Forums: Fields of Transformations

Organised by: Peter Wegenschimmel (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg), Piotr Filipkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

Enterprises were more than just employers during socialism. Industrial sociology from Central Eastern Europe stressed not only production but also their various non-production functions. Socialist multifunctionality blurred the boundaries between the enterprise and its local or state environment. It also had strong, though sometimes hidden, impact on workers’ identifications and identities. Although increasingly oppositional in orientation, the workers perceived their factories and products as  achievements of socialist modernity.

What has remained of the multifunctionality after transformation? In fact, there were many of them, as (post)socialist enterprises underwent synchronous transformations of different kind. Organizational changes were triggered by the global oil crisis, economic reforms in late socialism and then democratic transition and postsocialist shock-therapies. In the 1980s some functions such as the provision of social services started to be dismantled. The institutional and discursive transformation led to a corrosion of the social pact between the state, managers, workers and local communities. Especially, the neoliberal reforms and the urge to make the shipyards more profitable hit the non-production side of the enterprises hard.

Another outcome of the transformation was the re-valuation of all assets. The assessment of an enterprise's value and the meaning of its profitability seemed to be based on hard data but were even more so performative acts. 30 years after 1989 it is a good moment to have a more distant and more reflexive look on these complex processes, and therefore make attempts at historicizing them.

Organised by: Urs Lindner (Erfurt)

There is a longstanding leftist skepticism in regards to the transformative potential of affirmative action policies (“Gleichstellungspolitik”). These policies, the argument runs, may make the composition of capitalist elites a bit more diverse in terms of race and gender, but they do not tackle the underlying structures and mechanisms of inequality. On the other hand, for many observers feminism has been most successful when taking the road of “state feminism”. Affirmative action policies have changed organizational cultures to a considerable extent: the increasing presence of women in political bodies correlates with more women and LGTBQI-friendly policies; measures like parental leave and money (begin to) undermine the gendered division of labor; recent shifts in justification from equal opportunity to equal participation question established boundaries between the private and the political.
The aim of this panel is to systematically address the transformative impact of affirmative action policies as well as their limits. Which mechanisms of inequality do these policies act on and in which ways? Does it make sense to (analytically) distinguish between positional and group inequalities and, if yes, what about their interplay? Which are the political constellations that enable affirmative action to realize its transformative potential? And how should this potential be normatively framed?  

Organised by: Research Group Social Theory and Social Philosophy, Max-Weber-Kolleg (Erfurt)

The abstract of the event will follow shortly.

Organised by: Sabrina Zajak (Bochum), Sebastian Haunss (Bremen)

Today’s social movements could be interpreted as Polanyian counter-movements to the disembbeding of societies through globalization and economic re-regulation. Social movements count as key drivers for social change in modern societies. Many of the pressing issues – climate justice, fair wages, degrowth, sustainability, gender equality, global justice – have been framed and put on the public agenda through the mobilization of social movements.  And yet social movement scholar’s reception of Polanyian inspired theorizing remains marginal (della Porta 2018, Zajak 2019). This panel discusses the uneasy relationship of social movement studies with Polanyian ideas by putting the relationship between social movements and inequality at its center.

Organised by: Edward Webster (Johannesburg, ZA), Carmen Ludwig (Gießen)

In the mainstream discourse about the “Future of Work”, much of the conversation has focused on responses to technological trends rather than ways of addressing shifting power dynamics and the transformation of societies through the struggles of precarious and informal workers. The panel seeks to focus on the making and re-making of class in Africa and its link to new, emerging forms of workers’ organisations.
In Africa, the industrial working class is very much a minority of wage earners. Instead, we find “classes of labour“. These include men and women who sell their labour power either directly on a wage labour market or indirectly through some form of product market in order to reproduce themselves and their families. Categories like ‘worker’, ‘peasant’, ‘employed‘ and ‘self-employed’ become fluid. The ambiguity and heterogeneity of class corresponds with new forms of organisations of precarious and informal workers. “Hybrid” organisations are emerging which cross the divide between traditional unionism, informal workers’ associations or cooperatives. 
The panel seeks to address the link between the re-making of class and the new, emerging forms of organisations. Its aim is to shift the debate and fields of action toward the “Future of Worker Organisation” and to the contribution their struggles make to the dynamics of change in Africa.