James D. Thompson Graduate 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:

(1)   PDF file of the paper,

(2)   Nomination letter (PDF format) indicating how the paper contributes to scholarship on organizations, occupations, and work, and

(3)   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:

The full committee includes:

Laura López-Sanders (Chair), Brown University, laura_lopez-sanders@brown.edu

prabhdeep singh kehal, University of Wisconsin, Madison, kehal@wisc.edu

Laura Garbes, University of Minnesota- Twin Cities, garbes@umn.edu

Daniel Auguste, MIT Sloan School of Management, augustep@mit.edu

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Past Winners:

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”