Two Full Professorships in Sociology at SNS

Nicholas Pohl Job Market

The Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) invites expressions of interest from qualified scholars in the field of Sociology, in view of the possible opening of positions in its Istituto di Scienze Umane e Sociali at the full professor level.

In particular we seek candidates with the following backgrounds:

  • Methodology of the social sciences, with a strong and pluralist profile in qualitative and quantitative methods, Qualitative Comparative Analysis as well as multimethods research designs.
  • Economic sociology, with particular attention to political economy within cross-national comparative analysis as well as attention to the international dynamics.

SNS looks for candidates with a proven record of achievements, a clear potential to promote and lead research activities and a specific interest in teaching at the graduate level to a small set of particularly skilled students.

English is the working language.

As a result of this enquiry, SNS will decide whether or not to fill a position, on the contract to offer or procedure to activate.

Expressions of interest, addressed to:

Prof. Mario Citroni
Preside dell’Istituto di Scienze Umane e Sociali
Scuola Normale Superiore
Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza degli Strozzi
50123 Firenze
Italy

can be sent by email to the address classi@sns.it, writing EOI/SOC in the subject field.

Deadline for the receipt of applications: August 15th, 2015.

Applications (in Italian or English) should include a CV, a description of current research interests and all relevant information about the applicant. Working knowledge of Italian is appreciated but not required.

Agenda for the SGPS meeting at GC Montreal 28 August 2015

Nicholas Pohl Standing group activities

Agenda for the SGPS meeting at GC Montreal 28 August 2015

1. Organisation of meeting
2. Election of convenor, co-convenor, treasurer and secretary for 2015-2018 (3 years). Volunteers needed. David Swartz and Niilo Kauppi would be ready to continue. 
3. Section at GC Prague 2016. We will need 2 volunteers to organize the political sociology section at the conference.
4. Other matters arising (Joint sessions, cooperation with other organizations, publications…)
5. Date of next meeting

CfP 10th Jyväskylä Symposium on Political Thought and Conceptual Change

Nicholas Pohl Uncategorized

CALL FOR PAPERS
10th Jyväskylä Symposium on Political Thought and Conceptual Change
11-12 June 2015, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä
Organised by the FiDiPro project Transformations of Concepts and Institutions in the European Polity (TRACE)
https://www.jyu.fi/ytk/laitokset/yfi/en/research/testi/research/projects/moral-and-political-agency-projects/trace

Theorising the European polity: Conceptual and institutional transformations

The aim of this year’s Jyväskylä Symposium on Political Thought and Conceptual Change is to contribute to developing a political theory of the EU – political theory with an emphasis on the political and an approach to the European integration as a process creating new spaces for political action and new interpretations of political struggles and debates.
The key argument of the symposium is that both the EU and the processes of European integration bring about politicization in several new respects and dimensions, as they question established conceptions of political identities, institutions and practices. The political processes of polity formation around the EU, and an increasing fusion of what formerly was named ”internal and external political structures”, not only transform those established conceptions – the EU also is to be seen as a major agent of politicisation.
But, so far, these political aspects of European integration have been weakly theorised. Besides the debates around the ”normative turn” in EU studies, the attempt to apply deliberative democratic theory to international organisations, or the study of the ”Europeanisation” of European integration, theoretical approaches to European integration such as Federalism, neo-functionalism, constructivism, or intergovernmentalism do not address integration as a new space for political action. A political-theoretical approach to the EU must take into account the conceptual, historical and institutional transformations brought about by European integration.
We encourage papers that seek to develop a political-theoretical approach to the EU that strives to make sense of the growing complexity and the development of novel structures and opportunities for political action that European integration entails: political theorising should recognise the European polity as an eminently political phenomenon. Theorising the European polity has been underdeveloped, so has the linkage between political philosophy and political theory. The symposium aims to fill these gaps in current scholarship, and invites scholars working on European studies, political theory, history of political thought, political rhetoric and other disciplines to participate in this endeavour.
Contact person. Send abstracts (one page) before April 15th to Anna Bjork (anna.k. bjork@jyu.fi).
Decisions will be communicated during the first week of May.
Keynote speakers. Dario Castiglione (University of Exeter), Michael Freeden (University of Nottingham), Claudia Wiesner (Marburg University)
Limited funds are available to provide graduate students with travel stipends.
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Nominations ECPR Mattei Dogan Prize

Nicholas Pohl Uncategorized
ECPR Mattei Dogan Prize –Submit your nomination by 1 March 2015
The Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in European Political Sociology is awarded by the ECPR for a major contribution to the advancement of political sociology by a jury composed of four members of the ECPR Executive Committee. The prize is presented to either a scholar with an ensemble of outstanding scientific publications and constructive professional achievements or a coherent team of several researchers enjoying a high reputation in the international community of political sociologists. The award for this prize is US$3,000.
 
