International Sociological Association

"Sociology on the move"

Gothenburg, Sweden, 11-17 July, 2010

http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2010/

Research Committee on Social Transformations and Sociology of Development RC09

Programme Coordinators
Ulrike Schuerkens, EHESS, France, uschuerkens@gmail.com and Nina Bandelj, University of California, USA, nbandelj@uci.edu

Call for Papers

Paper abstracts should be submitted via e-mail to the session organizers indicated below.

The deadline for the submission of paper abstracts for all RC09 sessions is December 15, 2009.

Any individual may participate on up two sessions. Once your presentation is approved by the session chair, you must then submit an abstract of your paper on-line (instructions will be made available in due course). Abstracts are only accepted by the system from those who are already registered for the Congress. The deadline for submission of approved abstracts is May 1, 2010.

Proposed Sessions

Session 1: Crisis and social transformations
Chair: Ulrike Schuerkens, Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France, uschuerkens@gmail.com

This session would like to reunite case studies on the topic of crisis and its recent escalation during the financial crisis of the last months. The aim of the session is to contribute to a widening of the notion of crisis and to possible openings that a theory of social transformations can provide. Scholars are asked to look for possibilities how research on social transformations and the sociology of development can suggest outcomes and possible reactions in a time of crisis. In particular, this session looks for case studies that develop the theoretical thinking and suggest empirical research on the consequences of the financial crisis in different countries of the North and the South.

As the financial crisis has shown, the economic system seems to have attained a critical moment where transitions announcing structural changes of the neo-liberal order appear. Authors should accept the challenge that this new situation presents to us as sociologists and should suggest case studies that may tackle the following topics: Broad segments of populations will have to live new and unexpected outcomes of state interventions that the crisis of the financial sector has asked for. The neo-liberal economy has permitted middle classes and poorer groups to maintain standards of living by getting bank credits in such a volume that the actual value of these credits was no longer guaranteed by banks, which was one of the main reasons for the financial crisis. How do different social groups react to this crisis and what are the influences on the labour markets? Are there country differences, such as countries where the lending ratio was lower or higher than in other countries? Does this mean different outcomes depending on local situations? What is the role of the global interconnectedness in given local settings? The overall assumption of the session is that transformation theory can provide rational explications on the basis of observation, analysis, and interpretation and can thus display possible sociological alternatives to the critical-historical analysis of the present.

Session 2: Current social and economic challenges in postsocialist societies
Chair: Nina Bandelj, University of California, USA, nbandelj@uci.edu
Twenty years since the dramatic events of 1989, the time is now ripe to generalize more broadly about the social and economic repercussions of the post-1989 transformations. Specifically, this session invites papers that examine the contemporary social and economic challenges that Central and Eastern European societies have to face. Possible topics include social inequality and poverty, welfare-state transformations, nationalism/ethnicity issues, civil society, second demographic transition, declining health outcomes, and economic challenges exacerbated by the current world-wide economic problems. We invite country case studies or cross-national research comparing several Central and East European countries or employing a cross-regional comparison framework.

Session 3: Labour migration, governance and global development
Chair: Habibul Haque Khondker, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Habibul.Khondker@zu.ac.ae
Migration of overseas contract workers has been an integral feature of the globalization of the labour process. Despite the involvement of millions of workers both male and female with varied qualifications, this process remains poorly governed in the absence of appropriate institutional frameworks. The neo-liberal ideologues have favoured unregulated movements of people. Many of the governments in the labour-sending countries are moreover either indifferent or lack capacity to deal with this situation which not only has contributed to the victimization of the workers and has put them at a great risk with little or no bargaining power. This often results in workers taking up jobs that do not match their qualifications so that migrant workers get little opportunity for professional development. The papers in this session will examine a variety of cases of overseas contract workers, the social and institutional nexuses that either facilitate or hinder the harmonization and implementation of the policies aimed at the protection of the rights of the workers. Papers should examine the consequences of the temporary labour migration and explore conditions for the improvement of the governance by facilitating better coordination of all stakeholders, namely, the government of the labour-recipient country, the government of the labour-sending country, the migrant workers, and the civil society organizations working on the migrant workers issues.

Session 4: Labour markets on the move: Out-migration from the Caucasus to the Russian Federation
Chair: Nikolai Genov, Free University Berlin, Institute of Sociology, genov@zedat.fu-berlin.de
The small Armenian and Georgian societies declined in number by over one million each after 1990. The largest part of this massive emigration was absorbed by the Russian Federation and particularly its capital city, Moscow. What was the interplay of push and pull factors influencing decisions and actions in this process? What are its consequences now and what will they become in the foreseeable future? Answers to these questions are sought for in extended field studies in Armenia, Georgia, and in Moscow in the framework of a research project supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. The guiding idea of the studies concerns the dynamic links between national labour markets in the global movement of labour force. The comparison on the side of the out-migration societies provides evidence for substantial economic, political and cultural local specifics. The study on the spot in the receiving country reveals controversial effects of immigration. The explanatory scheme focuses on the links between structural opportunities and constraints of international migration, on the one side, and on the gains and losses for the involved parties, on the other.

