Guest Editors
Marco A. Pirrone (Università degli Studi di Palermo)
Sergio Riggio (Cobas di Palermo)
Socioscapes: International Journal of Societies, Politics and Cultures is inviting papers for a special issue on 'Class and Industrial Societies in Global Capitalism'. Over the past few decades, two concepts that profoundly shaped the tradition of sociology and the social sciences — class and industrial society — have been progressively expunged from the dominant lexicon of social research. The concept of class has often been replaced by apparently more neutral categories, such as stratification, social difference or differentiation. In parallel, the notion of industrial society has been supplanted by diagnoses of its supposed end: post-industrial society, knowledge society, network society, postmodern society.
This transformation of theoretical vocabulary is not neutral: it risks obscuring some of the fundamental processes that characterize contemporary capitalism. This special issue of Socioscapes starts from a simple but radical question: have sociology and the social sciences abandoned the concepts of class and industrial society too soon?
This special issue of Socioscapes therefore intends to reopen a theoretical and empirical discussion on two fundamental categories of the sociological tradition: class and industrial society. The aim is to reflect on their persistent analytical capacity to understand contemporary global capitalism, its material transformations, the new forms of social domination and the dynamics of conflict that traverse the world of labour and society in its various articulations.
The issue also welcomes contributions that question the analytical validity of these categories or propose radical revisions: the aim is not a pro forma defence of the concepts, but a rigorous examination of their heuristic capacity in the present.
Topics of Interest
The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible contribution themes:
decline and marginalization of the concepts of class and industrial society in the social sciences;
critique of narratives of post-industrial society;
global industrialization, extractivism and the infrastructures of contemporary capitalism;
labour classes, precarization and new compositions of living labour;
"class struggle from above" in neoliberal societies;
Silicon Valley as an ideological paradigm of contemporary capitalism;
empirical and comparative analyses of social classes in contemporary societies;
analysis of contemporary international literature on the use of both concepts.
Submission and Publication Procedure
Socioscapes welcomes article proposals submitted as abstracts to the Guest Editors. Proposals should include:
author’s name, institutional affiliation, email address;
title of the contribution;
abstract of no more than 500 words;
keywords (up to 5).
Proposals should be sent to:
Marco Antonio Pirrone – marco.a.pirrone@unipa.it
Sergio Riggio – sergioriggio@yahoo.it
Accepted articles should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words or 36,000 and 60,000 characters (spaces included, bibliography excluded).
Languages: proposals and articles may be written in Italian, English, French, or Spanish.
Calendar:
30 May 2026 – submission of proposals
20 June – selection
30 November 2026 – submission of articles
15 December 2026 – double blind peer review
30 January 2027 – revision of articles
March 2027 – publication
For further details, visit http://www.socioscapes.org/index.php/sc/announcement/view/5