Author: Ben Shestakofsky

Announcement: Special Themed Section on Marxist Studies of Organization Published

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A Special Themed Section on Marxist Studies of Organization has now been published in Organization Studies.

 

When Organization Studies Turns to Societal Problems: The Contribution of Marxist Grand Theory

Matt Vidal, Paul Adler, and Rick Delbridge

Organizational Learning: Bringing the Forces of Production Back In

Jonas A. Ingvaldsen

Community and Innovation: From Tönnies to Marx

Paul S. Adler

Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies

Armin Beverungen, Steffen Böhm, and Chris Land

Explaining Organizational Paths through the Concept of Hegemony: Evidence from the Italian Car Industry

Giuliano Maielli

Introducing the Journal of Professions and Organizations

On By Ben ShestakofskyIn PublicationsLeave a comment

Last year marked the launch of a new journal called “Journal of Professions and Organizations” which is published by Oxford University Press. It is part of their Law & Social Sciences journal collection.

http://jpo.oxfordjournals.org/

This journal could be a suitable outlet for the OOW members. Our broad objective is to leverage the network of international scholars in sociology, management, psychology, geography as well as economics and business history in order to advance research in the broader field of expert or knowledge-based work. This broad perspective enables us to bring together scholars from very diverse disciplines to engage in broad debates and foster a multidisciplinary research agenda. This makes JPO unique and puts it at the forefront of the development towards more integrative and multidisciplinary research in this field.

Call for Papers: Social Movements and the Economy Workshop

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Call for Papers: Social Movements and the Economy
Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management
Date: October 23-25, 2015

We invite submissions for a workshop on the intersection of social movements and the economy, to be held at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management from Friday October 23 to Sunday October 25, 2015.

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a vibrant literature engaging with questions of how social movements challenge firms, support the rise of new industries, and engender field change in a variety of domains of economic activity. A growing amount of attention has also been devoted to the ways that actors with vested interests in particular types of economic activity may resist, co-opt, imitate, or partner with activist groups challenging their practices. On the whole, there is now substantial evidence of a variety of ways that social movements effectively influence the economy.

And yet there has been less recent attention paid to the inverse relationship: classic questions related to how economic forces – and the broader dynamics of capitalism – shape social movements. This is all the more remarkable given the major economic shifts that have taken place in the U.S. and abroad over the past decade, including economic crises, disruptions associated with financialization and changing corporate supply chains, the struggles of organized labor, and transformations linked to new technologies. These changes have major implications for both the theory and practice of social movement funding, claims-making, strategic decision-making, and the very targeting of states, firms, and other institutions for change.

This workshop seeks to bring together these two questions in order to engage in a thorough reconsideration of both the economic sources and the economic outcomes of social movements, with careful attention to how states intermediate each of these processes.

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Info-Metrics Institute Seeks Nominations for Annual Prize

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The Info-Metrics Annual Prize in Memory of Halbert L. White, Jr.

The Info-Metrics Institute is pleased to create research prizes, in memory of Professor Halbert L. White, Jr., one of the Institute’s founding members, who passed away on March 31, 2012.

The prizes will reward outstanding academic research by scholars. An award of $2000 will accompany each prize, along with an invitation to become an Institute Research Associate, with the benefits that being an Associate provides. Prize winners will be recognized at regular meetings (either conferences or workshops) held by the Institute.

Eligibility

We seek nominations of researchers from any discipline who:

  1. Have done outstanding work developing or applying statistical information-theoretic methods, which has had (or is likely to have) significant impact.
  1. Have earned their doctorates during the past decade.

The Institute envisions awarding two or three inaugural prizes, hopefully spanning multiple disciplines.

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Seeking Participants for UIUC Study on Fatherhood, Parenting, and Families

On By Ben ShestakofskyIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are conducting a study on fatherhood, parenting, and families.
Would the study be a good fit for me?
This study might be a good fit for you if:
* You are married and/or cohabitating and have children 12 and younger
* You or your spouse are working for payWhat will happen if I take part in the study?
If you decide to take part in the research study, you would:

*  Complete a brief online survey to see if you can be included in this study.
*  If eligible, both you and your spouse will be asked to complete individual 30-45 minute online surveys
​*  If both spouses complete the survey, your family will receive $25 as a thank you for your participation.
To take part in this research study or for more information, please contact Rachael Hawn at 217-244-7259 or hcd-familywork@illinois.edu

Announcement: New Book: Do-It-Yourself Democracy

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Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry

