) conference 2018 for the first time last week. It certainly is no hardship to visit Japan and the beautiful city of Kyoto and I’ve been wanting to engage with the SASE crowd for some time now. There is something quite refreshing about going to a non-geography conference, to get new ideas and perspectives, and also interact with a more inter-disciplinary crowd.
There were many finance-related sessions and I enjoyed some of the plenary lectures too. I presented two papers: ‘Philanthro-capitalism, social enterprise, and global development’ (co-authored with Dennis Stolz), and ‘How ‘global’ are investment banks? An analysis of investment banking networks in Asian equity capital markets’ (co-authored with Kurtulus Gemici); and was co-author with a third paper (with Kurtulus Gemici and Tony Vashevko) on ‘Inter-organisational hierarchies and equity capital market network structures in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore’. All on the first day! On the up side, that made the rest of the conference much more relaxed.
There were fewer business and management folks that I had expected, perhaps because this conference was held outside Europe. Plenty of political science, IPE and economic sociology scholars, with a handful of geographers, historians and economists.
There was plenty of good food, to be sure. It really is hard to go wrong with food in Japan, whether at posh restaurants or even university cafeterias (I still miss the cafeteria lunch!). There were two dinners hosted by GPN Centre, one with our international advisory committee and another with geographers (many of whom were also attending SASE for the first time). Hope to see more geographers at SASE in time to come.
Karen P.Y. Lai 