Nomination for the prize can be made by ECPR member institutions, or from outside the ECPR by professional associations, universities, or research centres. Two or three political sociologists may jointly nominate a candidate. Nominations should include: a biography and bibliography of the nominee; evidence of the visibility of the nominee in the literature; and letters of recommendation from well-known scholars who may not necessarily be ECPR members.
 
Nominations must be sent by email to Marcia Taylor at the ECPR by the deadline of 1 March 2015.

ECPR 2015: Call for papers

Nicholas Pohl Calls for papers, Conferences

The political sociology standing group’s section for the 2015 General Conference of the ECPR in Montreal is entitled  ‘Political Engagement, Scholarship and Social Trajectories’.

The call for papers has just been published. Paper proposals must be submitted by February 16, 2015.

Below are descriptions of the six panels that are planned within the section. More information can be found here 

Panel 1: Scholars and Public Intellectuals as Policy Advisers.
Jane Jenson and George Ross, University of Montreal.

How do scholars and public intellectuals respond to institutional crises? This panel invites papers exploring how veteran EU analysts and public intellectuals are responding to the Eurozone crisis. Is there an emerging collective imaginary of possible solutions or simply a polysemy of disjointed voices? Are scholarly voices being taken as seriously today in EU committees as they were in the past?

Panel 2: The Relationship between social trajectories and political careers: the revolving door of MPs, officials and lobbyists in the EU and in other national contexts
Stephanie Yates, University of Montreal and Hélène Michel, University of Strasbourg

Revolving door social trajectories of public office holders (POH) likely impacts their apprehension of political issues, their political decisions, and ultimately public policy. When POHs transfer to private activities within the same sector or when private sector leaders become POHs with responsibilities in the same arena conflicts of interest can emerge that politicize public service and compromise public institutions with private interests.
The objective of this panel is to discuss comparatively the revolving door in the European Union and in other national and subnational contexts: How frequent is the phenomenon? Has it been a growing trend in recent years? Which sectors of activities are the most concerned? Is it closely associated with particular political ideologies?

Panel 3: The Long-Term Impacts of 1970’s Feminist Activism in Various Contexts
Olivier Fillieule, University of Lausanne and Alban Jacquemart, Centre d’étude de l’emploi, Paris, France.

Personal and biographical consequences of feminist activism can affect the life-course of individuals in decisive ways. How do feminist commitments generate or modify dispositions to act, think, and perceive that are either consistent or contrast with previous socialization. In this panel, we would like to address (empirically, methodologically, and epistemologically) these kinds of questions with particular concerns for issues of sexual freedom and orientation, alienation from previous movement engagement, rethinking gender roles, and how « the personal is political » actually plays out in family and professional life.

Panel 4: Persistence and Transformation of Political Involvement: How Activism Reverberates through Diverse Life Spheres
Emilie Biland, Laval University and Bleuwenn Lechaux, University Rennes 2

This panel will devote special attention to how one’s activist involvements in political events or in formal or informal collectives can impact various life spheres (professional, family, and private). Paper proposals could address such questions as how activist skills transfer into professional skills, how one’s conceptions of family, affective relationships and friendship are revised or perpetuated, how activist social ties persist through time even after disengagement, and how commitments themselves are transformed or redesigned in the light of previous activist experiences?

Panel 5: Studying Activism: Methods of Data Collection and Analysis of Activism and Activists’ Careers
Davide Morselli, University of Lausanne and Julie Pagis, University of Lille 2

This panel will focus on methodological aspects of researching activist’s trajectories. Activists represent a non-randomly distributed population for which conventional survey and sampling methods may not apply. Political engagement and radicalization can impact activists’ lives far beyond the political sphere, such as in career, fertility, family, and health. Thus, the study of the diverse effects of activism faces the challenge of collecting complex and multifaceted data and using multiple analytical strategies able to take in consideration holistic processes. Paper proposals could address different methodological questions such as: What sampling strategies can be applied to study activism and activists’ life-course? What are the implications of using certain data collections modes (e.g. web survey, questionnaires, dairies, autobiographical interviews) and analytical methods (e.g., phenomenological analysis, longitudinal mixture methods, multi-channel sequence analysis, self-organizing-maps) ?

Panel 6: Academics as Politicians. 
David Swartz, Boston University and Niilo Kauppi, Academy of Finland

The panel will address a question that has been, at least since Max Weber’s writings, on the agenda of political science and political sociology: the relationship academics have with politics. A key issue is the conversion of academics into either professional politicians or political activists and public intellectuals. Examples of these are numerous and include professors of IR becoming presidents of the European Commission (Manuel Barroso), or academics getting engaged in social movements (Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu) or in political debates, like Jürgen Habermas concerning the future of the EU. Under what conditions do these conversions take place? What are the links between political culture and political engagement?

