The Theory Prize
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The Theory Prize is given to recognize outstanding work in theory. In even-numbered years, it is given to a book, and in odd-numbered years, to a paper; in both cases, eligible items are those published in the preceding four calendar years.
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current winner
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2020 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: Ari Adut.
The 2020 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Ari Adut, Reign of Appearances: The Misery and Splendor of the Public Sphere, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Two Honorable mentions were awarded:
Michal Pagis, Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self, University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Sarah Quinn, American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation, Princeton University Press, 2019.
Committee: Margaret Frye (Chair), Kimberly Kay Hoang, Jaeeun Kim, Iddo Tavory, Fiona Greenland
The 2020 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Ari Adut, Reign of Appearances: The Misery and Splendor of the Public Sphere, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Two Honorable mentions were awarded:
Michal Pagis, Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self, University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Sarah Quinn, American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation, Princeton University Press, 2019.
Committee: Margaret Frye (Chair), Kimberly Kay Hoang, Jaeeun Kim, Iddo Tavory, Fiona Greenland
Past Winners
2019 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: Jaeeun Kim.
The 2019 Theory Prize for an outstanding article was awarded to Jaeeun Kim of the University of Michigan for her 2018 article in Sociological Theory, "Migration-facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration".
2018 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: Gabriel Abend and Josh Pacewicz (co-winners)
The 2018 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Professor Gabriel Abend for his outstanding book , The Moral Background: An Inquiry Into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2014).
The 2018 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Professor Josh Pacewicz for his outstanding book Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
2017 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: ROBERT JANSEN.
The 2017 Theory Prize for an outstanding article was awarded to Robert Jansen of the University of Michigan for his 2016 Theory & Society piece, “Situated Political Innovation: Explaining the Historical Emergence of New Modes of Political Practice.”
Honorable mention was awarded to Omar Lizardo of the University of Notre Dame and Michael Strand of Brandeis University for their 2015 article in Sociological Theory, “Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World.”
2016 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: MUSTAFA EMIRBAYER and MATTHEW DESMOND.
The 2016 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Professors Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond for their outstanding book,The Racial Order (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
2015 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: ERIN METZ MCDONNELL.
The 2015 Theory Prize for an outstanding article is awarded to Professor Erin Metz McDonnell for her outstanding article, "Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption" (American Journal of Sociology, 2013).
2014 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: CHRISTIAN BORCH.
The 2014 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Professor Christian Borch for his outstanding book, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
2013 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: DAN SILVER.
The 2013 Theory Prize for an outstanding article is awarded to Professor Dan Silver for his outstanding article, "The Moodiness of Action" (Sociological Theory 2011).
2012 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: JOHN LEVI MARTIN.
The 2012 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to Professor John Levi Martin for his outstanding book, The Explanation of Social Action (NY: Oxford University Press, 2011).
2011 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: STEPHEN VAISEY.
The 2011 Theory Prize for an outstanding article is awarded to Professor Stephen Vaisey for his outstanding article, "Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action" (AJS, May 2009).
2010 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: JOHN LEVI MARTIN.
The 2010 Theory Prize for an outstanding book is awarded to John Levi Martin for his book Social Structures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2011). The 2010 Theory Prize committee members were Chair: Guillermina Jasso (Guillermina.Jasso@Verizon.net), Rick Biernacki (rbiernac@dss.ucsd.edu ), Harry Dahms (hdahms@utk.edu), Marion Fourcade (fourcade@berkeley.edu), Monica Prasad (monica.prasad@gmail.com).
2009 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: ANDREAS WIMMER.
The 2009 Theory Prize for an outstanding article is awarded to Andreas Wimmer (UCLA) for "The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries. A Multi-level Process Theory" (AJS 2008). The 2009 Theory Prize committee members were Adam Green (Univ. Toronto), James Jasper (CUNY Graduate Center), Linda Molm (Univ. Arizona), Brent Simpson (chair), and Reef Youngreen (UMass Boston).
2008 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: JAMES M. JASPER and WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR..
The 2008 Theory Prize is awarded to co-winners James M. Jasper for his book Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World (University of Chicago Press) and William H. Sewell Jr. for his book Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (University of Chicago Press). The 2008 Theory Prize committee members were Susan Silbey (Chair), Uta Gerhardt, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Paul McLean, and Bob Shelley.
