XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

326

Disappearing Organizations? Contention, Pressure Politics and the Maintenance of Organizations

RC17 Sociology of Organization (host committee)

Language: English

Modern corporations have learned to deal with world cultural expectations – at least in a ceremonial way. However, with changes in political leadership like the presidencies of Trump, Putin, Erdogan one can observe cultural and discursive changes which lead away from universalistic world cultural principles like democracy, sustainability or progress and towards autocracy, environmental exploitation and nationalistic particularism.

Whether these developments will lead to an end of world culture or merely to more or less radical changes within world culture is a question to be addressed by future students of world culture. However, one can presently observe that corporations and other world cultural actors are confronted with more diverse and contradicting expectations. Moreover, these developments are also challenging the concept of world culture itself.

Against this background, we are interested in a range of questions:

1. What are the consequences for theory building within world polity research in the face of recent developments towards particularism and nationalism?
2. How do corporations deal with this heightened degree of conflict and uncertainty on their front- and backstage?
3. What are the discursive dynamics and structures of the conflicts between corporations and specific critics on the one hand and of the conflicts between different critics themselves on the other hand?

We encourage both, contributions that are investigating these questions from a theoretical point of view as well as work that draws on empirical findings.