Dead Reckoning is an historical ethnography covering the life course of the air traffic control system from system emergence through 2017. Based on archival research and field work in four air traffic control facilities, the book focuses on how historical conditions, social actors, and events in the system’s institutional environment – political, economic, technological, cultural – impact the air traffic organization, changing it, and how in turn those changes affect not only the social, technological, and material arrangements of the workplace, but also controllers’ interpretive work, cultural understandings, and work practices. Far from a top-down model, controllers – the workers at the bottom of the hierarchy – respond to these events, making repairs that supply organizational resilience. Building on work on institutional logics, boundaries and boundary work, culture and cognition, and expertise, the case demonstrates the connection between institutional change, agency, and persistence over the life course.
Category: Awards
OOW Section Call for Awards: W. Richard Scott Article Award
The W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship is granted for an outstanding contribution to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and/or work in an article published within the last three years (2020, 2021, 2022). An article may be nominated by its author(s) or by any ASA member.
To nominate an article, send (1) a PDF file of the article or a functioning URL where it can be accessed, (2) a letter (PDF or MSWord) of no more than one page justifying the nomination, and (3) contact information for the nominee (including email), to the selection committee. Publication date is based on print publication for traditional journals (i.e., not online-first date), and release date for online-only journals. To receive full consideration, nominations must be submitted by March 31, 2023.
Please submit your nomination to the members of the Thompson Award Committee:
Jiwook Jung (chair)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Adilia James
Endicott College
adilia.james@gmail.com
Barbara Kiviat
Stanford University
OOW Section Call for Awards: Max Weber Book Award
The Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship is granted for an outstanding contribution to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and work in a book published within the last three years (2020, 2021, 2022). Self-nominations are permitted; however, all nominations must come from members in good standing of the OOW Section. Nominated candidates need not be members of the OOW Section or the ASA in order to be eligible for the award.
To nominate a book, mail each member of the selection committee at the addresses below: (1) a hard copy of the book; and (2) a nomination letter that states how the book contributes to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and work and provides the nominee’s email address and other contact information. To receive full consideration, nominations must be received by March 31, 2023.
Please submit your nomination to each of the members of the 2023 Weber Book Award Committee:
Amy Binder (Chair)
840 24th Street
San Diego, CA 92102
Melissa Abad
585 W Hacienda Ave, Apt 109
Campbell, CA 95008
Eric Dahlin
2927 Rensselaer Ct
Vienna, VA 22181
Minjae Kim
McNair Hall #238
Rice University
6100 Main Street
Houston, Texas, 77005-1892
OOW Section Call for Awards: James D. Thompson Student Paper Award
The James D. Thompson Award is given for an outstanding graduate student paper in the area of organizations, occupations, and work (OOW) written or published within the last three years (2020, 2021, 2022). Authors may nominate themselves, or section members may do so. However, all submitted nominations must come from members in good standing with the OOW Section or the ASA in order to be eligible for the award. In addition, the award recipient serves for one year on the section Council and receives $500 for travel to a professional meeting.
To nominate a paper, please submit the following materials via e-mail:
- PDF file of the paper,
- Nomination letter (PDF format) indicating how the paper contributes to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and work, and
- Contact information for the nominee (including email).
To receive full consideration, the committee Chair should receive the nomination materials by March 31, 2023 – Please use Thompson Paper Award Nomination as the subject for the email. The full committee includes:
Laura López-Sanders (Chair)
Brown University
prabhdeep singh kehal
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Laura Garbes
University of Minnesota- Twin Cities
Daniel Auguste
MIT Sloan School of Management
OOW Section Call for Awards: Rosabeth Moss Kanter Distinguished Career Award
The Distinguished Career Award recognizes and celebrates a career of outstanding contributions to the area(s) of organizations, occupations, and/or work. Nominations are judged on the depth and breadth of scholarly impact over an extended time and across multiple projects.
Section members may nominate a distinguished scholar by sending the following information to the selection committee: (1) a letter of nomination, which outlines the candidate’s scholarly contributions to the field, (2) a copy of the candidate’s most recent curriculum vitae, and (3) contact information for the nominee (including email address). Nominators also have the option of sending a portfolio of up to 10 of the nominee’s electronic publications. All nomination materials should be in pdf or word format and submitted as attachments to a single email.
To receive full consideration, nominations must be submitted by March 31, 2023.
