日本社会学会：The Japan Sociological Society

The Center for the Study of Social Stratification and Inequality (CSSI) of Tohoku University solicits six to ten papers on social stratification and inequality from Asian perspectives for presentation at the symposium. Authors of selected papers are invited to the symposium to collectively discuss issues on this topic and expected to submit them to a special issue of Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, guest edited by Yoshimichi Sato (submitted papers to this special issue will go through the journal's standards review process).

Global forces such as globalization and the rise of service industry have great impacts on advanced industrial societies. Asian societies are not exempt from them. They are witnessing increasing fluidity in local labor markets as their Western counterparts are. However, as Hans-Peter Blossfeld and his colleagues point out, global forces do not directly affect social stratification and inequality in each society. Rather, their impacts are filtered by local institutions.

For example, global forces have weakened long-term employment practice in Japan, which has increased unemployment rates and turnover rates. However, the practice is not deteriorating ubiquitously in the labor market. Workers in large firms and the public sector are still protected by the practice, while workers in the periphery of the labor market are thrown into harsh competitions in the external labor market. Thus inequality between the two types of workers has become wider.

Asian societies have experienced “compressed” modernization and industrialization, which have produced unique local institutions. Furthermore we observe differences in institutions even among Asian societies. It may be possible that global forces are so strong that local institutions in Asian societies are converging on Western ones, but this is an open question to be checked by empirical data. Thus contemporary Asian societies are an ideal field for “natural experiments,” and studying social stratification and inequality from Asian perspectives would lead to new findings that would not be found by studying only Western societies.

Participants apply for the conference by submitting an extended abstract of about 2 pages (not more than 1000 words). Please clearly link your paper to the theme and objective of the symposium in the abstract. Abstracts should be sent to Yoshimichi Sato at ysato@sal.tohoku.ac.jp via e-mail by May 20, 2012.

Closing date for abstract submission: May 20, 2012

Information about acceptance of the paper: May 31, 2012

First draft of the paper: August 31, 2012