Tag: conference

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Labor market and Economic perspectives on large-scale Migration in Sociology (LEMS)

On By Sarah MosseriIn Calls for Papers, Calls for Proposals, Conferences, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Dates and location:
Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) of the University of Mannheim on Friday, November 17 and Saturday, November 18, 2017.[1]

Theme:
Labor market and economic sociologists take notice of each other less often than common concerns might suggest. This ignorance is particularly troubling amid the large-scale influx of immigrants and refugees into established economies over the past few years in particular and the past decade in general. Among these changes, issues of employment and emergent economic activities, which both fields focus on, gain in significance and salience. Labor market sociologists demonstrate that unregulated labor markets are neither free nor fair, diminishing hopes for quick integration. A focus on the distribution of relevant worker characteristics over a range of social dimensions such as class, gender, and ethnicity allows labor market sociologists to develop more constructive views of labor market mechanisms. Economic sociologists scrutinize dynamics around the establishment of larger social objects such as industries and “informal economies”, some of which are dominated by immigrant ethnic groups. In more specific settings, economic sociologists have found evidence that ethnic diversity—an obvious consequence of migration—increases the resilience of common market mechanisms. The conference seeks to foster a dialogue between the two views in order to develop conceptual, analytical, and empirical strategies that help us study and understand the forces undergirding the recent developments and their consequences.

Submission:
Name, title, and abstract (250 words)
Deadline: September 10, 2017 (LEMS2017@mzes.uni-mannheim.de)
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Program announced for mini-conference on precarious labor

On By Sarah MosseriIn Conferences, Seattle 20161 Comment

 

The program for the 2016 mini-conference on precarious labor is now available online.  The one-day conference, which is co-sponsored by the OOW Section, will be held Friday, August 19, 2016 in Seattle, Washington (Seattle Central College).

The conference focuses on analyzing the growth of precarious employment and informal labor, its consequences for workers and their families, the challenges it poses to worker organizing and collective mobilization, and how workers and other social actors are responding to precariousness.  The program focuses on the United States and China, but includes a range of global cases and perspectives.

The conference was initiated by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Labor and Labor Movements Section, the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s Research Committee on Labor Movements (RC44), and the Chinese Sociological Association’s China Association of Work and Labor (CAWL).

 

 

 

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ILR Review: CALL FOR PAPERS

On By Richard BentonIn Calls for Papers, Conferences, UncategorizedLeave a comment

ILR Review: CALL FOR PAPERS

A Conference and Special Issue Honoring David B. Lipsky

Conflict and Its Resolution in the Changing World of Work

The ILR Review (http://ilr.sagepub.com) invites submissions for a conference and subsequent special issue devoted to the role that conflict and conflict resolution play in the changing world of work. Ariel Avgar (University of Illinois; avgar@illinois.edu), Alexander Colvin (Cornell University; ajc22@cornell.edu), and Harry Katz (Cornell University; hck2@cornell.edu) will serve as coordinators of this special issue. Scholars interested in participating should submit a complete draft of their paper by April 15, 2017. Authors will be notified by July 1, 2017, if their paper has been accepted for presentation at the conference. Prospective contributors are urged to consult any of the coordinators regarding preliminary proposals or ideas for papers.

Authors whose papers are accepted will be invited to a conference sponsored by the ILR School at Cornell University honoring David B. Lipsky and recognizing his many contributions to the field of conflict resolution. The conference will be held in Ithaca, New York, in November 2017. Conference expenses will be subsidized by Cornell University. Papers presented at the conference should be suitable for immediate submission to external reviewers. A subset of authors will be asked to submit their papers to the ILR Review with the expectation that their papers will be published in a special issue if they pass the external review process. Papers that are deemed of good quality but not selected for the special issue may be considered for publication in a regular issue of the journal.