2007 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: JEFFREY ALEXANDER.
The 2007 Theory Prize is awarded to Jeffrey Alexander for his article, "Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy," published in Sociological Theory, 2004. Alexander presents a theory of cultural pragmatics that brings meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. He argues that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances, whether individual or collective, can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, he suggests that these elements have become "de-fused" as societies have become more complex. Performances are successful only insofar as they can "re-fuse" these increasingly disentangled elements. ..
2006 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article*: KARIN KNORR CETINA & URS BRUEGGER.
The 2006 Theory Prize went to Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger for their article, "Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets," published in the American Journal of Sociology, 2002. Using participant-observation data, interviews, and trading transcripts drawn from interbank currency trading in global investment banks, this article examines regular patterns of integration that characterize the global social system embedded in economic transactions. To interpret these patterns, which are global in scope but microsocial in character, this article uses the term "global microstructures." Features of the interaction order, loosely defined, have become constitutive of and implanted in processes that have global breadth. This study draws on Schutz in the development of the concept of temporal coordination as the basis for the level of intersubjectivity discerned in global markets. * Given the fact that no Prize was awarded in 2006, the voting officers of the section voted, on a one time basis, to award two article prizes in 2007: one for the 2006 period (beginning in 2002) and the other for the 2007 period (beginning in 2003).
2005 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: NOAH MARK.
The 2005 winner of the Theory Prize is Noah Mark (Stanford University) for his article, "Culture and Competition: Homophily and Distancing Explanations for Cultural Niches" [JSTOR],American Sociological Review 68:319-345, 2003. This article formally analyzes and empirically tests two answers to the question, Why do different kinds of people like different kinds of culture?: the homophily model and the distancing model. Computer simulation demonstrates that these models are alternative explanations for the finding that different cultural tastes and practices are concentrated within different sociodemographic segments of society. Conflicting implications of the two models are identified. Although both models predict that cultural forms compete for people (i.e., people are a scarce resource on which cultural forms depend), the distancing model differs from the homophily model in that the distancing model predicts a dual ecology: Not only do cultural forms compete for people, but people compete for cultural forms. According to the distancing model, the larger the segment of society in which a cultural form is liked, the smaller is the proportion of people in that segment of society who like that cultural form. The homophily model predicts that people do not compete for cultural forms. Instead, it predicts a local bandwagon effect: The larger the segment of society in which a cultural form is liked, the larger is the proportion of people in that segment of society who like that cultural form. An empirical test using 1993 General Social Survey data supports the prediction of both models that cultural forms compete for people. The analysis also reveals a local bandwagon effect, yielding further empirical support for the homophily model and disconfirming the distancing model's prediction of a dual ecology.This is the second time that Dr. Mark won the Theory Prize. Congratulations!
2004 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: ANDREW ABBOTT.
The 2004 Theory Prize committee was very pleased by the superb quality of the nominations and their theoretical range, taking this as testimony to the vibrancy of sociological theory-building in our discipline today. This year, the prize went to Andrew Abbott for his book, Chaos of Disciplines, University of Chicago Press, 2001. In the words of the University of Chicago Press website, "Abbott presents a fresh and daring analysis of the evolution and development of the social sciences. Chaos of Disciplines reconsiders how knowledge actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, Abbott contends that disciplines instead cycle around an inevitable pattern of core principles. New schools of thought, then, are less a reaction to an established order than they are a reinvention of fundamental concepts. Chaos of Disciplines uses fractals to explain the patterns of disciplines, and then applies them to key debates that surround the social sciences. Abbott argues that knowledge in different disciplines is organized by common oppositions that function at any level of theoretical or methodological scale. Opposing perspectives of thought and method, then, in fields ranging from history, sociology, and literature, are to the contrary, radically similar; much like fractals, they are each mutual reflections of their own distinctions."
The prize committee found Chaos to be a masterful combination of abstract analysis and empirical research in an overall enterprise of theoretical thinking. Abbott has effectively called social scientists' attention to a pervasive abstract pattern, self-similarity, and demonstrated some of its major manifestations in cultural and social structures. He develops interlocking theories of the origins and consequences of such patterns, and he does so with strong originality as well as wit and stylistic panache.
