Escalating Recognition: Book Awards in Anthropology and Sociology, 1962-2019

Abstract

Why so many book awards? In this poster, we examine the growth in scope and number of book awards in anthropology and sociology, considering them an analogue to what Joel Best (2008) calls “prize proliferation," and what James F. English (2005) has described as “the economy of prestige.” As academic societies and sections expand, scholars use book awards as a legitimating device to establish their authority, honor their members, and draw attention to their respective subfields. As of 2020, anthropology and sociology society sections award 37 prizes for books in anthropology and 52 prizes for monographs in sociology, respectively. To better understand the allocation of awards, we compiled a dataset of over 1000 awarding events from their websites, including author, affiliation, title, publisher, award year, award subfield, and location of fieldwork. This poster finds evidence of prize proliferation in both anthropology and sociology, marked by a steady increase in number of awards granted per year. Our initial analysis suggests that award-winning authors often work at high-prestige universities and publish with top university presses. And even in our global professions, books published in English about the United States dominated the awards list. As scholarly monographs are not evaluated via blind review, and can often be self-nominated, the recognition that authors, institutions, and publishers already possess can be leveraged to accrue further book awards. This escalating recognition comes to signal a scholar worth investing in, reinforcing existing markers of value in our scholarly economy.