Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 13:35:54 -0500 From: Michael Rempel Subject: CONFNC: Class Theory and Social Change Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 11:26:32 -0700 From: Michael Dreiling Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS CLASS THEORY AND SOCIAL CHANGE: RETREAT OR RENEWAL? Political Sociology Panel, Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. April 16-19, 1998. This panel seeks papers that challenge widely held notions that social class has retracted from the core dynamics of social change in the last 25 years. While an increasingly evident shift in the political dynamics of unions is generating both scholarly and journalistic attention, a corresponding shift in the theoretical framework of class formation, struggle, and mobilization has thus far failed to materialize. Theories that depict class in the static terms of social stratification, or cast labor politics in terms of industrial relations, are clearly insufficient, and even misleading approaches for understanding the political behavior and potentials of organized segments of the working class. Class need not be conceptualized as a totalizing structure and identity either; race, gender, nation, and sexuality shape the political and cultural conditions associated with class formation, as do the "anonymous" motors of global economic change. Empirical and theoretical work that makes these and related connections -- between class theory, worker-organization and collective action/social movements -- with the explicit aim of renewing a dynamic theory of class formation, mobilization and/or struggle will be ideal for this panel. Please send proposal or paper by Nov. 1, 1997, to: Michael Dreiling, Asst. Professor Department of Sociology 1291 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1291 541-346-5025 Michael Dreiling Phone: 541-346-5025 Department of Sociology Fax: 541-346-5026 1291 University of Oregon Email: dreiling@darkwing.uoregon.edu Eugene, OR 97403-1291