P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, professor of developmental psychology and IPR faculty fellow, was elected a fellow of Division 7 (developmental psychology) of the American Psychological Association in October. The APA awards fellow status “on the basis of evaluated evidence of outstanding contributions in the field of psychology.”

Sociologist and IPR Faculty Fellow Devah Pager’s dissertation, The Mark of a Criminal Record, won the American Sociological Association’s dissertation award for 2003. In it Pager sent matched pairs of young black and white men to apply for entry-level job openings throughout Milwaukee to assess the effects of race and criminal record on hiring outcomes. One of the most striking findings from this study was that whites with criminal records were more likely to receive call-backs from employers than were black applicants with no criminal history. An article based on her research was published in the American Journal of Sociology, 2003, 108(5): 937-975.

James Rosenbaum’s Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half (2001, Russell Sage Foundation) received the Willard Waller Award from the American Sociological Association (Sociology of Education section) this summer. The award is given every three years for books. The committee that made the award was “impressed by the vigor of [his] argument, by the quality of the evidence marshaled, and by the centrality of the issues raised regarding the sociology of education and stratification.”

In his book Rosenbaum, professor of sociology and human development and social policy, and IPR faculty fellow, argues that a breakdown in communication between employers and high schools has left many marginal students and recent graduates in the lurch—unaware that they are unprepared for, and unable to finish, college and having unrecognized value in the labor market. The study discovers teachers sometimes play a crucial role in helping students have better careers.

Brian Uzzi’s “Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness” won the Administrative Science Quarterly’s 2003 Award for Scholarly Contribution. Uzzi is associate professor of management and organizations, Kellogg, and sociology and an IPR faculty associate.

The award recognizes the paper having the most influence on theory and research in the five years following its publication. His paper, one of the first to consider “embeddedness,” the process by which economic transactions are embedded in social attachments and networks, was the most frequently cited of all of the prestigious management journal’s papers published in 1997, March, 42: 35-67.