Please submit your nomination via email to each of the members of the 2023 Distinguished Career Award Committee:
Erin Cech (chair)
University of Michigan
Oneya Okuwobi
University of Cincinnati
Eunmi Mun
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David Embrick
University of Connecticut
Megan Tobias Neely
Copenhagen Business School
OOW Award winners 2022
Dear OOW members,
As usual, reading the nominees for OOW awards is a reminder of what important and innovative research our members are conducting. This year was no exception, with large and strong pools to consider in each of our award categories. Below you will find a description of this year’s winners of the Max Weber Book Award, the Richard Scott Article Award, the James D. Thompson Graduate Student Paper Award, and the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Career Award. My sincere thanks to committee chairs Elaine Draper, Erin Cech, Vinnie Roscigno, and Amy Binder for their service to the section, and to all members of the committees for their time and engagement. I hope you find this work as exciting as I do, and that this whets your appetite to read it more deeply!
Best wishes,
Beth Popp Berman
Max Weber Book Award
Co-winners:
Margaret M. Chin. 2020 Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder. NYU Press.
Margaret Chin’s Stuck provides a compelling window onto corporate America, examining the powerful, yet often invisible, barriers in the workplace that prevent second-generation Asian Americans from achieving the highest level of corporate leadership. The 103 interviewees we meet in the book fit the “model minority” stereotype. They have graduated from Ivy League colleges and landed prestigious entry-level jobs in the corporate world—in finance, venture capital, law, business, technology start-ups, accounting firms, media companies, and nonprofits, among others. They are successful in many ways but this is not the full story. Asian Americans get stuck in mid-level corporate roles. Asian Americans face a lack of trust from their coworkers and an absence of role models, sponsors, and mentors in the workplace. The picture is bleaker for Asian American women in corporate America, who contend with sexual harassment and prejudice, making their climb up the corporate ladder even harder. As Chin clearly demonstrates, the “bamboo ceiling” prevents many Asian Americans from accessing leadership positions in the corporate world, in spite of their accomplishments. Stuck shines a light on the continuing significance of race in shaping the lives of Asian American professional elites.
Erin Hatton. 2020. Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. University of California Press.
Erin Hatton’s Coerced examines a previously understudied dynamic in the study of work and employment—those who work but who are not classified as workers by the state and so are denied the protections afforded traditional workers—including minimum wage, overtime, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and the ability to bargain collectively. Hatton focuses her grounded comparative analysis on four seemingly disparate groups where government protections do not apply: prison laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes. She draws from 121 interviews with members of these groups, showing that for workers without state-provided protections, the coercion inherent to work under capitalism extends beyond the economic to controlled access to additional sanctions and rewards as employers wield expansive punitive power beyond their traditional right to hire and fire. While protected workers are subject to economic coercion under capitalism—as sociologists have long recognized and studied, these laborers are subject to what Hatton calls “status coercion.” Status coercion consists of work oriented to acquiring good standing with the employer who controls access to resources that otherwise would not be provided automatically (as with wages). Welfare recipients, for example, must work to gain access to key elements of the social safety net such as food stamps, Medicare, housing vouchers, and cash assistance. Coerced examines the rhetoric that is required to legitimate such work under threat of punishment both for those in positions of privilege (e.g. graduate students who receive subsidized training and professional development) and those who are already marginalized and devalued in terms of class, race, and gender. Hattonenriches the sociological study of work, occupations, and organizations by asking scholars to consider the many ways power in the workforce operates—to go beyond the traditional nexus of economic coercion and analyze how economic coercion intersects with status coercion for all types of work in the contemporary economy.
Honorable Mention:
Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen. 2021. Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities. University of Chicago Press.
Richard Scott Article Award
Winner:
Sauer, Carsten, Peter Valet, Safi Shams, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey. 2021. “Categorical Distinctions and Claims-Making: Opportunity, Agency, and Returns from Wage Negotiations.” American Sociological Review 86:934-959.
This article addresses the core OOW issue of wage negotiations from a theoretically and empirically innovative lens. Taking wage negotiations as a specific instance of claims-making, the authors argue for the central role of positional constraints in gendered and racialized negotiation strategies and outcomes. The authors draw on an impressive dataset of negotiations from over 2400 German employees. The committee underscored the fresh take of the article on a perennial issue: contrary to current scholarship and the conventional narrative that individuals (particularly women) need to advocate for themselves by negotiating higher salaries, the authors examine empirically whether negotiation is possible and its consequences based on the employees’ structural location in the firm. As an exemplar example of Relational Inequality Theory, it helps to show how both agency and opportunity are central to wage negotiations.
Honorable Mention:
Lei, Ya-Wen. 2021. “Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China’s Platform Economy.” American Sociological Review 86: 279-309.
James D. Thompson Graduate Paper Award
Winner:
Sheehan, Patrick. 2022. “The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise: How Unemployed Workers Become Professional Career Coaches.” American Journal of Sociology 127:1151-1182.
