http://hdl.handle.net/2451/64426 2026-04-12T11:57:29Z 2026-04-12T11:57:29Z Anderson, Elisabeth Carruthers, Bruce G. Guinnane, Timothy W. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/64433 2023-05-25T06:56:14Z 2015-12-01T00:00:00Z

Title: An unlikely alliance: How experts and industry transformed consumer credit policy in the early twentieth century United States Authors: Anderson, Elisabeth; Carruthers, Bruce G.; Guinnane, Timothy W. Abstract: Despite the recently demonstrated importance of consumer credit for the economic health of nations and families, little is known about the history of consumer credit markets and their regulation. An important chapter in the history of consumer credit regulation came between 1909 and 1941, when policy experts at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) engaged in a national campaign to transform small loan markets and policy in the United States. Concentrating its efforts on state-by-state passage of the Uniform Small Loan Law, the foundation's political success hinged upon an alliance with the American Association of Personal Finance Companies. While most scholarship portrays experts as being dominated or co-opted by industry, our case provides a countervailing example. Far from controlling RSF experts, lenders became dependent on the foundation for legitimating their political lobbying and their business activities. We explain how the foundation built its expert reputation through a process of reputational entrepreneurship, and we trace how RSF experts deployed this reputation as a power resource in their negotiations with small loan lenders.

2015-12-01T00:00:00Z Anderson, Elisabeth http://hdl.handle.net/2451/64432 2023-05-25T06:54:26Z 2012-12-06T00:00:00Z

Title: Ideas in action: The politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839 Authors: Anderson, Elisabeth Abstract: This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors’ expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes.

2012-12-06T00:00:00Z Anderson, Elisabeth http://hdl.handle.net/2451/64431 2023-05-25T10:01:08Z 2022-06-22T00:00:00Z

Title: Habitus and personality in the work of Max Weber Authors: Anderson, Elisabeth Abstract: Weber’s critique of modernity centred on how it shaped the habitus – life-conduct and motivations – of the modern individual. I explicate six habitus-types that appear in Weber’s work: the early-modern Puritan Berufsmensch, the modern specialist, the modern industrial worker, the politician, the civil servant and the citizen voter. In doing so, I identify the main characteristics of each type and the causal mechanisms through which Western modernity’s core features – capitalism and bureaucracy – brought them into being. Further, I discuss two habitus-related problems that concerned Weber: the general failure of the modern habitus to achieve ‘personality’; and the mismatch between habitus and occupational role in the Wilhelmine political sphere. I then explain the practical reforms through which Weber hoped to address these problems. Finally, I show how this analysis helps resolve two apparent contradictions which have long perplexed Weber scholars.

2022-06-22T00:00:00Z