Isabelle Ferreras

About

Isabelle Ferreras is a senior tenured fellow (maître de recherches) of the Belgian National  Science Foundation (F.N.R.S.-F.R.S., Brussels), a professor of sociology at the University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) where she is a permanent research of the CriDIS (IACCHOS-Centre for interdisciplinary research Democracy, Institutions, Subjectivity, Louvain), and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School (Cambridge, MA). Ferreras was elected in 2017 a permanent member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts of Belgium (Class Technology and Society). She has been elected Director of her Class, and president of the Royal Academy starting January 2021.  Ferreras’s research agenda focuses on understanding work in the context of the service-based  production regime. She has developed a critical, political sociology of work. She is developing a companion, critical ‘political theory of the firm’ that seeks to grasp firms as “political entities” in the broader context of capitalist democracies at the global age, and to explore implications at  both levels of efficiency and justice via the proposal of “economic bicameralism” for  democratizing the government of capitalist firms. Ferreras’s proposal for democratizing corporations was the last ‘real utopia’ that Erik Olin Wright helped & readied for a Real Utopia Conference. As arranged by Erik, the conference was  scheduled to take place in March 2020 at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, with  funding from the Central Bank of Sweden. Due to the covid-19 crisis, the conference had to be  postponed to January 2021. Isabelle Ferreras’ main publications include: Firms as Political Entities. Saving Democracy  through Economic Bicameralism (2017. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/NYC) ; Gouverner le capitalisme ? Pour le bicamérisme économique (2012, Presses universitaires de  France, Paris); Critique politique du travail. Travailler à l’heure de la société des services (2007,  Les Presses de Sciences Po, Paris).