Past Awards · Theory Section
First Awarded in 1980
Theory Prize
2025: Kiviat, Barbara. “The Moral Affordances of Construing People as Cases: How Algorithms and the Data They Depend on Obscure Narrative and Noncomparative Justice.” Sociological Theory 41, no. 3 (2023): 175–200.
2025 honorable mention: Feinstein, Yuval. “The Tempest Within: The Origins and Outcomes of Intense National Emotions in Times of National Division.” Theory and Society 53, no. 4 (2024): 729–63.
2024: DeGloma, Tom. Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
2023: Monk, Ellis. “Inequality without Groups: Contemporary Theories of Categories, Intersectional Typicality, and the Disaggregation of Difference.” Sociological Theory 40, no. 1 (2022): 3–27.
2022: Camic, Charles. Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.
2022: Sweet, Paige L. The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and Its Aftermath. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.
2022 honorable mention: Krause, Monika. Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
2021: Ray, Victor. “A Theory of Racialized Organizations.” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 26–53.
2021: Sauder, Michael. “A Sociology of Luck.” Sociological Theory 38, no. 3 (2020): 193–216.
2020: Adut, Ari. Reign of Appearances: The Misery and Splendor of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
2020 honorable mention: Pagis, Michal. Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
2020 honorable mention: Quinn, Sarah. American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
2019: Kim, Jaeeun. “Migration-Facilitating Capital: A Bourdieusian Theory of International Migration.” Sociological Theory 36, no. 3 (2018): 262–88.
2018: Abend, Gabriel. The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
2018: Pacewicz, Josh. Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
2017: Gabriel Abend, New York University
2016: Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Matthew Desmond. The Racial Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
2015: McDonnell, Erin Metz. “Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption.” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 2 (2013): 307–50.
2014: Borch, Christian. The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
2013: Silver, Dan. “The Moodiness of Action.” Sociological Theory 29, no. 3 (2011): 199–222.
2012: Martin, John Levi. The Explanation of Social Action. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
2011: Vaisey, Stephen. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 6 (2009): 1675–1715.
2010: Martin, John Levi. Social Structures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
2009: Andreas Wimmer, University of California, Los Angeles
2008: Jasper, James M. Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
2008: Sewell, William H., Jr. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
2007: Alexander, Jeffrey. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22, no. 4 (2004): 527–73.
2006: Knorr Cetina, Karin, and Urs Bruegger. “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 4 (2002): 905–50.
2005: Mark, Noah. “Culture and Competition: Homophily and Distancing Explanations for Cultural Niches.” American Sociological Review 68, no. 3 (2003): 319–45.
2004: Abbott, Andrew. Chaos of the Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
2003: Lawler, Edward J. “An Affect Theory of Social Exchange.” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 2 (2001): 321–52.
2002: Perinbanayagam, R. S. The Presence of Self. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
2001: DiMaggio, Paul. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 263–87.
2000: Heimer, Carol A., and Lisa R. Staffen. For the Sake of the Children: The Social Organization and Responsibility in the Hospital and the Home. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
1999: Mark, Noah. “Beyond Individual Differences: Social Differentiation from First Principles.” American Sociological Review 63, no. 3 (1998): 309–30.
1998: Molm, Linda D. Coercive Power in Social Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
1997: Sewell, William H., Jr. “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille.” Theory & Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 841–81.
1996: Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
1995: Heimer, Carol A. “Doing Your Job and Helping Your Friends: Universalistic Norms about Obligations to Particular Others in Networks.” In Networks and Organization: Structure, Form, and Action, 143–164. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995.
1994: Black, Donald. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego: Academic Press, 1993.
1993: Macy, Michael W. “Social Learning and the Structure of Collective Action.” In Advances in Group Processes, 1–36. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1993.
1991: Wolfe, Alan. “Mind, Self, Society, and Computer: Artificial Intelligence and the Sociology of Mind.” American Journal of Sociology 96, no. 5 (1991): 1073–96.
1990: Kalberg, Stephen. “Rationalization of Action in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion.” Sociological Theory 8, no. 1 (1990): 58–84.
1989: Chambliss, Daniel. “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers.” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 70–86.
1987: Wiley, Norbert. “Early American Sociology and the Polish Peasant.” Sociological Theory 4, no. 1 (1986): 21–40.
1986: Orloff, Ann Shola, and Theda Skocpol. “Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public School Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880s–1920.” American Sociological Review 49, no. 6 (1986): 726–50.
1985: Granovetter, Mark. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 418–510.
1984: Carveth, Donald. “Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: The Hobbesian Problem Revisited.” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 7, no. 1 (1984): 43–98.
1982: Collins, Randall. “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology.” American Journal of Sociology 86, no. 5 (1981): 984–1014.
1980: Rubinstein, David. “The Concepts of Action in the Social Sciences.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 7, no. 2 (1977): 209–36.
