Several RSF titles have recently received book awards for their distinguished contributions to the social sciences. In June, Unequal Time (2014) by Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel was named the winner of the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship by the Organizations, Occupations, and Work (OOW) Section of the American Sociological Association. In Unequal Time, Clawson and Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace and show how the schedules of some workers can shape the schedules of others in ways that exemplify and often exacerbate gender and class differences. Focusing on four occupations in the health sector—doctors, nurses, EMTs, and nursing assistants—the authors show how all of these workers experience the effects of schedule uncertainty but do so in very distinct ways for each occupation.

The OOW also awarded an honorable mention to Nancy DiTomaso for her RSF book The American Non-Dilemma (2013). In the book, DiTomaso draws from interviews with working, middle, and upper-class whites to show that while the vast majority of whites profess strong support for civil rights and equal opportunity regardless of race, they continue to pursue their own group-based advantage, especially in the labor market where whites tend to favor other whites in securing jobs protected from market competition. This “opportunity hoarding” leads to substantially improved life outcomes for whites due to their greater access to social resources from family, schools, churches, and other institutions with which they are engaged.

The 2014 RSF book The Obama Effect, by Seth K. Goldman and Diana C. Mutz, also recently won the Frank Luther Mott Award from the Kappa Tau Alpha society, an organization honoring scholarship in journalism and mass communication. Kappa Tau Alpha vice president and finalist judge Jeff Fruit noted, “Goldman and Mutz have produced something that not only pushes the envelope of scholarly inquiry but also provides an intriguing framework for further research.”

In The Obama Effect, Goldman and Mutz trace the extent to which Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign—which exposed many white Americans more than ever before to a black individual who defied negative stereotypes—shifted racial attitudes. While Obama’s politics divided voters, Americans uniformly perceived Obama as highly successful, intelligent, and charismatic. As the authors find, white racial prejudice toward blacks significantly declined during the Obama campaign, yet increased again a few years after the election, as positive news coverage dwindled and allowed other, more negative images of African Americans to re-emerge in the media. The Obama Effect analyzes these shifts to offer a new understanding of the relationship between the mass media and racial attitudes in America.

Click here to read more about the Max Weber Award.

Click here to read more about the Frank Luther Mott Award.