Conflict and its resolution play a pivotal role in the workplace and organizations and help to explain a range of important outcomes at different levels of analysis. While conflict is an inherent part of the workplace and organizational life, the past 40 years have seen a dramatic and consequential transformation in the way it is resolved and managed. In the workplace arena, individual employment rights disputes have supplanted collective bargaining as the most widespread mode of conflict resolution, with declining unionization and strike rates and rising litigation numbers. At the same time, a growing proportion of organizations have turned to alternative methods for dealing with conflict, such as mediation and arbitration that, among other things, are designed to bypass approaches that rely primarily on traditional litigation or managerial authority. New organizational structures and work practices have changed the very nature of conflict and require new and innovative conflict management approaches.

This changing landscape has given rise to important questions about the antecedents and consequences associated with new forms of conflict and the wide array of methods used to manage and resolve it. While scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address these questions, there is much more we need to know. Research on alternative conflict resolution methods, for example, has focused more on explaining how and why such methods have emerged and much less on how they affect employees, organizations, and society more generally. In addition, existing studies have primarily focused on conflict resolution in the context of traditional employment arrangements, with far less attention paid to new forms of work and employment models. Existing research has also focused heavily on conflict resolution in the United States, with less attention given to international and comparative perspectives.

The study of conflict and its resolution has been fragmented, with little integration of theoretical and empirical insights across disciplines. Research examining conflict and its resolution at the individual or group levels, for example, does not incorporate relevant findings from organizational and societal level studies, and vice versa. Our theories need to integrate an understanding of how factors at multiple levels of analysis affect conflict, alternative approaches to conflict resolution, and related outcomes.

For this conference and special issue, we are particularly interested in papers that address underexplored areas of research and that incorporate diverse disciplinary perspectives. We welcome papers that are empirical or conceptual; that include international perspectives; and that make use of a range of methodologies, including surveys, experiments, case studies, archival studies, or legal research.

Potential topic areas include, but are not limited to:

  • New and emerging conflict resolution techniques in union and nonunion settings
  • Conflict and conflict resolution practices in different national settings and their implications for theory in this area
  • The relationship between alternative work arrangements and workplace conflict and conflict management
  • The influence of new employment models on conflict and conflict resolution
  • The adoption of conflict resolution practices in small and entrepreneurial firms
  • The link between conflict resolution methods and the level and nature of conflict in organizations
  • The impact of conflict resolution practices on employee, group, organizational, and societal outcomes
  • The implications of internal conflict resolution practices for employee access to justice
  • The relationship between legal, economic, and competitive pressures and workplace conflict and its resolution
  • Explaining individual usage patterns of various conflict resolution practices
  • Advances in the field of negotiation

To submit a paper for consideration, please go to http://ilr.sagepub.com and click on “Submit a Manuscript.” After you have logged into the manuscript submission website, be sure to fill in the “Special Issue” option.

Conference Call for Papers: Freedom and Control of Expression

On By Sarah MosseriIn Calls for Papers, ConferencesLeave a comment

Conference Call for Papers

Freedom and Control of Expression
In the Digital Aftermath of the 2015 French Attacks
October 13 & 14, 2016
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), Toulouse, France.

After the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices were attacked in January 2015, debate and discussion flourished about freedom of expression, in France and abroad. This debate intensified after the Paris attacks of November 13th. At the epicenter is the role of the Internet and free speech. An enormous wave of worldwide indignation expressed itself after both events, including a deluge of hashtag solidarity. But this social media storm eventually revealed cultural, political and social divides inside France, as well as globally. Much like after the 9/11 attacks, France passed laws allowing state surveillance of online communication. At the same time, social media censored posts about the attacks that were considered to be provocative or shocking.

The variety of reactions, including indifference or, on the contrary, the expression of very different points of view – sometimes even surveilled or censored – showed that one hashtag is neither unifying nor a universal view shared by everyone.  This event magnified the notion that the digital public sphere is a conflicting arena of not just what is being said (or kept quiet) online but also what the limits are. Undoubtedly, the Internet is the main means of massive public expression for millions. Yet it is still the result of a complex set of power relations established between professional media, amateur content producing communities, which sometimes defend particular interests, as well as corporate intermediaries. The resulting online content embodies rival editorial, political and industrial strategies. Recently, scholars have begun to question the idea of digital participatory democracy in terms of a level playing field.

