The Sociology Institute at the University of Neuchâtel is hosting the 2019 edition of the Swiss Sociological Association biannual congress on September 10 to 12, 2019. The theme of the event is The Future of Work.

Congress of the Swiss Sociological Association 2019The Future of Work

Presentation of the workshop

This workshop is based on the experience of the two organisers who have been involved for 15 years in ethnographic research in the chemical industry in France on the topic of industrial safety. Classified as Seveso with regards to their hazardous activities, these companies must comply with stringent regulations which are translated from the European to the national level.

As researchers, it is possible to remain situated locally in plants when describing and understanding safety practices. This is the traditional focus of the important and now classic literature such as Turner (1978), Perrow (1984), Vaughan (1996) or Hopkins (1999). However, our data also reveal that these plants are often and increasingly so embedded in global markets, featuring networkedproperties gained from the social, cultural, political and economic transformations of the past two to three decades at the world stage. Safety practices are embedded in webs of entities at different scales with which they engage in regular transactions,communications and interactions within transnational commodity chains. Chemical plants interact with corporate headquarters on several topics in several different ways, and these headquarters can be located in a different country, they engage in complementary but also competitive relationships with other plants within group, they deal with compliance issues from requirements of national and supra national regulations, international and professional standards, they cooperate with an array of expertise provided inside and outside a corporation, they outsource to product and services companies some of their activities etc. Sociological works have shown the way in the past 20 years of to widen the scope of our understanding of societies (Beck, 1986,2008 Eisenstadt, 1998, Sassen, 1998, 2009, Streeck, 2012, Therborn, 2011) to include the consequences of new technologies such as digitalisation, of the financialisation of capitalism as expressed in the Swiss Congress of Sociology.

These dynamics have, are and willprofoundly shape companies’ strategies has it happened in the background of BPs series of catastrophic events due to a poorly managed excess of decentralisation exploring the limits of network logic of the corporation (Le Coze, 2016, 2017)High-risk industries in general (nuclear, maritime, aviation, railway, etc) are now confronted to globalised processes for which there is only little description and conceptualisation in the dedicated literature despite the fact that it is now, and will be in the future,a strong characteristic of their mode of operating. Of course, some of these industries have a long history of operating worldwide, with various degrees of international coordination and sometimes control. But recent trends such as financialisation, digitalisation or standardization which have been behind the last decade of increased flows of money, data, information and people have changed their mode of operating. They created a diversity of new conditions translated in the daily management and practice of safety. It is therefore believed that much needs to be done to produce the empirical, methodological and conceptual lenses which allows researchers and decision makers to better grasp the complex dynamic unfolding.It is for this reason that this workshop would like to invite writers to produce a variety of insights on the relationships between safety and globalisation.

Organizer(s)

• Michèle Dupré, Centre Max-Weber/LyonJ
• ean-Christophe Le Coze, INERIS, Pôle UGO,Parc Technologique ALATA

Submission guidelines

Contact: michele.dupre@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr

Email address for abstract submission: michele.dupre@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr

deadline : 2019, April 20^th