|
The SCR awards the 2001 Mattei Dogan Award
(for best book published in the field of comparative research) to:
Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (October, 2000).
The SCR awards the 2001 Seymour Martin Lipset Award (for
best comparativist Ph.D. dissertation) to:
Erin K. Jenne, Group Demands as
Bargaining Positions: Signals, Cues and Minority Mobilization in
East Central Europe. (Stanford University, Dept of Political
Science)
Details below
2001 Dogan Award Winner:
Michele Lamont
Michele Lamont's new book is an extraordinarily sensitive, highly
original interview- based study of the lives and times of working
men, both white and black, and American and French. It digs
deeply, "thickly," into their experiences, their expectations,
their aspirations, and their frustrations. It creatively explores
a distinctively "male" vision at a moment in history in which
there is much talk of a "crisis of masculinity ," usually
attributed to recent changes in the global economy. Unlike many
studies of the "world of work" that rely principally on
interviews, this one does not stop at reminiscence and raportage;
it is much more than a collection of lumpen autobiographies. What
it does, to excellent effect, is to explain the ways in which a
moral economy, rather than material wealth, provides the currency
in which success is measured among working men. It also succeeds
brilliantly in showing how black and white male laborers inhabit
that moral economy very differently from one another, why rigid
racial boundaries are drawn between them, and why each regards the
other pejoratively. It succeeds as well, in the comparison between
American and French workers, in showing how racial consciousness
plays out differently in different political/historical contexts.
Some of the interview material is utterly stunning. Not only does
it succeed in yielding surprises where one would not expect them;
it also gives real insight into the dignity of labor and its
politico-social effects while showing, simultaneously, why being a
laborer is an insufficient condition for producing class
consciousness across other lines of social division. In sum, this
is a study which impresses with its methodological sophistication
at a time when qualitative methodologies are deeply in question;
with its theoretical orginality at a time when "theory" sui
generis is increasingly the object of skepticism; withs subbtle
treatment of race at a time when the persistence of racism, in its
various guises, is in sore need of explanation; with its capacity
to hit one with striking insights and ideas at a time when the
social sciences are badly in need of them. The Dignity of Working
Men is an exceptional achievement. It really works.
The review committee for the Mattei Dogan Prize were David
Laitin, Gary Gereffi, and John Comaroff.
2001 Lipset Award Winner:
Erin K. Jenne
This thesis adds an unusual dynamic dimension to the important
problem of ethnic conflict and utilizes a sophisticated
combination of methodologies: game theory, cross- sectional
quantitative analysis, and six interesting case studies of ethnic
conflict in central Europe. The case studies contain two
especially interesting pair comparisons (Slovaks and Moravians in
Czechoslovakia, and Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania), and the
two world wars), as well as the Roma case. The empirical analysis
are carefully developed. The prize committee was particularly
impressed with the results of systematic applications of the
"bargaining position" approach dynamically. The work is well
situated in the literature and has important applications well
outside East Central Europe.
The review committee for the Seymour Martin
Lipset award were Anthony William Marx, Susan Eckstein, and
Bingham Powell.
|
