Mayer N. Zald, professor emeritus of sociology, social work, and business administration at the University of Michigan, is the 2009 recipient of the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movement and Collective Behavior. His research focuses on social movement theory, organizational theory, and the reformulation of sociology as “a science and a humanities.”
The McCarthy award is presented annually by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change to recognize a scholar who has made “outstanding contributions to the scholarly literature concerned with social movements, protest, collective violence, riots, and other kind of collective behavior.”
The award banquet, scheduled for April 17 in McKenna Hall at the University of Notre Dame, will include a presentation by Zald titled “Looking Back on Collaborations, Looking Forward on Movements and Institutional Analysis.”
Founded in 2006, the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change fosters the interdisciplinary examination of collective political challenges expressed via protest, violence, and other extra-institutional means. The center provides Notre Dame faculty and graduate students working in these areas with a formal organization through which they can coordinate research and link their scholarship to the rest of the field.
The McCarthy award was inaugurated in 2007 and is named after its first recipient. Verta Taylor from the University of California, Santa Barbara, received the award in 2008.
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on April 15, 2009.