New publication ‘The Fight for Ethical Fashion’

Nicholas Pohl Publications

9781409458050.PPC.qxd:PPC

The Fight for Ethical Fashion. The Origins and Interactions of the Clean Clothes Campaign

Philip Balsiger, European University Institute, Italy

Series : The Mobilization Series on Social Movements, Protest, and Culture

From consumer boycotts and buycotts to social movement campaigns, examples of individual and collective actors forging political struggles on markets are manifold. The clothing market has been a privileged site for such contention, with global clothing brands and retailers being targets of consumer mobilization for the past 20 years. Labels and product lines now attest for the ethical quality of clothes, which has, in turn, given rise to ethical fashion.

The Fight for Ethical Fashion unveils the actors and processes that have driven this market transformation through a detailed study of the Europe-wide coordinated campaign on workers’ rights in the global textile industry – the Clean Clothes Campaign

Drawing on insights from qualitative fieldwork using a wide range of empirical sources, Philip Balsiger traces the emergence of this campaign back to the rise of ‘consumer campaigns’ and shows how tactics were adapted to market contexts in order to have retailers adopt and monitor codes of conduct. By comparing the interactions between campaigners and their corporate targets in Switzerland and France (two countries with a very different history of consumer mobilization for political issues), this ground-breaking book also reveals how one campaign can provoke contrasting reactions and forms of market change.

Contents: Preface; Introduction: contentious markets; The rise of consumer campaigns; Launching a campaign; Building a campaign; Campaign styles and protest in the market place; Campaigning over time; Strategic interactions and campaign outcomes; Conclusion: contention, consumers, and corporations; References; Index.

Two ERC-funded PhD Studentships in Politics/Social Science at the University of Exeter (Streatham Campus)

Nicholas Pohl Job Market

The PhDs are funded through a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC-STATORG) awarded to Principal Investigator (PI) Prof. Nicole Bolleyer. The five-year, interdisciplinary project addresses the following questions: Which regulatory frameworks are in place in 19 long-lived democracies to steer the behaviour of membership-based, voluntary organizations (e.g. parties, NGOs, interest groups, charities) (phase 1)? How do distinct regulatory frameworks affect the operation, evolution and survival of these voluntary organizations (phase 2)?

The two studentships are embedded in phase 2 of STATORG which studies the long-term evolution of parties, interest groups and charities formed post 1980 in a small number of long-lived democracies – qualitatively and quantitatively. The democracies will be characterized by different regulatory frameworks (e.g. funding regimes, allocation of tax benefits, regulation of legal recognition, election law, lobby regulation) to assess how different organizations adapt to their respective environment (e.g. in terms of organizational change, strategic adaptation).
The two PhD students can have backgrounds in various social science disciplines (e.g. politics, sociology, economics). They will contribute a) to a comparative study of developmental patterns of environmental groups, political parties and social policy organizations (through in-depth interviews and qualitative document analysis) and b) to a quantitative comparative analysis (using event history/survival analysis) on the features that affect organizations’ likelihood to survive. Next to the opportunity to write a PhD in the context of an ambitious, interdisciplinary project, there will be opportunities for all team members to co-author conference papers and academic publications, i.e. these posts will provide an excellent foundation for an academic career.

More information on this position can be found on this website

Social movements and corporations in the global South

Nicholas Pohl Calls for papers

Panel at the European Sociological Association Conference, Prague, 25-28 August 2015

The panel is part of the Social movement research network session, with many other movement related panels. More information on all the panels and on how to submit a paper here http://www.esa12thconference.eu/rn25-social-movements

Social movements and corporations in the global South

Chairs

Philip Balsiger, Graduate Center, City University New York, philip.balsiger@gmail.com

Maria-Therese Gustaffson, Stockholm University, maria-therese.gustafsson@statsvet.su.se

Corporations are powerful players in a world of deregulation and economic globalization. In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in studying interactions between social movements and corporations. So far, this literature has overwhelmingly focused on activists opposing corporations in Western countries. Yet many conflicts between corporations and social movement organizations or civil society groups take place in the ‘global South’. While scholars from a variety of disciplines do study such conflicts, they are rarely linked to the debates raised within the Western-centric study of movement-corporate interactions. In producing countries conditions differ in important ways: conflicts take place further down in the supply chains, the inequality of resources between activist challengers and companies is likely to be higher, political-institutional contexts vary greatly. For this panel we welcome empirical studies that address the following questions: How does corporations’ involvement in social service provision and/or the relationship between the state and corporations affect the relationship between corporations and movements? How are movement-corporate interactions related to the global inequalities of capitalism and reflected in in framing processes? How do the complex relationships between transnational advocacy groups and national/local organizations shape movement-corporate interactions? And how, on the opposite side, does the integration of firms in global supply chains constrain corporate responses? By addressing these issues the panel seeks to cross-fertilize studies on Western and non-Western contexts and contribute to develop the theoretical frameworks used to analyze interactions between movements and corporations.