Nina Bandelj is an economic sociologist, author and academic. She is a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Vice Provost for faculty development, and co-director of the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She is also a visiting professor at the IEDC-Bled School of Management and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.
Bandelj is most known for her work in economic sociology where she has examined the impacts of culture, politics, and emotions in shaping economic processes with a focus on postsocialist changes, globalization and financialization. She is the author and editor of several books including From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: The Social Foundations of Foreign Investment in Postsocialist Europe, Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged: Eastern Europe and China and Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works.
Bandelj is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. She was a vice-president of the American Sociological Association and President-Elect of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. She served as an editor of Socio-Economic Review and holds editorial appointments at journals including the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, Druzboslovne Razprave and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Education
Bandelj completed an International Baccalaureate program in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 1993, she enrolled at Augsburg College in Minneapolis and earned her B.A. in sociology and communication. She then pursued further education at Princeton University, where she obtained her master's degree and PhD in sociology. Her dissertation titled Embedded Economies: Foreign Direct Investment in Central and Eastern Europe was awarded the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize from Society for Comparative Research.
Career
Following her PhD, Bandelj began working as an assistant professor in 2003, at the University of California, Irvine, where she became a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology. She has received fellowships from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She is currently serving as a visiting professor at IEDC Bled School of Management and as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University
Bandelj holds concurrent appointments as inaugural Associate Vice-Provost for Faculty Development, and co-director of the Center for Organizational Research, at the University of California, Irvine.
Bandelj was the Chair of the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), as well as the co-chair of the RC09 of the International Sociological Association, and as a Council-at-large member of the ASA. Additionally, she was elected as the 2021-22 Vice President of the ASA and is the President-Elect of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics for 2023–24.
Research
Bandelj's research primarily focuses on two areas of inquiry: economic sociology and social change, with a specific emphasis on the transformations that have occurred in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of globalization.
Economic sociology
Bandelj has discussed the various aspects of economic sociology and its possible contributions. In her book From Communists to Foreign Capitalists: The Social Foundations of Foreign Investment in Postsocialist Europe, which Doug Guthrie for Administrative Science Quarterly called "an outstanding piece of work on the postsocialist transformation", she identified that politics, states, and path dependency play a crucial role in how markets are created and how they operate. She also found that the extent of legitimacy given by host nations to foreign direct investment (FDI) had a greater influence on the amount of foreign capital entering post-socialist countries during the initial phase of market reform, as opposed to formal regulations. In a related study, she highlighted that foreign globalization may be framed both in favor as well as against national interests, with multiple and contradictory views due to uncertain economic consequences shaped by social identities and postsocialist macro conditions. In her book, The Cultural Wealth of Nations, she examined how symbolic and cultural resources of countries, or cultural wealth, affect economic development.