MAX WEBER AWARD

The Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship is granted for an outstanding contribution to scholarship on organizations, occupations, or work in a book published within the last three years.  A book may be nominated by its author(s), or by its publisher, or by any ASA member. To nominate a book, send (1) a copy of the book, and (2) contact information for the nominee (including an email address) to each member of the selection committee at the addresses below.  Nominations, including copies of the book, must be received by all committee members no later than March 31, 2009.

The Max Weber Award Committee (best book) for the 2009 award is:

Prof. David Knoke, Chair
Department of Sociology
909 Social Sciences Bldg.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis MN, 55455
Email: knoke@atlas.socsci.umn.edu

Prof. Rakesh Khurana
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall 329
Boston, MA 02163.
Email: rkhurana@hbs.edu

Prof. Julie Kmec
225 SE Jackson St
Pullman WA 99163
Email: jkmec@wsu.edu

 

PAST AWARD WINNERS

The 2008 Max Weber Award was presented to Rakesh Khurana for his 2007 book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, published by Princeton University Press.  We had many excellent submissions this year; this book stood out on several grounds.

No one would question the significance of business schools in American society.  Yet, until  now, we have had no definitive institutional history of how business schools and, more broadly, management education, came to be what they are today.  Professor Khurana tells the remarkably compelling story of how the effort to create a profession of management that aims at something higher than maximizing shareholders' profits has largely been abandoned.  Combining original historical work with organizational theory and sociological analysis, this book authoritatively tracks and explains the development of business education from its late nineteenth century beginnings to the present.  In addition to coming away with a rich sociological understanding of the origins, development, and changing aspirations of management education, it is impossible to read this book without also reflecting on the current state of these institutions, their ideological underpinnings, and the nature of the work they prepare people to pursue.  In true Weberian fashion, Professor Khurana has produced a work of moral as well as intellectual import, and we are proud to present him with the 2008 Max Weber Award.

The 2008 Max Weber Award Committee: Mary Brinton, Mark Chaves (chair), and Howard Lune
 

The 2007 Max Weber Award. The winner of the 2007 Max Weber Award, given by the Organizations, Occupations and Work Section of the American Sociological Association, is Nicole C. Raeburn, for her book, Changing Corporate America from Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights.  It was published in 2004 by the University of Minnesota Press, as Volume 20 of the Social Movements, Protest and Contention Series. 
 
We received 29 outstanding books this year, which each of the 3 committee members read with great enthusiasm.  Among this field, however, Raeburn’s book stood out.  It is filled with important theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of organizations and social movements, yet it is written in an accessible style, so it clearly can appeal to a much broader audience, including gay and lesbian activities, human resource professionals, corporate managers and those interested in diversity issues in or outside organizations.

Raeburn asks the question of how the rights of various groups are negotiated and secured in the workplace, given the frequent conflicts between employees and profit-making employers. Specifically, she notes the lack of progress toward gay and lesbian rights at all levels of government, yet quite spectacular change has occurred in the corporate world.  In 1990, just three corporations provided family and bereavement leave for gay employees, and none provided health insurance coverage for domestic partners.  Today over half of the Fortune 500 offer these benefits.

Raeburn's book provides a multi method approach to explain how this amazing change has come about.  She synthesizes political process theory and new institutional organizational theory 1) to focus on activism within organizations, not solely targeted at the state and 2) to focus not just on external pressures for change, but on pressures from groups within corporations.  The institutional opportunity framework she develops explains why some employers adopt gay-inclusive policies, while others do not. The contribution that makes this book worthy of the Max Weber Award is that this framework can be applied to mobilization inside all kinds of organizations, from universities to religious congregations.

Catherine Zimmer, (Chair), Jerome Karabel, and Jeff Sallaz

The 2006 Max Weber Award.The Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section's Weber Award Committee is pleased to present this year's award to Jerome Karabel (University of California, Berkeley) for The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin Press, 2005). Professor Karabel's extraordinary book was selected from a large pool of excellent nominees.

Drawing upon more than two decades of historical research at the archives of the Big Three Ivy League universities - Harvard, Yale, and Princeton - The Chosen provides a rich and highly engaging account of changing admissions policies between 1900 and 2005, including the rise of "character-based" admissions, the role of intercollegiate sports, systematic quotas on admission of intellectuals, decisions to admit blacks and women, and shifting understandings of affirmative action. The resulting narrative, by one of the country's preeminent scholars of American higher education, illuminates the power relationships and symbolic struggles that have shaped admissions policy at these elite institutions over the past hundred years. The Chosen also provides a lens for examining some of the twentieth century's most penetrating social forces: anti-Semitism, racism, market competition, and the rise of the civil rights movement.

Karabel demonstrates, in lucid prose, how changing definitions of merit have been used by administration officials at the Big Three to advance specific organizational goals - most notably to remain attractive to members of the privileged class and to preserve institutional status in the highly stratified system of American higher education. The Chosen is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the power struggles and prejudices that have shaped admissions policies at elite American universities.

Maria Charles (chair), David Grusky, and Hayagreeva Rao

The winners of the 2005 Max Weber Award. The Weber Award Committee of the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section is pleased to announce that among an amazing set of nominees for the award this year, we have selected Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men by Maria Charles and David Grusky as this year’s recipient. This is a truly exceptional scholarly work, and is richly worthy of the section’s book award. It offers a sophisticated argument that illuminates seemingly contradictory developments in patterns of worldwide gender stratification. Although advances in gender stratification may appear to be uniformly advancing (e.g. more egalitarian views, equal college attendance rates, growing female participation in the labor force), Occupational Ghettos demonstrates and successfully explains why this trend has one important exception: the resistance to sex integration in occupations. Charles and Grusky show that the hyper-segregation of genders in occupations is an organic feature of modern economies and is consistent with egalitarianism as it is understood today.

They use cross-national data to discover that gender inequality is driven by two dynamics: a horizontal dynamic that segregates men and women across the manual-nonmanual divide, and a vertical dynamic that allocates men to the most desirable occupations on both sides of the divide. While egalitarian values and policies have chipped away at vertical segregation, horizontal segregation continues to be propped up by ideas of gender differences. That women tend to develop different career aspirations than men is not currently considered to be problematic, nor is the tendency of employers to view male and female workers through essentialist lenses. These tendencies are not inconsistent with postindustrial labor markets, and cannot be expected to wither away on their own. This book is a must read for all interested in gender differences at work.

Martin Ruef, Steven Brechin, and Judith Stepan-Norris, Chair

The winners of the 2004 Max Weber Award from Organizations, Occupations, and Work section are Judy Stephan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin for their book Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions published by Cambridge University Press (2003). The book is a carefully researched, well crafted, and comprehensive historical analysis. It addresses the question of why is there no socialism in the United States. In contrast too much research that stresses the differences between Marx and Weber, Stephan-Norris and Zeitlin elaborate on complimentary themes in Marx and Weber to develop a theoretical framework that guides their research. Other dimensions of this book that make it exceptional are the use of multiple kinds of data and both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze these data. Their analysis shows how politics and public policy subverted the progressive branch of the mid-20th century labor movement. This book provides a much needed correction to the prevailing interpretation of relationships among working-class formation, unions, and communists in the United States. The research is first-rate and the book is a pleasure to read.

The winner of the Weber Award in 2003 was Charles Perrow, for his recent book Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism.

 

Return to OOW Home Page

Last updated 21 September, 2008