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Welcome to the official website of the Comparative and Historical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Please navigate the site using the contents bar to the left.

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The section has planned some exciting events for the 2010 ASA Meetings in Atlanta. Click here for details.

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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2010 SECTION AWARD WINNERS!

Barrington Moore Book Award

Winner:

Andrew G. Walder, 2009. Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China's Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation’s capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement’s crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure.

Most accounts of the movement have portrayed a struggle among Red Guards as a social conflict that pitted privileged "conservative" students against socially marginalized "radicals" who sought to change an oppressive social and political system. Walder employs newly available documentary evidence and the recent memoirs of former Red Guard leaders and members to demonstrate that on both sides of the bitter conflict were students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, who shared similar—largely defensive—motivations. The intensity of the conflict and the depth of the divisions were an expression of authoritarian political structures that continued to exert an irresistible pull on student motives and actions, even in the midst of their rebellion.

Walder's nuanced account challenges the main themes of an entire generation of scholarship about the social conflicts of China's Cultural Revolution, shedding light on the most tragic and poorly understood period of recent Chinese history.

Honorable Mentions:

Marion Fourcade, 2009. Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Economists and Societies is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional context gave rise to a distinct professional and disciplinary configuration. She argues that because the substance of political life varied from country to country, people's experience and understanding of the economy, and their political and intellectual battles over it, crystallized in different ways--through scientific and mercantile professionalism in the United States, public-minded elitism in Britain, and statist divisions in France. Fourcade moves past old debates about the relationship between culture and institutions in the production of expert knowledge to show that scientific and practical claims over the economy in these three societies arose from different elites with different intellectual orientations, institutional entanglements, and social purposes.

Much more than a history of the economics profession, Economists and Societies is a revealing exploration of American, French, and British society and culture as seen through the lens of their respective economic institutions and the distinctive character of their economic experts.

Chad Alan Goldberg, 2008. Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.

Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.

This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.

Best Article Award

Dan Slater, 2009. "Revolutions, Crackdowns, and Quiescence: Communal Elites and Democratic Mobilization in Southeast Asia." American Journal of Sociology 115(1):203-254.

Statement from award committee: This year's award for best article goes to Dan Slater for his 2009 AJS piece on "Revolutions, Crackdowns, and Quiescence: Communal Elites and Democratic Mobilization in Southeast Asia." For those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure of reading it, Dan argues that we have overemphasized class actors and economic factors in our accounts of when and where democratic moblizations occur. Mobilization depends more on whether "communal elites" have sufficient political autonomy to deploy nationalist and/or religious discourses and thereby tip the balance of symbolic power away from the authoritarian state. Committee members really thought this paper had it all. The article is careful in its comparative design, combines cross-case and within-case analysis, joins long-term structural and more conjunctural factors, and balances analytical comparison with attention to individual histories. It also has multiple theoretical payoffs for debates over democratic transitions, class as the basis for collective mobilization, rational actor accounts of social movements, and more. And it is unusually clear in its presentation and writing.

Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award

Dan Lainer-Vos, 2009. "Nationalism in Action: The Construction of Irish and Zionist Transatlantic National Networks." Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, Columbia University. (Dissertation Chair: Gil Eyal.)

Statement from award committee: "Nationalism in Action" uses insights gained from Bruno Latour's actor-network theory as well as from Leigh Star's concept of "boundary objects" to move the study of nationalism in new directions. Lainer-Vos' work takes its place in a new generation of nationalism studies that shift the focus of analysis from the territorially bounded and geographically specific nation state to the diaspora communities of displaced nationals.

Lainer-Vos views nation building as a practical organizational accomplishment. Using primary archival materials, he creates two case studies—the first focuses on Jewish Americans, and the second on Irish Americans. He treats encounters between these two dispersed national groups and their respective homeland movements as a site of strategic research. Lainer-Vos argues that national identity and sentiment may be created beyond, as well as within, the borders of the nation state depending upon the technologies of connection that develop. His core theoretical insight is that these technologies are always ambivalent because the ties they develop do not ignore or repress the differences between the homeland and the diaspora. On the contrary, these technologies exploit difference in order to create lasting associations—based upon "cooperation without consensus."

The dissertation has a twofold comparison. First, it examines financial technologies that attempted to tie the diaspora to the homeland. It focuses upon attempts to float national bonds in the Irish and Jewish communities in the US between 1920 and 1951 respectively. Whereas the Irish bond drive tore the community apart; the Israeli bond drive was the core of the long lasting Jewish American commitment to the state of Israel. Second, Lainer-Vos examines cultural technologies--specifically Jewish American summer camps in Israel and Irish American Gaelic Athletic Association--again with startling different results.

"Nationalism in Action" is a tour de force of archival research and theoretical acumen. It is historical and comparative in every dimension. It will surely make a wonderful first book and it is eminently worthy of being the recipient of the first Theda Skocpol Dissertation Prize.

Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award

Anoulak Kittikhoun (CUNY Graduate Center, Political Science), 2009. "Small State, Big Revolution: Geography and the Revolution in Laos." Theory and Society 38(1).

Statement from award committee: This article combines a masterful review of the comparative historical literature on social revolutions with a compelling argument for the importance of geography-—including the physical characteristics of a country, the historical legacies associated with the place, and the “spatial identity” of its residents—-as a factor in their emergence. The size of Laos and its long history of vulnerability relative to other states were critical for the victory of Lao communists. Geographical factors conditioned the opportunities available to Lao revolutionaries, the strategies they used, and, ultimately, the changes they could imagine and achieve. The import of this argument extends well beyond Laos. Indeed, the article can be read as an expansive and insightful commentary on Barrington Moore’s dictum in The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy that political phenomena have fundamentally different causes in small countries and large ones. Moore asserted that sociologists must take the difference between large and small countries into account if we wish our theories to be more than “abstractly platitudinous” (1966: xix); but he did not himself provide a model for how to integrate geography into our theories. Anoulak Kittikhoun shows how it might be done.

Honorable Mention:

Bart Bonikowski (Princeton), "Shared Representations of the Nation-State in Thirty Countries: An Inductive Approach to Cross-National Attitudinal Research."

Statement from award committee: This paper argues that popular nationalism consists of a small set of stable, patterned representations of the nation whose relative influence changes over time and varies from one country to the next in response to identifiable events. In the words of one committee member, this paper is “rigorous, well-argued, balanced, and most importantly, illuminating.” We think it will be an influential paper.