5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The relationship between work and environment is emerging as a fundamental phenomenon since more than a decade. Especially after the pandemic it is increasingly urgent to understand the relationship between the environmental crisis and the labour crisis that appear more and more clearly intertwined. In particular, various international and national analysis have highlighted a significant employment impact of all efforts towards a sustainable economy. However, most authors underline how the current development model is still based on a logic of extraction and exploitation trying to maximize value from nature as well as from the people. These logics are then reproduced in the labour market, both in the formal than in the informal one. Events and facts of labor exploitation take place daily in several sectors both in the agriculture, in the industry and in the tertiary sector. This heuristic and societal challenge is expressed by the notion and political objective of transition as a policy oriented process of transformative change that follows a double trajectory in the public debate: 1) the idea of “just transition”, as a way to drive transformation without “leaving no one behind”, combine transition with restorative and redistributive justice; 2) the necessity of a complementarity between the digital and the green innovation, which let us talk about “twins transitions”. This call for papers aims to invite scholars to present theoretical, empirical or methodological reflections on the interconnection between the environmental and labour crisis.