2025 Winner
Fox, Anna. “Covalent Logics: Policing, Family Values, and the Reproduction of Inequality.”

Honorable mentions:

Chun, Kyungmo. “When Investment Becomes Religion: How Household Investors Persist with Risky Investments Amid Uncertainty”

Tenorio, L. E. (2024). Work after lawful status: formerly undocumented immigrants’ gendered relational legal consciousness and workplace claims-making. Law & Society Review, 58(3), 383–414. doi:10.1017/lsr.2024.29

2024 Winner

Clem Aeppli, “Subcontracting, organizational rigidity, and employment instability”

Honorable mentions:

Julia Michelle Dessauer, “Sousveillance Work and Patrimonial Relations in Hollywood”

Sino Esthappan, “Legitimation Strategies: Pretrial Risk Assessments and the Logics of Data-Driven Judicial Discretion”

2023 Winners

Eldad Levy Guerrero, “Looking Right and Looking Busy: Producing Vigilance in Private Security.”

Wendy Y. Li, “Regulatory Capture’s Third Face of Power” (forthcoming in the Socio-Economic Review)

2022 Winner

Winner: Sheehan, Patrick. 2022. “The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise: How Unemployed Workers Become Professional Career Coaches.” American Journal of Sociology 127:1151-1182.

2021 Winner

Hart, Chloe Grace. 2021. “Trajectory Guarding: Managing Unwanted, Ambiguously Sexual Interactions at Work.” American Sociological Review 86, no. 2: 256–78.

Honorable mentions

Luhr, Sigrid. 2020. “Signaling Parenthood: Managing the Motherhood Penalty and Fatherhood Premium in the U.S. Service Sector.” Gender & Society 34, no. 2: 259–83.

Kunyuan Qiao. 2021. “E pluribus unum: Historical Origins and Contemporary Organizational Implications of Subnational Institutional Variations in the United States”. Working paper. Cornell University.

Winner: Guillermina Altomonte: “Exploiting Ambiguities: A Moral Polysemy Approach to Variation in Economic Practices (published in American Sociological Review, 85(1):76-105).

Honorable Mention: Rui Jie Peng: “Racial Stereotypes and Intergroup Relations in a Transnational Workplace: How Workers Respond to Workplace Inequalities.”

2019 Co-winners

James Chu, Stanford University, “A Camera or Merit or Engine of Inequality? College Rankings and the Enrollment of Disadvantaged Students”

Michael Gibson-Light, University of Arizona, “Sandpiles of Dignity: Labor Status and Symbolic Boundary-Making in the Contemporary American Prison”

2018 Winner

Jennifer Bouek (Brown University). “Navigating Networks: How Nonprofit Network Membership Shapes Responses to Resource Scarcity.” Social Problems, 65: 11-32.

2017 Winner

Winner:  Josh Seim (UC, Berkeley), “The Ambulance: Toward a Labor Theory of Poverty Governance.” American Sociological Review 82(3):451-475.

Honorable mention: Amanda Barrett Cox (University of Pennsylvania), “Cohorts, ‘Siblings,’ and Mentors: Organizational Structures and the Creation of Social Capital.” Sociology of Education 90(10):47-63.

2016 Winner

Winner: Benjamin Shestakofsky (UC, Berkeley) “High-Tech and High-Touch: The Labor behind the Screens of an Online Market.”

Honorable mention: Patrick Reilly (UCLA) “The Layers of a Clown: Career Development in Cultural Production Industries.”

2015 Winner

Brad R. Fulton (Duke University), “Bridging and Bonding: How Social Diversity Influences Organizational Performance.”

2014 Winner
Kim Pernell-Gallagher, “Learning from Performance: banks, collateralized debt obligations and the credit crisis.”

2013 Winner
Adam Goldstein, “Revenge of the Managers: Labor Cost-Cutting and the Paradoxical Resurgence of Managerialism in the Shareholder Value Ear, 1984-2001”

2012 Winner
Daniel Schneider, “Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation”

2011 Winner
András Tilcsik, “Pride and Prejudice: Discrimination Against Openly Gay Men in the U.S.”

2010 Winner
Catherine Turco, “The Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry”

2010 Honorable Mention
Elizabeth Chiarello, “Challenging Professional Self-Regulation: Social Movement Influence on Pharmacy Rulemaking in Washington State”

2009 Winner
John-Paul Ferguson, “Space Invaders: Social Valuation and the Diversification of Union Organizing Drives, 1961-1999”

2008 Winner
Taekjin Shin, “Pay Disparities Within Firms: The Role of the Chief Executive Officers”

2007 Winner
Matthew Desmond, “Making Workers Deployable”

2006 Winner
Jake Rosenfeld, “Desperate Measures: Strikes and Wages in Post-Accord America”

2005 Winner
Dirk Zorn, “Here a Chief, There a Chief: The Rise of the CFO in the American Firm”

2004 Winner
Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, “How Free are Free Agents? Relationships and Wages in a Triadic Labour Market”