Call for Papers: Diversity and Work Atmosphere in Research Organisations

For an edited collection, we ask you to submit contributions that present empirical findings of a qualitative or quantitative nature on the relationship between an individual’s diversity characteristics and his or her perception of working environment in research organisations worldwide.

Contributions are welcomed that show, 

 (1) how being perceived as or identifying as belonging to particular social categorizations and identities (gender, race, sexuality, religion, dis/ability, nationality, parenthood, etc.), influences employees experience and perception of their working atmosphere and culture (including the relationship to superiors), in particular experiences of bullying, discrimination and harassment in research workplaces;

(2) how the specific framework conditions in research organisations, e.g. different disciplinary cultures, fixed-term employment relationships or gender relations at the workplace, affect the relationship between the characteristics of an individuum and its perception of working atmosphere; and

(3) what measures are effective to successfully support the integration of a diverse workforce into research institutions.

The edited collection has a special interest in contributions discussing phenomena of bullying, discrimination and harassment in research environments. In general, contributions on group atmosphere, leadership culture or organisational commitment are welcomed. Only contributions that deal with the working environment of research organisations are relevant. A broad understanding of research organisations is applied, encompassing universities, private research departments and institutions, and other non-university research. In the case of universities, only results on the employees are to be considered, not those exclusively on students. Preference is given to contributions that take an intersectional approach. This refers to contributions that deal with interaction effects between different social categories. Exemplary questions are whether harassment particularly affects women scientists of foreign origin or if all scientists with children or only male scientists benefit from a work-life-balance measure?

Please send your abstract (200 – 300 words) to Dr. Clemens Striebing at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (clemens.striebing@iao.fraunhofer.de) by 22 April 2020. In the abstract, explain the research question, relevance and data used. A scopus listing for each individual contribution is aimed at.

Schedule:

Deadline Abstracts – 22 April 2020

Feedback Abstracts – until 15 May, 2020

Deadline Manuscript & Start Review – 30 September, 2020

The conference will take place on October 8-9, 2020, at Université Paris-Est Créteil, France
Proposals (300-word abstract + short biography) should be submitted by April 1, 2020
Participants will be notified in June 2020

In a seminal article entitled “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), the historian E. P. Thompson analyzed the evolution of the concept of time in British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He demonstrated the importance of incorporating the question of time into the study of the transformations that took place in the organization of labor during industrialization. Subsequently, scholars have questioned the ways in which temporal norms in work contexts have
changed over the past two centuries. For example, historians of labor have highlighted the role of trade unions in organizing the length of work hours since the end of the nineteenth century, while sociologists of labor have been particularly interested in definitions of “work” and the issue of measuring and managing the time that our contemporary societies devote to work.

Like others, E. P. Thompson also noted that the concept of time and its evolutions are issues that do not only concern work. The time devoted to hobbies, sports, holidays, entertainment, or tourism has become inherent to the study of free time. For example, social history has documented its institutionalization, as well as the practice of leisure and vacation in British or North American societies from the nineteenth century to the present day. Following in the tracks of Robert Stebbins, who coined the concept of “serious leisure”, some sociologists have renewed the theory of leisure practices.

Building on studies of volunteer work or “gray areas” of employment on the one hand, and of workers’ leisure practices on the other, this conference proposes to combine work time and free time in the English-speaking world in order to explore their various definitions, redefinitions and the ways in which they have interacted over the centuries. This means considering the ways in which these two temporalities have changed and hybridized each other, generating tensions or new forms of balance or complementarity. How has legislation in different countries regulated free time and labor time? To what extent have new practices of work and leisure blurred the boundaries between these two temporalities? How have different perceptions of the private and professional spheres changed the way people think about and experience work and leisure time?

For this conference, we invite researchers in the various disciplines of the humanities and economic and social sciences to consider the following topics and approaches:

• Mapping the intersections of research on free time and work time.
• Philosophical approaches to work and leisure.
• Images and representations.
• Hybrid forms of work (volunteer work, charity work, activism, “gray areas” of employment…).
• Social conflicts, mobilization, and labor rights.
• Gender and the organization of work.
• Recreational practices in the workplace.
• Boundaries, liminality, and intersections.
• Methodological and archival particularities.

This conference is organized by Sonia Birocheau and Fabienne Moine (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France).

The scholars on the scientific committee are Fabrice Bensimon (Sorbonne Université, France), Karine Chambefort (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France), Neil Davie (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France), Yannick Deschamps (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France), Jessica Dunkin (University of Alberta, Canada), Emma Griffin (University of East Anglia, United Kingdom), Donna Kesselman (Université Paris-Est Créteil, France), John Krinsky (City College of New York, United States), Olaf Stieglitz (University of Cologne, Germany).