Caroline W. Lee

In Do-It-Yourself Democracy, sociologist Caroline W. Lee examines how participatory innovations have reshaped American civic life over the past two decades. Lee looks at the public engagement industry that emerged to serve government, corporate, and nonprofit clients seeking to gain a handle on the increasingly noisy demands of their constituents and stakeholders. New technologies and deliberative practices have democratized the ways in which organizations operate, but Lee argues that they have also been marketed and sold as tools to facilitate cost-cutting, profitability, and other management goals – and that public deliberation has burdened everyday people with new responsibilities without delivering on its promises of empowerment.

http://amzn.com/0199987262

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Announcement: New Volume: Democratizing Inequalities

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Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation (2015, NYU Press)

Edited by Caroline W. Lee, Michael McQuarrie, and Edward T. Walker
Foreword by Craig Calhoun

Contributors: Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Emily Cummins, Ernesto Ganuza, Nina Eliasoph, J. Matthew Judge, Daniel Kreiss, Caroline Lee, Isaac Martin, Michael McQuarrie, David Meyer, Aaron Panofsky, Francesca Polletta, Amanda Pullum, David Schielfer, Steven Vallas, Edward Walker

Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive policymaking context, we now hold the keys to large-scale democratic revitalization. Democratizing Inequalities shows that the equation may not be so simple. Modern societies face a variety of structural problems that limit potentials for true democratization, as well as vast inequalities in political action and voice that are not easily resolved by participatory solutions. Popular participation may even reinforce elite power in unexpected ways. Resisting an oversimplified account of participation as empowerment, this collection of essays brings together a diverse range of leading scholars to reveal surprising insights into how dilemmas of the new public participation play out in politics and organizations. Through investigations including fights over the authenticity of business-sponsored public participation, the surge of the Tea Party, the role of corporations in electoral campaigns, and participatory budgeting practices in Brazil, Democratizing Inequalities seeks to refresh our understanding of public participation and trace the reshaping of authority in today’s political environment.

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Call for Papers: Socio-Economic Review Special Issue: Elites, Economy and Society

On By Ben ShestakofskyIn Calls for PapersLeave a comment

“Elites, Economy and Society: New Approaches and Findings”

Special Issue of Socio-Economic Review 

Timeline

Submission deadline: January 18, 2016

Publication of the special issue in the Socio-Economic Review: 2017

Background

Recent economic findings and global protest movements have brought increased scholarly attention to elites and the wealthy. While the economic position and material resources of elites relative to the rest of society, and their evolutions in the past decades, are now starting to be well documented (Piketty and Saez 2003, Piketty 2014), we still have an incomplete view of this group (Khan, 2012). This special issue of the Socio-Economic Review calls for papers that document and theorize the social, cultural and political dimensions of the economic elite and the contexts and consequences associated with their recent rise, with a particular focus on the various processes and mechanisms fostering inequality and privilege.

We know that elites control a greater share of the income and wealth than they did just a generation ago. But how did this happen, and what does it mean for the interplay of economy and society? One of the oldest traditions in elite research, network analysis, has recently suggested an “unraveling” of national social ties (Mizruchi 2013), while others show the increase of economic variance within the upper class itself (e.g., Godechot 2012) and ascent of a more and more global bourgeoisie. Yet considerably less research addresses the content of social ties among elites. What consequences do both the structure and content of these elite relations have on the current economic and social order?  This key issue may be addressed at different levels, including the social relations among the economic elites, between economic elites and those from other fractions of the field of power (Bourdieu 1996), and their relations with other social groups.

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Call for Nominations: Book Award in Humanist Sociology

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The Association for Humanist Sociology is pleased to announce The Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for 2015. Authors, publishers, and AHS members may nominate books for consideration. The winner will be recognized at our annual meeting October 21–25, 2015 in Portland, OR. Nominations should be for Sociology or interdisciplinary social science books that approach their subjects from a humanist perspective.

Founded in 1976, the Association sees its mission to strive as professionals, as scholars and as activists to uncover and address social issues. We view people not merely as products of social forces, but also as agents in their lives and the world. We are committed to a sociology that contributes to a more humane, equal, and just society.

Eligible books should have been published in the calendar year 2014 or the first half of 2015. If a book was submitted for last year’s consideration, it cannot be nominated again.

To nominate a book, authors/publishers/nominators should e-mail a letter of nomination with the subject line “Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award Nomination” to Daina Cheyenne Harvey at dharvey@holycross.edu. Authors/publishers should send one copy of the book to each of the award committee members listed below. The deadline for nominations is May 15, 2015. Additional information about AHS is available at www.humanist-sociology.org