UMass Center for Employment Equity Director Donald Tomaskovic-Devey Receives ‘Distinguished Career’ Award

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, professor of sociology and founding director of the UMass Center for Employment Equity, has been honored with the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Distinguished Career Award by the American Sociological Association (ASA). The award was presented by the ASA’s Organizations, Occupations and Work (OOW) section at the association’s annual meeting, held Aug. 17-21 in Philadelphia.

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The awards committee cited Tomaskovic-Devey’s “immense contributions to the discipline” over his career of nearly 40 years, highlighting his work to position organizations as a central social site for understanding inequality dynamics and to understand the crucial role social relations play in organizational inequality. His works include four books, two edited volumes and more than 75 peer-reviewed articles.

Tomaskovic-Devey is a leading scholar on employment equity, having served as a member of the Federal Civil Rights Commission and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as an expert witness in several high-profile employment discrimination cases.

He has led projects on the impact of financialization on U.S. income distribution, workplace desegregation and equal opportunity, network models of labor market structure and relational inequality as a theoretical and empirical project. Tomaskovic-Devey’s long-term objective is to work with others to move the social science of inequality to a more fully relational and organizational stance. He is pursuing that goal through empirical studies of jobs and workplaces, as well as social relationships between jobs within workplaces and the social relationships that link organizations together.

The OOW’s Distinguished Career Award recognizes a career of outstanding contributions to the areas of organizations, occupations and work. The award is named in honor of noted strategy, innovation and leadership scholar Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School. Nominees are judged on the scholarly impact of their work.

As the three colleagues who nominated him commented, “What truly sets Don apart from other scholars is his relentless support of the discipline, and of junior scholars in particular.”