Malcolm Gladwell has been actively reporting on social issues in The New Yorker since 1966. He is also the author of Tipping Point (Little Brown, 2000), which inquires into social epidemics and social change, and Blink (little Brown, 2005), a book about social context and unconscious thinking. For the award, however, we focus on his contributions to The New Yorker, which expound and elaborate in novel ways the works and ideas of distinguished sociologists.
Gladwell is a gifted writer, with a knack for grounding social controversies in everyday experiences, thus giving his articles a wide appeal. Gladwell not only puts social issues on the public agenda but his writing style is distinctively sociological and critical. His articles have catchy title and alluring written, but they are also always research-based. They are, indeed, rich social analyses in their own right. Whether they treat public issues such as Enron, airline safety, the pharmaceutical industry or whether they treat the seemingly mundane (“The Life of paper,” “Ketchup”), his articles are always powerful social critiques.
Many of his columns refer to and elaborate the research of sociologists, thus conveying sociological knowledge to wider publics. Most compelling is his autobiographical “Black Like Them,” in which he analyzes the reasons for different racial attitudes towards groups of African Americans and West-Indians. In this piece he works from Mary Waters’s research and further elaborates it by reference to his knowledge of Canada. “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” is a network analysis, incorporating Mark Granovetter’s ideas in “The Strength of Weak Ties,” to explain the effectiveness of a woman in Chicago at shaping the city’s cultural life. Gladwell devoted an entire article to Erik Klinenberg’s Heat Wave. He wrote an article entitled, “Blow-Up,” which lays out the sociological approach to risks, accidents and catastrophes -- using the work of Charles Perrow and Diane Vaughan. Here he draws out the implications of organizational and technological complexity as causes of catastrophes as compared with the more common psychological explanations. Amazingly, he wrote a piece about Saturday Night Live that dwells on innovation and group processes and is loaded with references to philosophers and scientists, taken from Randy Collins’s latest book.
Gladwell’s talent of bringing sociological analysis to social issues is amply displayed in the article “Designs for Working,” about the design of the new workplace, introduced and framed throughout by reference to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of American Cities. Here is the last paragraph:
"The point of the new offices is to compel us to behave and socialize in ways that we otherwise would not – to overcome our initial inclination to be office suburbanites. But, in all the studies of the new workplaces, the reservations that employees have about a more social environment tend to diminish once they try it. Human behavior, after all, is shaped by context, but how it is shaped—and whether we’ll be happy with the result—we can understand only with experience. Jane Jacobs knew the virtues of the West Village because she lived there. What she couldn’t know was that her ideas about community would ultimately make more sense in the workplace. From time to time, social critics have bemoaned the falling rates of community participation in American life, but they have made the same mistake. The reason Americans are content to bowl alone (or, for that matter not bowl at all) is that increasingly, they receive all the social support they need – all the serendipitous interactions that serve to make them happy and productive—from nine to five."
Gladwell here and elsewhere displays in public that rare sociological imagination that illuminates social processes by seeing what social principle they share, that is by discovering unexpected links between disparate situations, links that render deep insights into human interaction. The committee is delighted that such an able exponent of sociology as Malcolm Gladwell should be the first winner of the Award for the Excellence in Reporting of Social Issues.