This workshop aims to progress this debate by addressing the following central question:

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ASA Session on “Organizations as Legal Persons

On By Richard BentonIn Calls for Papers, Conferences, Seattle 2016Leave a comment

Happy New Year, All

With the ASA 2016 submission deadline just around the corner (specifically, 3:00pm EST on Wednesday, 1/6), we have so far received relatively few submissions to the joint OOW/Soc of Law session on “Organizations as Legal Persons.”  So we’re writing to remind you of the Call for Papers (appended below), and to encourage you to send in your work, if you have anything either written or in progress.  We welcome not only research manuscripts, but also research designs, talking points, theoretical reflections, and other expressions of interest.

Despite the prominence of such Supreme Court cases as “Citizens United” and “Hobby Lobby”, the changing socio-legal understanding of corporate personhood is a topic that has only recently forced itself into the public eye.  We hope that the upcoming ASA session will jump-start a serious sociological conversation on the subject, but we recognize that many researchers with relevant things to say may not yet have fully metabolized those things into their research pipeline.

So we see this ASA session as a forward-looking endeavor, and we are perfectly willing to entertain early drafts, thinkpieces, and agenda-setters, as well as more fully-formed empirical research papers.  If you have something that you’ve been mulling over, reading up on, or outlining, please don’t hesitate to send it in!  In the end, the session will be as open-ended or as formal as the submissions warrant; but we can’t know what you’re working on unless you share it with us.

Thank you for your submissions — whether already arrived or still on the way, and whether to this topical joint session or to the OOW open-submission sessions.  We look forward to reading your work — and to seeing you in Seattle next summer!

With best wishes,
The OOW 2016 Program Committee

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Organizations as Legal Persons
(co-sponsored by the Section on Sociology of Law and the Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work).

Recent legal decisions (such as Citizen’s United and Hobby Lobby), coupled with recent public debates about corporate and personal responsibility (such as the anti-sweatshop movement and the wave of “complicity” objections to providing services for same-sex marriages), suggest a profound rethinking of the legal and cultural relationship between organization as “legal persons” and the “natural persons” who own, run, work for, buy from, and live near them. We invite papers that explore these and related developments, situating corporate personhood in historical, political, cultural, theoretical and/or empirical context. What forces are driving the current reexamination of corporate personhood? How do recent developments relate to larger societal trends and historical legacies? What impacts are these developments likely to have, and what research agendas might they suggest?

Session Organizer: Mark C. Suchman, Brown University

Call for Papers: Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World?

On By Sarah MosseriIn Calls for Papers, ConferencesLeave a comment

Mini-Conference of the Comparative Historical Sociology Section
Friday, August 19, 2016
Seattle, Washington

The Comparative Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association and the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) program at Northwestern University are pleased to announce a mini-conference entitled “Can Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World?” The conference will take place August 19th, 2016 at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

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Call for Papers: WFRN 2016 Conference Call for Papers

On By Sarah MosseriIn Calls for Papers, ConferencesLeave a comment

The Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) invites submissions for the 2016 Conference, Careers, Care, and Life-Course “Fit:” Implications for Health, Equality, and Policy, to be held June 23-25, 2016 at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C.

Conference Information: 
Careers, Care, and Life-Course “Fit:” Implications for Health, Equality, and Policy
June 23-25, 2016 (June 22, 2016 Pre-Conference Policy Day)
Capital Hilton Hotel, Washington D.C., USA

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Professional workshop on the intersection of organizational and occupational ethnography

On By Sarah MosseriIn ConferencesLeave a comment
Please join us on Friday, August 7 from 8:00am to 10:00am at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC for a Professional Development Workshop: Being There/Being Them: The Intersection of Organizational and Occupational Ethnography. Our panelists include: Steve Barley (Stanford University); Lisa Cohen (McGill University); Emily Heaphy (Boston University); and Gerardo Okhuysen (UC Irvine).

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