As a sociologist of work, occupations, professions, and large organizations you have explored some of the most important social questions of our time. How does bureaucracy shape moral consciousness? What constitutes ethical law enforcement? What is the nature of violence, and how best can democracies thwart it? Your book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers continues to be taught widely. You co-edited Main Trends of the Modern World, a twelve-book series that brings together classical and contemporary analyses of the institutional foundations of modern society. You brought to campus a long line of speakers, with deep and varied practical experience, of a kind rarely encountered on a college campus. All of this grew from your careful field studies, some of which, in the area of police work, courted danger. This focus on ethnography became the foundation of the curriculum of our anthropology and sociology department, of which you were the co-architect and whose theory and method courses you have so often taught. Through it all you have enabled countless students to engage in more critical and grounded ways the moral complexities of the professional and community lives that they moved on from here to lead.
I hereby declare you Willmott Family Third Century Professor of Sociology & Public Affairs, Emeritus, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 3, 2018
Megamenu Social