Greta R. Krippner

Greta Krippner is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in economic sociology, political sociology, the sociology of law, and social theory. Her first book, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Harvard University Press, 2011), examined the financialization of the U.S. economy in the period since the 1970s, arguing that the turn to finance was an inadvertent response to unresolved distributional dilemmas as post-war growth stalled. Her current book project traces the long history of the individualization of risk in U.S. society, asking how the notion that each individual should "bear the cost" of her own riskiness emerged as a widely accepted normative principle governing how risk is distributed.