How do digital platforms affect coordination in the restaurant market? In particular, how do they reshape firms’ positions in the quality space and their dependence on both consumers’ valuations and competitors’ choices? Focusing on the case of a widely used platform for restaurant booking and reviewing, we analyze the dine-in services market in the city of Lille, France. In line with economic sociology’s definition of markets as concrete social spaces, we frame these restaurants as a producer market in which multiple quality conventions coexist. We use sequential mixed methods and data (observations and interviews, web-scraping and business data) to show that platforms rationalize firms’ practice of observing one another as a basis for making decisions on volume and quality. The rise of digital platforms provides producers with devices that amplify their view of competitors, standardize their offerings and support the stability of their business choices over time, conditional on spatial constraints and quality choices.

Empires and nation states tend to be understood as two distinct types of political organization. The former are primarily associated with the premodern world, while the latter have come to be seen as political forms paradigmatic of the modern. While colonialism is a process associated with empires, it is more usually practised by modern nation states in their establishment of overseas empires. These empires are marked by a particular form of political economy—a colonial political economy—which determines the specificity of their political form as distinct from earlier empires. In this article, I examine the Mughal Empire of the premodern period in relation to the subsequent establishment of British colonial rule in India, and discuss the particularities of each in terms of the modes of political economy—moral and colonial—which were characteristic of their administration. In particular, I address the mobilization of the precepts of classical liberalism by the British, as demonstrated in the response of colonial administrators to incidences of dearth and famine, and contrast this with the modes of governance of the preceding Mughal Empire. The differences between them, I suggest, demonstrate that British colonial rule was a structurally distinct, modern type of empire.

Classical social science viewed economic elites as the primary drivers of rapid economic change in Western Europe. Studies of late industrialization, however, tend to argue that the state, rather than economic elites, acts as the principal agent of development; in many late-developing contexts, economic elites may constitute an obstacle to rather than a catalyst of development. These analyses yield two questions that have yet to be thoroughly answered in the existing literature: 1) under what conditions are states able to act as the necessary agents of late development? And 2) who actually controls the state under these circumstances? This article addresses these questions through a case study of Francoist Spain. It articulates a path to state-led development in which, following class conflicts that diminish the power of economic elites, an educated “cultural” bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum) takes over the state and uses it as an agent of industrialization.

Based on an analysis of the situation in France after the uprising of May 13, 1958, this article analyzes the theoretical and empirical class of ambiguous political events. During such events, the holders of political power, faced with an actor who has assumed a political role by transgressing the established order, must take a stance. Since contradictory meanings can be attributed to the challenger’s actions based on the categories of thought constituting that order, the power holders experience an ambiguity: they are unable to say “how things stand with what is,” to use Luc Boltanski’s expression. The challenge, then, is to elucidate both the process through which they can leave their cognitive uncertainty behind and the conditions that would make that possible. This approach sheds light on the transition from one political order to another.