The 2004 Theory Prize Committee consisted of Julia Adams (Yale University), Chair; Karin Knorr-Cetina (University of Konstanz); John Lie (University of California-Berkeley); Noah Mark (Stanford University), and Robert Wuthnow (Princeton University).
2003 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: EDWARD J. LAWLER.
The 2003 winner of the Theory Prize went to Edward J. Lawler (Cornell University) for his article, "An Affect Theory of Social Exchange," in the American Journal of Sociology 107(2):321-352, 2001. Lawler's article "develops a theory that explains how and when emotions, produced by social exchange, generate stronger or weaker ties to relations, groups, or networks. It is argued that social exchange produces positive or negative global feelings, which are internally rewarding or punishing. The theory indicates that social units (relations, groups, networks) are perceived as a source of these feelings, contingent on the degree of jointness in the exchange task." (from the abstract).Jack A. Goldstone (George Mason University) received an honorable mention for this prize for his article, "Efflorescences and Economic Growth in the World History: Rethinking the 'Rise of the West' and the Industrial Revolution," in the Journal of World History 13(2):323-389, 2002. Goldstone's article offers a bold and sweeping reassessment of the rise of the West and the Industrial Revolution in England. Goldstone urges analysts to see historical episodes of growth and development as frequent and normal occurrences that took place throughout the world, not as an isolated phenomenon confined to Europe.
2002 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: R.S. PERINBANAYAGAM.
R. S. Perinbanayagam, Hunter College CUNY, received the 2002 Theory Prize for The Presence of Self (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). The Presence of Self completes a three-volume study of signs and signifying practices. Drawing on and then extending the ideas of Charles Sanders Pierce, George Herbert Mead, Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer and others, Perinbanayagam focuses on social acts as essential and fundamental to being, specifically being human. Perinbanayagam places the act as rhetorical and dialogie to make the case for the self as a social being, and the act as communicafion. Perinbanayagarn creatively draws upon sociological classics to articulate a novel research agenda, demonstrating how sociologists can draw on unconventional resources of literature and poetry. Chair, Theory Prize Committee, Jane Sell, Texas A&M University.
2001 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: PAUL DIMAGGIO.
The 2000 Theory Prize Committee consisted of Carol Heimer, Noah Mark, Linda Molm, Guillermina jasso and Richard Swedberg (Chair). Twenty four articles were nominated for the prize. All the members agreed that the winner was "Culture and Cognition," Annual Review of Sociology (1997), by Paul Dimaggio, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. The main thrust of the winning article is that the study of culture can be substantially improved by drawing on recent research in cognitive psychology and social cognition. This is particularly the case when it comes to some of the presuppositions of cultural sociology There is also die fact that recent research in cognitive psychology and social cognition fits very well with the current tendency in cultural sociology away from viewing culture as a coherent whole of values to be internalized, and towards a view of culture as a toolkit or repertoire of resources. The role of schemata is especially highhghted. lt is noted, for example, that people are more likely to perceive information that is germane to existing schemata and also to recall this type of information more quickly and more accurately. People may even falsely recall events that fit their schemata hut which never took place. Areas where insights from cognitive psychology and social cognition can be usefully applied in cultural sociology are indicated, as well as key problems in the study of culture and cognition that need to be addressed..
2000 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: CAROL HEIMER & LISA STAFFEN.
The 2000 Theory Prize Committee consisted of J. David Knottnerus (chair), Julia Adams, Noah Friedkin, Edward J. Lawler, and Noah Mark. Nine books were nominated for the prize. Among them, the clear winners were Carol A. Heimer and Lisa R. Staffen for their book, For the Sake of the Children: The Social Organization of Responsibility in the Hospital and the Home (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The Theory Prize Committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to David Willer (ed.) for his book, Network Exchange Theory (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
For the Sake of the Children is a highly original piece of work that carefully interweaves theory with empirical analysis, takes a creative problem (responsibility), and uses theory to generate broad implications. The book focuses on the social organization of responsibility by asking who takes responsibility for critically ill new-borns. In addressing this question the study draws on medical records and interviews with parents and medical staff and examines the social dynamics of two neonatal intensive care units. The authors' concern is not to treat responsibility as an ethical issue (i.e., from a normative approach), but rather to show how responsibility is socially created and maintained, especially within a bureaucratic world. The book is innovative in that it suggests an analytical/empirical treatment of responsibility taking. That is, the authors identify responsibility as a theoretical concept, provide a measure of responsibility taking, and assess variation in responsibility taking across individuals. This innovation is productive in multiple ways including the careful identification of several dimensions of responsibility taking and distinguishing the social factors that contribute to high levels of responsibility taking along these dimensions. The book is notable for the way it renders complex ideas and arguments dealing with the social organization of responsibility, linkages between moral and social theory, and policy decisions remarkably accessible to a range of readers.
