Political-economy scholarship has proven a fruitful perspective in understanding recent transformations of capitalism and capitalist societies. Many European sociologists and scholars from other disciplines work on projects that investigate European societies from a variety of political-economy perspectives. However, we lack a platform to promote and facilitate such research endeavours, to reassert the political economy perspective in the European Sociology and European social science in general, and to promote critical and emancipatory scholarship in Europe.

Therefore, we call interested scholars to participate in the Political-Economy Research Network of the European Sociological Association. Given the inherently inter-disciplinary nature of political-economy perspectives, we do not limit this call to sociologists. On the contrary, we wish to address scholars working within different disciplines, who employ political economy perspective in its broad sense in the study of Europe. Political economy has been traditionally defined as a particular field of study focusing on the relationship between the state and the economy. It understands the political and the economic as mutually co-constituted, the economic relations are seen as power relations involving a struggle over various scarce and valuable resources. Thus, we would like to bring together people employing neo-Marxist, neo-Gramscian, Regulationist, cultural political economy, world systems, constructivist, sociological institutionalist and other heterodox institutional and evolutionary political economy perspectives.

The primary activities of the network will include:

1. Facilitating the exchange of information, ideas and dialogue [mailinglist, website, newsletter]
2. Establishing contacts that might lead to new research projects or bids for funding for research projects
3. Organizing paper sessions and workshops at the ESA conferences
4. Organizing special seminars and conferences

The founding meeting of the research network will take place at the ESA conference in Torun, 9-13 September 2005. The topic of the session will be Competing Perspectives on the European Economy and its Future in the Global Era. However, we may try to arrange with the organizers more sessions if there is a strong demand for another topic.

Please email your interest in participating in the network in any form (e.g. subscribing to the mailinglist) or presenting a paper at the ESA session to the acting coordinator at the e-mail address provided below. If you with to participate in the conference, please note that the deadline for electronic submission of abstracts is February 15, 2005. (If you learn about this call later, please do not hesitate to contact the coordinator anyway.)

Jan Drahokoupil (Central European University, Budapest)
Bastiaan van Apeldoorn (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Bob Jessop (Lancaster University)
Christel Lane (University of Cambridge)
Claes Belfrage (University of Birmingham)
David Hudson (University of Birmingham)
Dorothee Bohle (Central European University, Budapest)
Glenn Morgan (University of Warwick)
Magnus Ryner (University of Birmingham)
Nicole Lindstrom (Central European University, Budapest)
Nitsan Chorev (Central European University, Budapest)
Paul Fawcett (University of Birmingham)