now ____________ is a great paper
A friend writes:
[For a seminar I'm teaching,] I am trying to collect a top 20 list of social science articles—in any subfield—that are particularly good and compelling examples of creative, parsimonious scholarship. A piece of research where the puzzle was set up well and the argument, methods and interpretation are clean and convincing. Please nominate a favorite piece of scholarship.
So, not necessarily the most influential, or most cited, or deepest but—compelling. A sweet piece of work. What’s the first thing that comes to mind?
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I’m not sure if you would consider this a social science paper, but “Five-Hundred Life-Saving Interventions and their Cost Effectiveness,” (Tengs, et al, Risk Analysis, vol. 15 no. 3, 1995) has long been a paper that I use as an example of clarity in method description, definitions and results. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, it is a remarkably information-dense article.
L. Goldsmith
July 29, 2011 at 5:30 am
Healy (2000) AJS.
Omar
July 29, 2011 at 11:39 am
Very broad query. I suppose you’re looking for something recent, since everyone already knows the classic articles. Here’s something I dig from my own subfield:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp551.html
It appeared in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in 2008.
Guillermo
July 29, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004). [pdf]
They pay very close attention to testing the mechanisms their story relies on and deriving predictions from alternative explanations, and just in general wring every possible bit of information from their data.
Elizabeth
July 29, 2011 at 12:56 pm
For what it’s worth, the editorial board of the Academy of Management Journal did this exercise systematically about 5 years ago and published the results. Here’s what they came up with (highlights are in Table 2): http://journals.aomonline.org/amj/editorials/bartunek.rynes.ireland.2006.pdf
Adam Kleinbaum
July 29, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Pager’s “The Mark of the Criminal Record” is one of my favorites.
Mikaila
July 29, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Freedman, David A. (1991), “Statistical Models and Shoe Leather,” Sociological Methodology 21: 291-313, available at http://www.rochester.edu/college/psc/clarke/405/Freedman91.pdf
Marc F. Bellemare
July 29, 2011 at 2:15 pm
I thought Alice Goffman’s 2009 piece in ASR “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto” was pretty schnazzy. Great example of what can be done with ethnography.
Scott Dolan
July 29, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Dolowitz, David P. and Marsh, David “Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy-Making” Governance Vol. 13, No. 1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0952-1895.00121/abstract
Greg McNeal
July 29, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Most things Peter Bearman has had his hands on, really…
But especially…
his autism piece in AJS (2010, I believe) with Marissa King and Liu.
his piece on malfeasance and the growth of the international economy. Also AJS, though I can’t recall the year.
Jane
July 29, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Ron Burt’s AJS piece on structural holes and brokerage was the first article I read in graduate school that seemed like a really compelling, interesting, well-formulated, and important piece of research.
Trey
July 29, 2011 at 3:39 pm
from the AMJ study, Uzzi’s paper stands out to me:
B. Uzzi. 1997. “Social Structure and Competition in Inter-Firm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness.”
Administrative Science Quarterly, 42: 35–67
sean
July 29, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Correll, Benard & Paik 2007 (in AJS) on motherhood penalty. I know this isn’t exactly the question, but great to pair with Budig & England 2001 (in ASR) on how the same questions are approached with observational (survey) vs. experimental data.
Erin Kelly
July 29, 2011 at 6:06 pm
A bit long but very compelling comparative study by Sean Safford
http://web.mit.edu/ipc/publications/pdf/04-002.pdf; it is a take-off from his book and is rather long but I think it meets all your criteria
Since you probably already have that on your list, I will suggest another really nice comparative study on institutional change in two hospitals by Katherine Kellogg at MIT, “Operating room: relational spaces and microinstitutional change in surgery.” AJS 2009
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20503740
orgtheory reader
July 29, 2011 at 6:38 pm
“The Mundanity of Excellence; an Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” by Chambliss in Sociological Theory, 1989.
A kind of cult classic to some. I think it’s a wonderful article and deserves a wider readership. It’s also a nice example of writing up ethnographic work.
shakha
July 29, 2011 at 7:40 pm
“The Glass Escalator” by Christine Williams (Social Problems, 1992) has been one of my favorites since my intro to Soc class years ago. It’s elegant and incredibly illustrative of how gender discrimination manifests in very tangible ways.
Max Besbris
July 30, 2011 at 2:54 pm
[...] week, we had a great discussion about papers that were clear and insightful empirical pieces. “Sweet.” Now, let me ask a related question – what papers have you found to be [...]
inspirational papers? « orgtheory.net
July 31, 2011 at 12:20 am
Steve Barley’s “Technology as an Occasion for Structuring” (here), in ASQ, 1986.
Also, Karen Hossfeld’s “Their logic against them: Contradictions in sex, race, and class on the Silicon Valley shop floor”, from 1991, I think, it’s a chapter in an edited book.
100% agree with Shamus about Chambliss.
Peter Levin
July 31, 2011 at 3:10 am
Chambliss’s piece is the first thing my students read when they get to graduate school. It’s (mostly) true about swimming, more true about academia.
David S. Meyer
July 31, 2011 at 9:59 pm
I can think of some feminist classics — among others, West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender” (Gender & Society 1987) and Deniz Kandiyoti’s “Bargaining with Patriarchy” (Gender & Society 1988).
bedhaya
August 1, 2011 at 2:50 pm