Mario Small Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from Community and Urban Sociology Section of ASA
The department chair and Quetelet Professor of Social Science was honored with the Robert and Helen Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement, which "recognizes distinguished career achievement in community and urban sociology"
At a remarkably young age for receiving a lifetime achievement award, Mario was presented with the 2023-2024 Robert & Helen Lynd Award at the Community and Urban Sociology Section (CUSS) reception during this year's ASA meeting in Montreal. Mario joins two previous Columbia sociology professors who have received the award: the award's namesake Robert Lynd (jointly with Helen Lynd of Sarah Lawrence College) in 1980, and professor emeritus Herb Gans in 1992.
Below are the published remarks from CUSS. You can find remarks for all 2024 CUSS awardees here, and a list of previous awardees here.
The committee has selected Dr. Mario Small for the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dr. Mario Luis Small has made numerous contributions to research on urban neighborhoods, personal networks, qualitative and mixed methods, and many other topics. Broadly, his scholarship has fundamentally changed how we understand neighborhood effects, social capital, and the distribution and quality of organizations/institutions across space. He has shown that poor neighborhoods in commonly studied cities such as Chicago are not representative of low-income neighborhoods everywhere, that how people conceive of their neighborhood shapes how its conditions and how those conditions affect the residents, and that local organizations in poor neighborhoods often broker connections to both people and organizations. Dr. Small has demonstrated that people’s social capital‚ including how many people they know and how much they trust others‚ depends on the organizations in which they are embedded. His work on methods has shown that many practices used to make qualitative research more scientific are ineffective, and he recently published a co-authored book on qualitative literacy for social scientists.
Dr. Small’s work has informed policy and community development work on issues of social capital, childcare centers, nonprofit organizations, and more. He has also testified before the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress on social capital and the role of early childcare. Dr. Small’s work has been featured by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Public Radio International, the Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, Greater Good, the Chronicle Review, Commonwealth, and Spotlight on Poverty, among many other outlets.
Congratulations, Mario!