“The Paradox of Self-Help Expertise” by Patrick Sheenan (which appeared in AJS) was selected as this year’s recipient of the OOW section’s Thomson Graduate Paper Award. The award committee had very high praise for this article, its theoretical and conceptual richness, and the impressive amount of evidence marshaled to interrogate questions about expertise in contemporary society, and why precisely unemployed workers would turn specifically to self-help experts. Sheehan masterfully shows how strategic interactions and relational work cojoin to establish self-help experts’ credibility in the eyes of those seeking work. Such interactions and relational work provide an alternative route to establishing expert credibility above and beyond more traditional and institutionalized credentials. Sheehan’s analyses and conception opens several important avenues for future research for those interested in expertise, credibility, and claims-making. Moreover, it expands our understanding of not just how one becomes an expert, but what it means to be an expert.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter Career Award
Winner:
Paula England, New York University
The OOW Rosabeth Moss Kanter Distinguished Career Award recognizes and celebrates a career of outstanding contributions to the areas of organizations, occupations, and work. We are pleased to announce that this year’s winner is Paula England. Beginning in the 1980s, England has conducted pioneering research unpacking gender inequality in workplaces, combining studies of occupational sex segregation and wage gaps with a theoretical account focused on the cultural devaluation of women’s work. Along the way, she has mentored many others and pushed sociology’s engagements across disciplinary lines. Equally important, England has been a leader in and for the discipline, serving as the 2014-15 president of the American Sociological Association and as the 1998-99 chair of the OOW section. The committee, whose members were Amy Binder, Tim Hallett, Jennifer Nelson, and Ofer Sharone, congratulate Paula England on her tremendous accomplishments.
2021 OOW Distinguished Career Award Winner
Dear All,
I am happy to announce that the 2021 OOW Distinguished Career Award goes to Christine Williams!
How perfectly deserving! Thank you to the diligent committee members Vinnie Roscigno (Chair), Erin Kelly, Sylvia Fuller, Reginald Byron and Victor Ray. Please join us for the award ceremony at the OOW Business Meeting, on August 10th, 2:30PM-3:00PM EDT.
Congratulations Christine!
-Sandra
2021 OOW Award Winners
It’s a pleasure to announce OOW papers and book award winners! Please come to congratulate them at the OOW business meeting on August 10th at 2:30-3:00pm EDT.
James D. Thompson Graduate Student Paper Award
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.
Many many thanks to the Thompson award committee members: Erin Cech (Chair), Yongjun Zhang, Jennifer Merluzzi, Guillermina Altomonte and Rui Jie Peng.
W. Richard Scott Article Award
Winner
Storer, Adam, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett. 2020. “What Explains Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Job Quality in the Service Sector?” American Sociological Review 85, no. 4: 537–72.
Big thank you to members of the Scott award committee: Nina Bandelj (Chair), Lindsey Ibanez, Ken-Hou Lin, Eunmi Mun and Ryan Smith.
Max Weber Book Award
Co-Winners
Clair, Matthew. 2020. Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matters in Criminal Court. Princeton University Press.
Kelly, Erin L. and Phyllis Moen. 2020. Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It. Princeton University Press.
We’re grateful to the members of the Weber award committee, Tim Bartley (Chair), Christine Williams, Marlese Durr and Dustin Avent Holt.
Awards: ASA Science, Knowledge and Technology (SKAT) Section Awards in the Spirit of Anti-Racism
Two new awards from the ASA Science, Knowledge and Technology (SKAT) section in the spirit of anti-racism—the Ida B. Wells-Troy Duster award and the Emancipatory Practice in SKAT award. Link for information: https://asaskat.com/2020/12/24/skat-section-announces-call-for-nominations-for-two-new-awards-established-in-the-spirit-of-anti-racism/
These awards welcome nominations and self-nominations of BIPOC scholars who are not currently members of the SKAT section (the prizes come with section membership if the winner is not currently a member).
2020 OOW Award Winners
Max Weber Book Award
Winner
Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald, and Dustin Avent-Holt. 2019. Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach. New York: Oxford University Press.
Honorable Mention
Sallaz, Jeffrey. 2019. Lives on the Line: How the Philippines Became the World’s Call Center Capital. New York: Oxford University Press.
James D. Thompson Graduate Student Paper Award
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
Ruijie Peng: “Racial Stereotypes and Intergroup Relations in a Transnational Workplace: How Workers Respond to Workplace Inequalities.”
W. Richard Scott Article Award
Winner
Raina A. Brands and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo: “Leaning Out: How Negative Recruitment Experiences Shape Women’s Decisions to Compete for Executive Roles” (published in Administrative Science Quarterly 62(3): 405-442).
Honorable Mentions
Victor Ray: “A Theory of Racialized Organizations” (published in American Sociological Review 84(1): 26-53).
Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: “Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being” (published in American Sociological Review 84(1): 82-114).
Rosabeth Moss Kanter Distinguished Career Award
Arne Kalleberg, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina.
The recipients of these awards will be honored at OOW’s (virtual) business meeting at ASA. Congratulations once again to all of the winners.