Established in 2006
Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda-Setting
2025: Terence McDonnell, University of Notre Dame
2024: Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia
2023: Claudio Ezequiel Benzecry, Northwestern University
2022: Claire Decoteau, University of Illinois Chicago
2021: Greta Krippner, University of Michigan
2020: Kimberly Kay Hoang, University of Chicago
2019: Monika Krause, London School of Economics
2018: Julian Go, Boston University
2017: Gabriel Abend, New York University
2016: Iddo Tavory, New York University
2015: Isaac Ariail Reed, University of Colorado
2014: Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley
2013: Omar Lizardo, University of Notre Dame
2012: Ivan Ermakoff, University of Wisconsin, Madison
2011: Philip Gorski, Yale University
2010: Mustafa Emirbayer, University of Wisconsin
2009: Loic Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley
2008: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2007: George Steinmetz, University of Michigan
2006: Margaret R. Somers, University of Michigan
Junior Theorist Award
2025: Yang, Yuchen. “Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender.”
2025 honorable mention: Cheong, Amanda R. “Who Counts as a Stateless Person? Nation-Statist Logics and the Liabilities of Potential Citizenship Elsewhere.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 48, no. 4 (2025): 883–905.
2025 honorable mention: Torres, Mo. “Separate from Class? Toward a Theory of Race as Resource Signal.” Social Problems 72, no. 4 (2025): 1703–20.
2024: Brundage, Jonah Stuart. “Representation and Recognition: State Sovereignty as Performative.” American Journal of Sociology 128, no. 5 (2023): 1335–80.
2024 honorable mention: Puetz, Kyle. “Relational Durkheim: Homo Duplex as the Foundation of a Formalist Cultural Sociology.” Sociological Theory 42, no. 3 (2024): 204–30.
2023: Desan, Mathieu Hikaru. “Realist and Historicist Modes of Critique in Critical Sociology.” Critical Sociology 49, no. 4-5 (2023): 589–612.
2023 honorable mention: Ferguson, Jason L. “‘There Is an Eye on Us’: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal.” American Sociological Review 86, no. 4 (2021): 700–27.
2023 honorable mention: Sendroiu, Ioana. “‘All the Old Illusions’: On Guessing at Being in Crisis.” Sociological Theory 40, no. 4 (2022): 297–321.
2021: Joosse, Paul, and Robin Willey. “Gender and Charismatic Power.” Theory & Society 49, no. 4 (2020): 533–61.
2021 honorable mention: Simko, Christina. “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma.” Sociological Theory 38, no. 1 (2020): 51–77.
2020: Gong, Neil. “Between Tolerant Containment and Concerted Constraint: Managing Madness for the City and the Privileged Family.” American Sociological Review 84, no. 4 (2019): 664–89.
2019: Winchester, Daniel, and Kyle D. Green. “Talking Your Self into It: How and When Accounts Shape Motivation for Action.” Sociological Theory 37, no. 3 (2019): 257–81.
2018: McDonnell, Erin Metz. “Patchwork Leviathan: How Pockets of Bureaucratic Governance Flourish within Institutionally Diverse Developing States.” American Sociological Review 82, no. 3 (2017): 476–510.
2017: Larissa Buchholz, Northwestern University
2016: Bail, Chris. “The Public Life of Secrets: Deception, Disclosure, and Discursive Framing in the Policy Process.” Sociological Theory 33, no. 2 (2015): 97–124.
2015: Benzecry, Claudio. “An Opera House for the Paris of South America: Pathways to the Institutionalization of High Culture.” Theory & Society 43, no. 2 (2014): 169–96.
2014: Decoteau, Clair Laurier. “Hybrid Habitus: Toward a Post-Colonial Theory of Practice.” Political Power and Social Theory 24 (2013): 263–93.
2014: Reed, Isaac. “Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions.” Sociological Theory 31, no. 3 (2013): 193–218.
Established 1996
Edward Shils – James Coleman Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper
2025 Co-Winner: Richardson, Jacob W. “Queering Edgework: An Autoethnographic Account of Cruising for Sex.” Journal of Autoethnography 5, no. 1 (2024): 95–114.
2025 Co-Winner: Leeds, Tyler. “Stuart Hall’s Relational Political Sociology: A Heuristic for Right-Wing Studies.” Journal of Right-Wing Studies 2, no. 1 (2024): 98–126.
2025 honorable mention: Sariego, Carlo. “Birth Rights and Wrongs: Reproductive Outsiders in Azar v. Garza and Madrigal v. Quilligan.” Signs 50, no. 2 (2025): 343–68.
2024: Laemmli, Taylor. “Class Experience Mobility through Consumption, Work, and Relationships.” University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2024 honorable mention: Marom, Oded. “Situational Orders: Interaction Patterns and the Standards for Evaluating Public Discourse.” University of Southern California.
2023: Laryea, Krystal. “Playing up Difference: How Identities are Interactionally Navigated in Groups.” Stanford University.
