The Edward Shils - James Coleman Memorial Award

The ASA Theory Section is committed to advancing sociological theory in both scholarly as well as professional respects. Neatly fulfilling this dual end, the section awards prizes for the best publications in sociological theory (the Theory Prize), the best papers written by students (the Shils-Coleman Student Prize), and career achievement in sociological theory (Lewis Coser Award).

The Shils-Coleman Award, in honor of eminent sociologists Edward Shils and James Coleman, recognizes distinguished work in the theory area by a graduate student. Work may take the form of (a) a paper published or accepted for publication; (b) a paper presented at a professional meeting; of (c) a paper suitable for publication or presentation at a professional meeting. Details on the most current competition are typically posted on the Announcements page. 

Below are details for the awardees from these years:

2009, 2008, 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, & 1996..

"The action, or behavior, of the system composed of actors is an emergent consequence of the interdependent actions of the actors who make up the system."

-James S. Coleman

Michael Strand (University of Notre Dame) has been named the winner of the 2009 Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper in the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association.

The 2009 Shils-Coleman award committee members were Peter Callero (chair, Western Oregon University), Chuck Powers (Santa Clara University), Lisa Rashotte (UNC Charlotte), Stephen Sanderson (UC Riverside), and David Wagner (SUNY Albany).

Erin Metz McDonnell (Northwestern University) has been named the winner of the 2008 Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper in the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association  for her paper "Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption" 

Honorable mentions were given to Stefan Bargheer (University of Chicago) for "The Fools of the Leisure Class: Honor, Ridicule, and the Emergence of Animal Protection Legislation in England, 1740-1840" and Becky Hsu (Princeton University) for "Mismatched Moral Dispositions and Economic Logics: Social Collateral, Liability, and Microcredit in Rural China". 

The 2008 Shils-Coleman award committee members were Joseph Gerteis (Chair), Alison Bianchi, Phaedra Daipha, and Ron Jacobs. 

William Wood (Boston College) has been named the winner of the 2007 Edward Shils-James Coleman Memorial Award for Best Student Paper in the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association for his paper "(Virtual) Myths."  This paper examines notions of territoriality and space and calls for a stronger sociological examination of these concepts. The paper fits well with section chair Karin Knorr-Certina's call for an examination of "extreme theory" at the 2007 meetings because it takes on a largely under-examined sociological issue and makes a profound contribution towards basic conceptualizations of why this issue matters and how it can be studied. As one committee member put it, "The cultural logic is so well captured that it is able to make a convincing argument that geographical mapping of the pre- and colonial era is related to our contemporary mapping of the genome -and that both are practices of control and ordering of the Western culture based on technological/scientific rationality."  The paper was published in 2004 in Critical Sociology, Vol. 30 No. 4 (July). 

Honorable mentions were given to Gabriel Abend (Northwestern), Stefan Kluseman (UPenn), and Isaac Reed (Yale). 

The 2007 Shils-Coleman award committee members were Dustin Kidd, Chair (Temple), Vida Bajc (University of Pennsylvania), and JoAnn Brooks (Bentley College)

The 2005 Shils-Coleman Award Committee members were Lisa Troyer, Chair (University of Iowa), Noah P. Mark (Stanford University), Gretchen Peterson (California State University, Los Angeles), Lisa Slattery Rashotte (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), and Brent Simpson (University of South Carolina).

The 2004 Shils-Coleman Award went to Scott Leon Washington of the Department of Sociology at Princeton University for his paper: "Principles of Racial Taxonomy". Using a variety of examples, this paper explores the peculiar nature of racial taxonomy: a particular type of taxonomic practice which involves the sifting and the sorting of putative groups whose members are generally believed to either be or belong to a distinct "race." After discussing the difference between monothetic and polythetic systems of racial classification, the paper presents a series of hypotheses pertaining to the potential impact of different principles of racial taxonomy on the structure and the severity of different systems of racial stratification. The paper ends on a programmatic note, with a section which emphasizes the importance of undertaking a doubly comparative approach to the study of "race" in different regions across the globe.

The 2004 Shils-Coleman Award Committee members were Adrian Favell (UCLA), Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas (University of California-Berkeley), Kieran Healy (University of Arizona), John Meyer (Stanford), and Charles Camic (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Chair. 

The Award Committee also awarded an Honorable Mention to Karen Danna Lynch for her excellent paper "Schemas and Schematic Thematization: Keys to Understanding Multiple Role Enactment."

We also wish to congratulate Scott Harris of the University of Oregon for an Honorable Mention for his paper titled "The Social Construction of Equality in Everyday Life" which can be found in the journal Human Studies 23(4): 371-393, October 2000. In this paper, Harris uses the interactionist perspectives of Herbert Blumer, Alfred Shutz and Harold Garfinkle to begin to explain the interpretive and experiential aspects of equality, a concept we usually take as given or self evident, or rathet its absence, that is inequality, which we typically think about and measure as an objective quantity. He also incorporates the work of John Dewey to propose how we might think about pragmatically (in real lifé) and in research "the social construction of equality."

Committee members: Denise Anthony, Chair, Michael Macy, Sigi Lindenberg, David Sculli, and John Skvoretz

The winner of the Shils-Coleman Memorial Award this year is Alison Bianchi from Stanford University. Ms. Bianchi's paper, "Sentiment and Status Processes: A Test Between the Constitutive and Mediator Models," examines the specific mechanism by which sentiment structures affect status structures. Her analysis and empirical test is directed toward determining whether sentiments act like a status element in shaping expectations or whether sentiments intervene between the formation of expectation states and the development of behavior. She conducts a creative study in which negative sentiment is examined in two different contexts --one in which the actor has full responsibility for the team effort, and one in which the actor is only advisory. In concert with the mediator interpretation of sentiment, the negative sentiment affected only the actor in the advisory role, not the decision-maker. Consequently, her formulation demonstrates that sentiment does not, by itself, constitute a status element.

Susan Chimonas, from the University of Michigan, was awarded Honorable Mention for her paper, "Back to the Drawing Board: Irony, Moral Panic Theory, and the Study of Social Problems." Ms. Chimonas' paper rejects what she terms the "artificial dichotomy between ideology and material life." She draws upon the work of Foucault to formulate a contextual constructionist approach to social problems. To illustrate her arguments, Chimonas analyzes and critiques the issue of moral panics, situations defined by sociologists as public reactions to social problems that are out of propor-tion to the actual "threat." The committee commends Chimonas on her clear prose and insightful analysis.

The Shils-Coleman Prize is an annual prize, begun in 1996, to recognize distinguished work in the theory area by a graduate student. Members of the prize committee were David Sciulli, chair, Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, Mustafa Emirbayer, Mark A. Schneider, and Geoffrey H. Tootell.