Session 5: Global economic crisis and trans-national migrant communities
Chair: Eric Popkin, Colorado College, USA, epopkin@coloradocollege.edu.
In this session, we are looking for papers that address how the current global economic crisis shapes the nature of trans-national migration and development in the global South. In particular, we are interested in papers that examine both the flow of remittances (both individual and collective remittances) and the patterns of migration that may have shifted due to global economic constraints. What do these possible changes mean for the transformation of the migrant sending and receiving communities? We are also interested in submissions that consider how the possible decline in remittances shape/influence local (municipal, regional, provincial) planning processes and how state institutions intervene in the expenditure of remittances in specific localities. Finally, papers could consider the extent to which the relationship between immigrant hometown associations and their interlocutors in the migrant sending communities (local elites, community organizations, local government officials, etc.) have been altered in the current economic context.

Session 6: Civil society organizations and development
Chair: Wade Roberts, Colorado College, USA, wroberts@coloradocollege.edu
Civil society organizations, from international nongovernmental organizations to local community-based organizations, have become central actors in development efforts and processes in recent years. Their expanding presence raises important questions concerning the neo-liberal project and the structure and role of the state in the developing world. This session invites papers that examine the various roles of civil society organizations (CSOs) in development and their relationship to other development actors. Among other topics, papers may address such issues as state-CSO relations, CSOs and the neo-liberal project, and the role of CSOs in advocacy, policy-making, and project implementation.

Session 7: Hiring queues and sourcing sites in the global economy
Chair: Fredrick Wherry, University of Michigan, USA, ffwherry@umich.edu
Recent work in the sociology of development and in economic sociology have asked why particular locales become favoured sites for foreign direct investment or as sourcing sites for artisanal products when other comparable places offer nearly the same types of investment opportunities or the same types of products for export. Similarly, sociologists studying race, ethnicity, and immigration have long recognized that there exists a hiring queue in some sectors of the economy: holding education, job experience, age, and other relevant factors constant, some ethnic groups are favoured over others for some forms of employment.
Authors should ask some of the following questions: Are there hiring queues based on ethnicity or country-of-origin in globalized markets? If so, how do they work? Are some production sites favoured over others even though there exist production sites in comparable countries? What are the tangible and the intangible components that producers and buyers consider when making decisions about the advantages and disadvantages of the actual location of production? What do these components tell us about the opportunity structure in the global economy?

Session 8: Climate change, governance and the sustainability of cities
Joint session of RC09 Social Transformations and Sociology of Development and RC23 Sociology of Science and Technology [host committee]

Session 9: The cost of radical social change: Sociological surveys of public opinion in European states of the former Soviet Union
Co-Chairs: Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Poland tomescu.1@sociology.osu.edu and Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, Ohio State University, USA, slomczynski.1@sociology.osu.edu
The session “The Cost of Radical Social Change: Sociological Surveys of Public Opinion in European States of the Former Soviet Union” aims to (a) discuss methodology, theory and social problems related to survey research in the post-Soviet countries, and (b) examine specific data sets and evaluate their usefulness for cross-national comparisons. In their article “Representation of Post-Communist European Countries in Cross-National Public Opinion Surveys” published in Problems of Post-Communism (2006), Slomczynski and Tomescu-Dubrow found that historical legacies of the communist era and the costs of radical social change tolled heavily on the social science communities in the region. Macro-level factors, economic and political especially, on one hand, but also uneven experience with survey research infrastructure, systematically affected countries’ inclusion in cross-national surveys. This article sparked two conferences on post-communist societies: “Sociological Surveys of Public Opinion in Southeast Europe: Cross-National Comparative Studies” supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and hosted by the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 2007, and “Sociological Public Opinion Research in Central and Eastern Europe: Historical and Cross-National Research,” hosted by IFiS-PAN and held in Warsaw, Poland in 2008. Presentations by representatives from these countries provided the context for articulating the main problems and challenges of sociological public opinion surveys in these post-communist societies. This session seeks empirical papers from established and young up-and-coming scholars from the international academic community interested in the state of public opinion survey research in the European States of the Former Soviet Union.

Session 10: Global Economic crisis, varieties of capitalism and social inequality – Theoretical, historical and comparative perspectives
Joint session of RC09 Social Transformations and Sociology of Development [host committee] and TG02 Historical and Comparative Research

Session 11: Social transformations and changing leisure patterns
Joint session of RC09 Social Transformations and Sociology of Development and RC13 Sociology of Leisure [host committee]