About

Simone Polillo is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and serves as Chair of the Sociology Department within the College of Arts & Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, and holds an International Baccalaureate from the United World College of the Atlantic (UK) as well as a B.A. in Economics and Social Theory from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His research interests encompass economic and political sociology, social theory, world-system theory, comparative-historical sociology, and the sociology of the self. Polillo has authored books including 'Conservatives vs. Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict' and 'Beyond Liquidity,' and has published articles on topics such as money, moral authority, creditworthiness, globalization, and trust in various sociological journals.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Finance
• Social Science
• Law
• Political economy
• Economics
• Gender studies
• Business
• Market economy
• Public administration
• Law and economics
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Economic emergencies: exception, government and the management of the economy

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2025-09-03 · 1 citations

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• The economic exception: how the Bank of Italy framed crisis to govern, 1960–1984

  Review of International Political Economy · 2025-10-09

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• The modes of performativity: A meta-theoretical review

  Finance and Society · 2025-05-15 · 6 citations

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  Abstract Over the past 25 years, performativity has emerged as a salient focus in social sciences, yet its meta-theoretical analysis remains limited. What is performativity? How is it located empirically and treated theoretically across disciplines? Analyzing 6,741 published articles and books deploying the term performativity, this paper proposes a framework to explore performativity and reviews the transdisciplinary literature that employs the term in academic practice. Drawing on an updated version of Actor-Network Theory and studying performativity in terms of its impact on the constituents of an agencement, i.e., devices (D), actors (A), representations (R), and networks (N), we outline the term’s theoretical landscape and summarize the general threads of performativity research. The paper defines performativity as a representational intervention involving a material act of describing devices, actors, representations, or networks that affects one or more of them. The literature demonstrates that such interventions can manifest as discourses, embodied engagements, speech acts, or scientific models, among other forms.

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• Crisis: Sovereign or Distributed?

  American Behavioral Scientist · 2022-12-27 · 2 citations

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  In the face of a proliferation of texts framing ongoing events and experiences in terms of crisis, a new critical literature has emerged to interrogate the political, moral, and epistemological assumptions and blind spots of this way of understanding the modern world. In this special issue, we engage with this new body of work on crisis by distinguishing between two models—sovereign and distributed. While the sovereign model of crisis fleshes out the link between crisis and political power, the distributed model points to the social fragmentation and confusion that crisis-claims can provoke when they are made outside established institutional channels—when they are distributed across disparate audiences. Understanding the relationship between crisis and sovereignty on the one hand, and between crisis-claims and their audiences on the other, sheds new light on the narrative and performative effects of crisis.

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• From collateral to money: social meaning, security devices and the law in the depersonalization of monetary relationships

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2022 · 5 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Law and economics

  A new sociology of money has emerged over the past three decades. Unlike conventional accounts, it is attentive to the social conditions of money-making and circulation: social relationships, authority, and impersonal trust. Yet, the problem of how money is at once ‘special’ – invested with meaning, personalized, and often physically earmarked in everyday transactions – and generalized, used across social boundaries, remains unsolved. Building on the anthropology of law and the economization perspective, I bridge this gap by focusing on the processes by which money is economized through security devices, mechanisms that enable the exchange of money by sustaining a credit relationship when connections between lender and borrower are insufficient, inadequate, or altogether absent. As they make such transactions possible, security devices create new interdependencies, which become visible once the promise is broken and the guarantee that was pledged as security is repossessed. Understanding the regulation of security devices, therefore, yields new insights into the nature of money, as the legal remedies in place to deal with failure implicate monetary authorities in a politics of redress, through which what counts as collateral, under what conditions, and with what penalties, gets redefined and connected to broader financial and political processes of monetary creation.

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• 1. Money, Banks, and Creditworthiness

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• 3. Institutions and the Struggle over Creditworthiness in the Nineteenth-Century United States

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• The Ascent of Market Efficiency

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-08-15

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  This book weaves together historical narrative and quantitative bibliometric data to detail the path financial economists took in order to form one of the central theories of financial economics—the influential efficient-market hypothesis—which states that the behavior of financial markets is unpredictable. As the notorious quip goes, a blindfolded monkey would do better than a group of experts in selecting a portfolio of securities, simply by throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper. How did such a hypothesis come to be so influential in the field of financial economics? How did financial economists turn a lack of evidence about systematic patterns in the behavior of financial markets into a foundational approach to the study of finance? Each chapter focuses on these questions, as well as on collaborative academic networks, and on the values and affects that kept the networks together as they struggled to define what the new field of financial economics should be about. In doing so, the book introduces a new dimension—data analysis—to our understanding of the ways knowledge advances.

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• 2. Banking and Finance as Organized Conflict

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• The Ascent of Market Efficiency

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-08-18

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Frequent coauthors

• Brad Pasanek

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Allison Reed

  Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport

  1 shared

• Kimberly Kay Hoang

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

• Cristina Mora

  1 shared

• Dingxin Zhao

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

• Kathleen A. Cagney

  University of Liverpool

  1 shared

• David Strang

  Cornell University

  1 shared

• Amir Goldberg

  Stanford University

  1 shared