Submission of proposals and contact: sonia.birocheau@u-pec.fr and fabienne.moine@u-pec.fr

References:
Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830- 1885, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
Peter Bailey, “Leisure, Culture, and the Historian: Reviewing the First Generation of Leisure Historiography in Britain”, Leisure Studies 8:2, 1989, 107-127.
Jean-Yves Boulin, Tiphaine de Rocquigny and Jean Viard. L’économie du temps libre (4/4). Le travail à l’assaut des loisirs. Entendez-vous l’éco? France culture, December 20, 2018. 58’.
Marie-Christine Bureau and Patrick Dieuaide, “Institutional Change and Transformations in Labour and Employment Standards: An Analysis of ‘Grey Zones’”, Transfer: European Review of Labor and Research, 24:3, August 2018, 261-277.
Hugh Cunningham, Time, Work and Leisure: Life Changes in England since 1700, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014.
John Krinsky and Maud Simonet, “La servitude et le volontaire : les usages politiques du travail invisible dans les parcs de la ville de New York”, Sociétés contemporaines 2012/3 (n°87), 49-74.
Catriona M. Paratt, “Little Means or Time: Working-Class Women and Leisure in Late Victorian and Edwardian England”, The International Journal of the History of Sport 15:2, August 1998, 22-53.
Robert A. Stebbins, “Serious Leisure: A Conceptual Statement”, The Pacific Sociological Review 25:2, April 1982, 251-272.
Tim Strangleman, “Representations of Labour: Visual Sociology and Work”, Sociology Compass 2:5, 2008, 1491-1505.
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present 38, December 1967, 56-97.

Contexts is a quarterly magazine that makes cutting-edge social research accessible to general readers. The magazine is issuing a call for papers for its Winter 2021 issue, dedicated to “Ethnographies of the Global South.” This special issue will be guest edited by Victoria Reyes, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California-Riverside, and Marco Garrido, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. 

In recent years, there has been a blossoming of ethnographies on the Global South within sociology; this represents something new. Historically, American ethnographers within the discipline have plied their trade almost exclusively within the U.S. context. Casting our eye south has produced a vivid description of “foreign” social worlds.

These descriptions have proven to be a goldmine theoretically. They challenge and compel us to revise many of the analytical categories we largely take for granted, from race and segregation, to state and civil society. In making “foreign” contexts familiar, the new ethnographies of the Global South are expanding our sociological imagination in exciting ways.

We are looking for papers that embody a deeper engagement with Southern contexts. We are seeking robust descriptions of everyday life rooted in these contexts. The papers should demonstrate how detailed descriptions serve to extend not only just the empirical but also the conceptual boundaries of sociology.

We are asking that potential authors submit a two-page proposal by March 1, 2020. The editorial team will notify all authors of our decision by April 2, 2020. Authors whose proposals are accepted will need to return a full submission of approximately 3,000 words by June 1, 2020 for peer review. Articles that pass peer review will be further revised by the editorial team with final text due by September 1, 2020. Authors interested in submitting a piece are highly encouraged to read our submission guidelines.

Issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences on:

Status: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter for Inequality?

Editors: Cecilia L. Ridgeway (Stanford University) and Hazel Rose Markus (Stanford University)

Status can be defined simply as a comparative social ranking on the basis of esteem, honor, prestige, and respect which creates a form of inequality and hierarchy among those ranked. This simple definition, however, leaves unanswered complex questions about what status really is as a social process and why scholars of inequality should be concerned with it. For instance, what do we make of evidence that concerns about status are often as or more powerful motivators for life decisions than economic incentives? Why is it that threats to status foster conflicts and undermine performance, health and well-being? And why and how does status matter for broader patterns of inequality in society based on valued life outcomes such as wealth, power, and health? The proposed issue grows from the need for a deeper story about what the nature of status inequality is and how it works that will allow us to address such questions.

In this issue, we invite theoretical and empirical papers that seek to enlarge our understanding of the nature and significance of status as a form of inequality and that illuminate the roles status plays in driving, maintaining, or changing inequality in wealth, power, or well-being in contemporary advanced industrial societies. We welcome papers from across the social sciences, including sociology, psychology, organizational behavior, economics, political science, and communications. Papers may employ a variety of methods and data from quantitative to qualitative. We are interested in papers that address any aspect of our general call but that, in particular, deepen our understanding of what status really is as a social process. In the link below we offer a list of questions and issues, organized into broad themes, that such papers might address. This list is suggestive only and is not meant to limit the topics papers might cover.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

Anticipated Timeline

Prospective contributors should submit a CV and an abstract (up to two pages in length, single or double spaced) of their study along with up to two pages of supporting material (e.g., tables, figures, pictures, etc.) no later than 5 PM EST on April 7, 2020, to:

https://rsf.fluxx.io

(NOTE that if you wish to submit an abstract and do not yet have an account with us, it can take up to 48 hours to get credentials, so please start your application at least two days before the deadline.)

