Call for Papers

The New Economy

ASA pre-conference hosted by the Economic Sociology Section

Economic Sociology Section of the ASA is pleased to announce a one-day conference on The New Economy to be held on August 19, 2016 at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The crises of late-stage capitalism has led to a series of crises, including global threats to sustainability, security and democracy. It has also created technologies and opportunities that are giving rise to new forms of organization, new systems of work, new markets, new global flows of people, new goods and capital, and new institutional and cultural frameworks. These macro-level changes, in turn, result in profound transformations of social life at the microlevel: new social identities, new forms of adaption, and the new sites of struggle and resistance. The city of Seattle is a particularly fertile ground for addressing these concerns, given its rich and important history of innovation, labor movements and its position as one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S.

The mini-conference will address the transformation of the old economic forms and the emergence of the new ones. In particular, we encourage papers that focus on:

• changes in organizational forms and institutional arrangements
• the emergence of new forms of work and employment, including the so-called “sharing economy”
• new patterns of consumption
• how new forms of work and patterns of consumption influence social identities
• new types of markets
• new forms of money and currency
• new patterns of lending and finance
• new digital and information infrastructures, and implications for surveillance and control
• effects of economic changes on social cohesion and social autonomy
• forms of economic adaptation and forms of resistance to these changes
• effects of all those innovations on sustainability, inequality and social justice
• theoretical approaches to studying these issues

Conference sponsors:

Socio-Economic Review
University of Oxford
Boston University
University of Washington

Extended abstracts (up to 500 words) should be submitted to theneweconomy2016@gmail.com by February 15, 2016.

Participants would be asked to register and pay onsite registration fee of $20 for faculty and $10 for graduate students. Lunch would be provided.

Please email aguseva@bu.edu if you would like to volunteer for the conference.