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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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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2012 SECTION AWARD WINNERS!

Barrington Moore Book Award

Yang Su, 2011. Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Publisher's summary: The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.

Honorable Mention:

Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, 2011. Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Publisher's summary: In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of "class warfare" yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles.

Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the "new persons" that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the authors show how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes.

Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.

Honorable Mention:

James Mahoney, 2010. Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Publisher's summary: In this comparative-historical analysis of Spanish America, Mahoney offers a new theory of colonialism and postcolonial development. He explores why certain kinds of societies are subject to certain kinds of colonialism and why these forms of colonialism give rise to countries with differing levels of economic prosperity and social well-being. Mahoney contends that differences in the extent of colonialism are best explained by the potentially evolving fit between the institutions of the colonizing nation and those of the colonized society. Moreover, he shows how institutions forged under colonialism bring countries to relative levels of development that may prove remarkably enduring in the postcolonial period. The argument is sure to stir discussion and debate, both among experts on Spanish America who believe that development is not tightly bound by the colonial past, and among scholars of colonialism who suggest that the institutional identity of the colonizing nation is of little consequence.

Charles Tilly Article Award

Nicolas Hoover Wilson, 2011. "From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, circa 1770-1855." American Journal of Sociology 116(5):1437-77.

Statement from award committee: We are pleased to announce Nicolas Wilson's article, "From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, circa 1770-1855," published in the American Journal of Sociology as the winner of the 2012 Tilly Prize for best article in comparative and historical sociology. Wilson's paper examines colonial administration of land revenues in British India, constructing a novel "refraction" model that emphasizes colonizers' perceptions of subject populations as key to understanding the organizational form of the colonial state. The Committee noted the paper's nuanced and original theoretical argument, as well as its careful marshaling of historical materials to support its argument. The Committee also admired the paper's finegrained account of concrete institutional processes, attentive to temporal and spatial variation. This is comparative and historical sociology executed with a high level of craft.

Honorable Mention:

Hazem Kandil, 2011. "Islamizing Egypt? Testing the limits of Gramscian Counterhegemonic Strategies." Theory and Society 40(1):37-62.

Statement from award committee: The Committee also awards honorable mention to Hazem Kandil's article, "Islamizing Egypt: Testing the Limits of Gramscian Counterhegemonic Strategies" published in Theory and Society. Kandil's provocative paper uses the case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to interrogate a narrowly cultural reading of Gramsci's notion of counterhegemonic strategies. While not denying the importance of cultural tactics in oppositional movements, Kandil argues that many appropriations of Gramsci have not come to terms with the problem of state coercion. The Committee was impressed by the paper's clearly delineated theoretical argument and by its use of historical materials to address an issue of contemporary significance.

Theda Skocpol Dissertation Award

Stephan Bargheer, 2011. "Moral Entanglements: the Emergence and Transformation of Bird Conservation in Great Britain and Germany, 1790-2010." Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, University of Chicago. (Dissertation Chair: Andrew Abbott.)

Statement from award committee: Stefan Bargheer's "Moral Entanglements" is an elegantly powerful study of the social origins and transformative trajectories of bird conservation in Great Britain and Germany over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contra prevailing approaches in environmental history and the study of social movements, which tend to treat conservation movements as a form of environmentally conscious blowback against the degradations of industrialized capitalism, Bargheer demonstrates convincingly that the "forms of valuation that dominate bird conservation are a continuation of the institutional forms of valuation that initially contributed to the decline and extinction of wild birds" (p. 51). That is, rather than representing a contemporary moral awakening and successful mobilization by virtuous movements, the development of bird conservation was shaped over time through institutionally patterned and iterative social actions that were continuous with the contextually-specific practices, valuations, and institutions of high modernity. This study is thus about much more than birds. In a superb introductory chapter, in which he draws on pragmatist theories of action to develop both a "leisure theory of value" and a consideration of "the banality of good," Bargheer provides the theoretical basis for his dissertation's empirical examination of how the social valuation of the objects of human experience is shaped by institutionally situated practices over time. And in an equally compelling methodological chapter, he elaborates a refreshingly straightforward treatment of the complex epistemological problems of historical process, continuity, and change--including a frank discussion of the promises and pitfalls of, and potential solutions for, the mode of historical ethnography on which he relies. These initial chapters set the stage for a historically rich, interpretively subtle, and analytically sophisticated dissertation that stands as a model for how to tackle big historical questions in a way that opens up new puzzles and possibilities for future research.