All submissions must be original work that has not been previously published in part or in full. Only abstracts submitted to https://rsf.fluxx.io will be considered. Each paper will receive a $1,000 honorarium when the issue is published. All questions regarding this issue should be directed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org and not to the email addresses of the editors of the issue.

A conference will take place at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City on February 26, 2021 (with a group dinner the night before). The selected contributors will gather for a one-day workshop to present draft papers (due a month prior to the conference (on 1/26/21) and receive feedback from the other contributors and editors. Travel costs, food, and lodging for one author per paper will be covered by the foundation. Papers will be circulated before the conference. After the conference, the authors will submit their revised drafts by 5/19/21. The papers will then be sent out to three additional scholars for formal peer review. Having received feedback from reviewers and the RSF board, authors will revise their papers by 11/1/21. The full and final issue will be published in the spring of 2022. Papers will be published open access on the RSF website as well as in several digital repositories, including JSTOR and UPCC/Muse.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

Please, see the following the call for papers for the 2020 IAFEP conference, (June 21‐24, 2020, La Jolla, California, United States).

The International Association for the Economics of Participation (IAFEP) gathers scholars dedicated to exploring the economics of democratic and participatory organizations, such as labor‐managed firms, cooperatives and firms with broad‐based employee share‐ownership, profit sharing and worker participation schemes, as well as democratic nonprofit, community and social enterprises. The IAFEP Conferences, which take place every two years, provide an international forum for presentations and discussions of current research on the economics of participation. The 2020 IAFEP Conference will be held in La Jolla (California, United States), alongside and in collaboration with the Beyster Symposium, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing of Rutgers University.

Submissions for the 2020 conference are invited from all relevant fields of study, including comparative economic systems, industrial and labor economics, organizational studies, social economics, management studies, institutional economics, evolutionary economics, development economics, sociology, psychology, political science, law, and philosophy. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. We also invite proposals for complete sessions.

Key themes:

1/ Development and dynamics of financial and decision‐making participation
The range of organizations implementing financial and decision‐making participation is broad and growing, from profit sharing to employee ownership, flat‐organizations, employees on the board, trade‐unions, etc. The drivers of the different types of participation can be very diverse. We are interested in research about the evolution and implications of participation in these organizations in industrialized, post‐industrial, transition, and developing economies.

2/ Effects of participation on firms’ and workers’ outcomes
We invite communications on the impact of workers’ participation on firms’ economic performance, as well as other outcomes – such as wages, working conditions, human resource practices, corporate social responsibility practices, etc. Communications with empirical approaches are particularly encouraged.

3/ Socio‐economic and political environment
The creation, growth and stability of participatory firms are influenced by the economic and social environment as well as the public policies and laws surrounding firms and participation. We welcome communications about the incidence of this broad environment on participation, including historical and international comparative approaches.

4/ Economic participation and political democracy
Participation in firms also raises the question of the relationship between economic participation and political democracy. On one hand, can economic participation affect political involvement of workers‐citizens? On the other hand, is economic participation more likely to thrive in a democratic and more egalitarian environment?

Extended Abstracts (max. 1000 words) in English should be sent by e‐mail to Trevor Young‐Hyman and Nathalie Magne at iafep2020@gmail.com by February 28, 2020. Abstracts should include full details of institutional affiliations and e‐mail addresses. Proposals for complete sessions should include a brief description of the theme of the session and an abstract for each paper.

Authors will be notified by March 31, 2020 whether their papers are accepted for presentation. Complete drafts should reach us by June 1, 2020 in order to be handed out to Conference participants.

Conference Dates
The conference will consist of three full day sessions on June 22, 23 and 24. A welcoming reception will take place on June 21.

Registration and Accommodations
Detailed information on registration (including fees) and local accommodations will be available on the conference website in early February.

Participants from Developing and Transition Economies and Students
A small amount of funding is available for participants from developing and transition economies and students. In order to be considered for the funding, researchers should clarify it in the abstract submission.

Horvat‐Vanek Prize
The Horvat‐Vanek prize is awarded every two years for a research paper of exceptional quality written by a young scholar in one of the areas of interest to IAFEP. The prize, of a value of US$ 1,000, will be awarded during the conference. In order to be considered for the prize, researchers and doctoral students aged 35 or under should submit one research paper in English (maximum length 10,000 words) by April 20, 2020 to iafep2020@gmail.com. Please, include your institutional affiliation and an abstract, and indicate clearly on the paper that you wish it to be considered for the Horvat‐Vanek prize (the recipient will be requested to provide a passport or other official evidence of their date of birth in order to receive the prize).