Network Exchange Theory describes the development of a successful, sustained, and intensive program of work on theory construction, testing, and refinement concerned with social exchange networks (involving a program of research developed collaboratively by David Willer, Barry Markovsky, John Skvoretz, Michael J. Lovaglia, and their various associates). The work is grounded on formal theory and data from experiments and is cumulative in nature. The theory examines under a variety of conditions the relation of social action to social structure and provides a valuable approach for structural analysis at both micro and macro levels.
1999 Theory Prize for Outstanding Article: NOAH MARK.
The 1999 Theory Prize Committee consisted of Ira Cohen (chair), Douglas Heckathorn, Linda Molm, Murray Milner, and Cecilia Ridgeway. Eighteen articles were nominated for the prize. Among them, the clear and decisive winner was Noah Mark, assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University, for his article, "Beyond Individual Differences: Social Differentiation from First Principles" (ASR, June 1998). The article draws on arguments from Rousseau, Spencer, Durkheim, and symbolic interactionism to propose a formal dynamic model for the emergence of social differentiation, which is defined as the degree to which interaction occurs within distinct sets of individuals among whom there is little interaction. Social differentiation is seen as arising through a positive feedbackprocess. Initial selection of interaction partners reflects homophily, a tendency to associate with others who share similar information. Subsequent interaction further increases similarity of knowledge through sharing and generation of information during interaction, and forgetting of information that is not shared during inter-action. The effect of this dynamic is to increase the similarity of those who interact frequently, and reduce the similarity of those who interact infrequently or not at all. An important conclusion is that the emergence of differentiation does not depend on individual differences. Rather, differentiation arises through a stochastic process in which patterns of association generate differences among individuals. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the model for the sociology of culture and for studies of social inequality.
1998 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: LINDA MOLM.
The 1998 Theory Prize for the best book in sociological theory was awarded to Linda D. Molm for Coercive Power in Social Exchange. Molm's book is a treatise on coercive (punishment based) power in exchange. She constructs a coherent theory of the use of coercive power in social exchange relations based on a program of experimental research conducted over a decade. The results of this program of research are ultimately surprising and, in some cases, counter-intuitive. Perhaps the most striking finding is that coercive power can be a highly effective means of increasing one's rewards in an exchange relation, especially if a power-disadvantaged actor uses coercive tactics to punish the non-ex-change or low level of exchange of a more powerful partner. Molm's findings also clarify why coercive power may be ineffective if it is used too infrequently or in a non-contingent manner. A controlled experimental setting was developed and then through careful, planned variation in key factors (e.g., structural power balance or imbalance, availability of options to reward and to punish, etc.) systematic results from a long series of experiments were obtained to test hypotheses derived from the theory, or formulated to help develop the theory. The book represents a model of the type of disciplined theory that can be produced from sustained, sequential, cumulative programmatic research. The Theory Prize is awarded annually to recognize outstanding work in sociological theory. Members of this year's committee were: Murray Webster, chair, Karen Cook, Stephen Turner, Henry A. Walker, and Harrison White. Approximately fifteen books were submitted, and of those, eleven were judged suitable in topic and content to be considered in detail. Some of the other books contributed to an understanding of methods of theory testing, summaries of theoretical knowledge in a field, and theoretical analyses of historical events. Molm's work was judged, overall, to provide the strongest contribution to theory building of the set of high quality books considered this year.
1995-1997 Theory Prizes.
Please send information on recipients from these years to the Website Editor, if you have it..
1994 Theory Prize for Outstanding Book: DONALD BLACK.
The 1994 Theory Prize for the best book in sociological theory was awarded to Donald Black for The Social Structure of Right and Wrong.