Honorable Mention:

Damon Maryl, 2011. "Secular Conversions: Politics, Institutions, and Religious Education in the United States and Australia, 1800-2000." Ph.D. Dissertation, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. (Dissertation Chair: Margaret Weir.)

Statement from award committee: While many have come to see the secularization debate as passé, the place of religion in politics remains a pressing issue. Damon Mayrl's "Secular Conversions," breathes new life into this topic by conceptualizing secularization as a contingent and politically-mediated process rather than an inevitable historical outcome. Mayrl begins by posing a counter-intuitive puzzle: "why has Australia's public school system retained both funding and institutional support for religious schools, while public schools in the United States have become officially secular?" The dissertation proceeds by reducing this main puzzle to a series of equally compelling sub-puzzles that focus on concrete "secular settlements": cases wherein each nation's administrative, judicial, or electoral institutions either advanced or prevented secularizing initiatives. Based on these analyses, Mayrl concludes that it is ultimately the relatively "permeable" nature of the American state that accounts for the success of secularizing initiatives in the United States, while showing that the "insulated" nature of the Australian polity prevented similar secularizing successes. Mayrl's "Secular Conversions" is noteworthy for its historical breadth, for the clarity of its analyses, and for its loving attention to historical detail. Additionally, the committee felt that the dissertation wonderfully illustrates the analytical promise of historical-comparative work: the ability to provide a compelling answer to a difficult and counter-intuitive question. In the process, Mayrl not only advanced theoretical understanding of state institutions, but also problematizes the terms of popular secularization debates by illustrating a mismatch between heated rhetoric and actual practice.

Reinhard Bendix Student Paper Award (Co-Winners)

Carly Knight (Harvard). "A Voice but Not a Vote: The Case of Surrogate Representation and Social Welfare For Legal Noncitizens Since 1996."

Statement from award committee: Following the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act in 1996, the power to determine immigrant eligibility for social welfare was devolved to the states. States proved far more generous than scholars might have predicted, and moreover, states' policies took quite different trajectories over time. In "A Voice But Not a Vote," Carly Knight develops and tests a framework that explains the adoption, maintenance, and retrenchment of welfare benefits for noncitizens in the U.S. since 1996. Using an innovative and rigorous multi-method analysis, Knight demonstrates the importance of surrogate representation, defined as instances in which an individual or group with access to political power (e.g., voters or office-holders) acts on behalf of an excluded group (e.g., noncitizens). States with mobilized immigrant-citizen communities acting as surrogate representatives were more likely to extend benefits initially, and surrogate representation was important for determining the trajectory of states' policies over time. Policies extending benefits were more likely to persist over time in the states in which benefits were initially extended due to the mobilization of immigrant co-ethnics. By contrast, states that extended welfare benefits without the mobilization of surrogates were likely to rescind such rights later when the political and economic context changed. The committee was particularly impressed with the comparative scope and multi-method conceptualization of the paper, which rigorously tests alternative explanations and mechanisms through which U.S. states adopted and then extended or curtailed welfare benefits for noncitizens.

Diana Rodriguez-Francoz (Northwestern). "Internal Wars, Taxation, and State Building."

Statement from award committee: Internal wars are generally considered to be quite detrimental to state strength, state capacity, and development. Indeed, civil war is widely viewed as a manifestation of state disintegration and state failure. Diana Rodriquez-Franco challenges conventional wisdom in "Internal Wars, Taxation, and State Building," taking up the rather provocative question: Do internal wars build states? Through an intriguing case study of Colombia, Diana Rodriguez-Franco traces the mechanisms through which internal wars build elite solidarity for paying taxes to support the state, which then incentivizes the existing tax administration to strengthen its infrastructural capacity and motivates the state to expand into new areas of the country. In this sense, internal wars, like external wars, can stimulate state building. Yet unlike external wars, the relationship between internal war and taxation is complicated by the presence of domestic insurgents (e.g., paramilitary, guerilla forces, etc.), who essentially compete with the state over the ability to tax elites. The aggregate level of taxation, Rodriguez-Franco's central measure of state building, varies depending on the relative balance of taxes collected by the state and insurgents, respectively. Ultimately, the state-building capacity of internal wars depends heavily on elite responses to internal war, and elite responses are in turn dependent on the intensity of elite solidarity. The committee was impressed with the originality of the paper, the evidence marshaled to support the argument, and the theoretical implications of this case study of state formation, one of the most important issues in comparative-historical sociology.