CONFLICT, SOCIAL ACTION, LABOR, AND SOCIAL CHANGE
The Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change Division welcomes scholars and practitioners from sociology, social work, and related disciplines examining conflict, the diverse forms and contexts of social action, labor and its transformations, and processes of social change. The Division brings these areas into conversation while recognizing their distinct intellectual traditions and objects of inquiry. It is particularly interested in the relationships among them: how conflicts emerge, develop, and are organized; how individuals and collectivities act within, negotiate, contest, and transform social conditions and institutions; how labor shapes and is shaped by wider social relations; and how these dynamics contribute to processes of social change.
The Division approaches conflict broadly, across social relations, institutions, organizations, communities, and political and economic processes. This includes labor and workplace conflicts, political and institutional conflicts, community struggles, conflicts over resources, rights, recognition, and belonging, as well as political violence, and global regimes of war. It understands social action as the ways people act individually and collectively in relation to existing social conditions. This includes social movements, protest and contentious politics, grassroots and community organizing, advocacy, mutual aid, local and transnational solidarities, resistance and mobilization, unions and worker organizing, civil-society action, and everyday forms of agency. It encourages attention to how conflict and social action occur within, through and against institutions, organizations, and broader social structures, and how these dynamics connect and unfold across local, national, transnational, and global scales.
Labor is likewise understood expansively. Alongside research on work, workers and workplaces, labor markets and processes, employment relations, unions, worker rights and struggles, precarity and informal work, the Division welcomes scholarship examining labor as a social relation implicated in the wider organization of society. This includes its connections with production and social reproduction, mobility and migration, citizenship and borders, political organization, institutions, markets and firms, and changing relations among states, capital, and society. This perspective encompasses transformations such as platform work and automation, care and reproductive labor, global production networks, economic restructuring, and technological and ecological change, with attention to how labor intersects with class, race and racialization, gender, migration and citizenship, and other social relations that shape experiences of conflict, forms of social action, and processes of social change.
The Division approaches social change as encompassing both intentional and unintended processes of transformation, including their conditions, mechanisms, contradictions, and consequences. It welcomes research on institutional and organizational change; transformations of capitalism and work; reforms and revolutions; crises; movement outcomes; resistance and counter-movements; and processes through which existing social relations may be challenged, reconfigured, or reproduced.
The Division encourages scholarship across interconnected scales—from workplaces, communities, and organizations, through states and societies, to transnational and global processes. It welcomes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches and contributions from social movement studies, political sociology, labor and work studies, organizational and economic sociology, political economy, globalization and transnational studies, and studies of war, conflict, and social transformation.
Division mission statement written in September 2026 by Sara Maani, University of Milan-Bicocca, Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change Division Co-Chair 2025-2027; Leticia Morales, University of Southern California, Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change Division Co-Chair 2025-2027; and Sara Tehrani, University of Central Florida, Conflict, Social Action, Labor, and Social Change Division Co-Chair 2025-2027.
