ASA call for papers: social movements, corporations, and consumption

The deadline for the ASA annual meeting submission is upon us. This year the online submission due date for the conference is January 9. That’s right, you have 6 days left until your submissions are due!  Here’s a link to the call for papers and to the online submission system.

I’d like to call your attention to one of the sessions for the Collective Behavior and Social Movements section.  The session topic – Social Movements, Corporations, and Consumption – is one that many of you may be working on and so I’d encourage you to submit. Although the session is sponsored by the CBSM section, I imagine that some of you working in economic or political sociology might have an interest in this as well. Deana Rohlinger and I are organizing the session. I’m pasting the description below:

Social Movements, Corporations, and Consumption. In a global economy, multinational corporations are omnipresent in the lives of individuals. Corporations provide services, objects for consumption, and leverage their substantial presence in the affairs of government and civil society, making them potential sites of political contestation. This session will include papers that examine the push and pull between corporations and the social movements that seek to alter their practices and policies. In addition, we seek papers that look more closely at the relationship between social movements and consumer society – one potential pathway through which activists might influence corporate outcomes. Corporations try to establish trust with consumers and other stakeholders by holding themselves up as socially responsible organizations begging several questions: How do social movements challenge and effectively change “responsible” authorities (ones that are not necessarily political)? Can corporate marketing strategies like GAP Red undermine movements? What role does reputation (of either the corporation or the movement) play in this dynamic? How do movements mediate the relationship between corporate reputation-building and consumer audiences?