2023 honorable mention: Bhardwaj, Ankit. “The Soils of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories of Environmental Racialization.” New York University.
2022: Brett, Gordon. “Dueling with Dual Process Models. Cognition, Creativity and Context.” University of Toronto.
2022 honorable mention: Shi, Mary. “‘Until Indian title shall be … fairly extinguished:’ The Public Lands, Settler Colonialism, and Early Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States.” University of California, Berkeley.
2021: Le, Andrew. “The Third Element of Migration.”
2021: Yang, Yuchen. “What’s Hegemonic about Hegemonic Masculinity?”
2021 honorable mention: Gonzales, Laura Acosta. “Victimhood Dissociation and Conflict Resolution.”
2021 honorable mention: Lewis, Demar. “Troubling America’s Historical Waters.”
2020: Horvath, Aaron. “From Accounting to Accountability: Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Disclosure.”
2019: Cheong, Amanda. “Legal Omission as Political Strategy: Motivations for and Consequences of Deliberate Contractions of the State’s Administrative Power.” Princeton University.
2019: Gong, Neil. “That Proves You Mad, Because You Know it Not: Impaired Insight and the Dilemma of Governing Psychiatry Patients as Legal Subjects.” Theory & Society 46, no. 3 (2017): 201–28.
2019 honorable mention: Husain, Fauzia. “Hobbled Leadership. Gender and the Engines of Authority in The Pakistani Police.” University of Virginia.
2018: Shiff, Talia. “Evaluating the Case: Encounters of Schematic Accordance and Schematic Discordance in Asylum Adjudications.” Northwestern University.
2018 honorable mention: Karunakaran, Arvind. “Reconfiguring Accountability: Organizational Accountability in the Age of Smartphones and Social Media.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
2018 honorable mention: Hyman, Mikell. “When Policy Feedbacks Fail: ‘Collective Cooling’ in Detroit’s Municipal Bankruptcy.” University of Michigan.
2017: Sweet, Paige. “The Feminist Question in Realism.” Sociological Theory 36, no. 3 (2018): 221–43.
2017 honorable mention: Rea, Christopher M. “Theorizing Command-and-Commodify Regulation: The Case of Species Conservation Banking in the United States.” Theory & Society 46, no. 1 (2017): 21–56.
2016: Wohl, Hannah. “Community Sense: The Cohesive Power of Aesthetic Judgement.” Sociological Theory 33, no. 4 (2015): 299–326.
2015: Brundage, Jonah Stuart. “The Pacification of Hunting: Elite Conflict, State Formation, and Violence in Early Modern England.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 4 (2017): 786–817.
2013: Garrido, Marco. “The Sense of Place behind Segregating Practices: An Ethnographic Approach to the Symbolic Partitioning of Metro Manila.” Social Forces 91, no. 4 (2013): 1343–62.
2012: Frye, Margaret. “Bright Futures in Malawi’s New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity.” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 6 (2012): 1565–1624.
2011: Acuña, Álvaro Santana. “How a Literature Book Becomes a Classic: The Case of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Harvard University.
2010: Schulz, Jeremy. “The Social and Cultural Construction of the Work-Private Life Boundary in Three Countries: A Comparative Study of the Evening Hours in the Lives of French, Norwegian and American Business Professionals.” University of California, Berkeley.
2009: Strand, Michael. “Institutional Change as a Field Process: The Transformation of American Psychiatry, 1945–1980.” Notre Dame.
2008: McDonnell, Erin Metz. “Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption.” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 2 (2013): 307–50.
2007: Wood, William. “(Virtual) Myths.” In Culture, Power, and History: Studies in Critical Sociology, 441–78. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
2005: Daniel E. Adkins, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2004: Washington, Scott. “Principles of Racial Taxonomy.” Princeton University.
2003: Summers-Effler, Erika. “The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation.” Sociological Theory 20, no. 1 (2002): 41–60.
2002: Green, Adam Isaiah. “Gay But Not Queer: Toward a Post-Queer Study of Sexuality.” Theory & Society 31, no. 4 (2002): 521–45.
2001: Porto, Christopher D. “The Predictable Nature of the Balinese Cockfight.” University of Virginia.
2000: Bianchi, Alison. “Sentiment and Status Process: A Test Between the Constitutive and Mediator Models.” Stanford University.
1999: Klinenberg, Eric M. “Denaturalizing Disaster: A Social Autopsy of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave.” Theory & Society 28, no. 2 (1999): 239–95.
1998: Brekhus, Wayne. “A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting our Focus.” Sociological Theory 16, no. 1 (1998): 34–51.
1997: Ermakoff, Ivan. “Prelates and Princes: Aristocratic Marriages, Canon Law Prohibitions, and Shifts in Norms and Patterns of Domination in the Central Middle Ages.” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (1997): 405–22.
1996: Berard, Timothy James. “Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, and the Reformulation of Social Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 29, no. 3 (1999): 203–27.