Three national awards recognize Michelle Jackson's book on labor

Michelle Jackson's recent book, The Division of Rationalized Labor (Harvard University Press, 2025), has received three national honors in 2026. The book won the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Labor and Labor Movements Section and the Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award from the ASA's Economic Sociology Section. It was also named a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. 

Michelle's book examines how the division of labor in the United States has changed over the past 150 years. While increasing specialization is often expected to push workers into ever-narrower roles, evidence shows that many specialized occupations have actually become more complex. Jackson argues that this apparent paradox can be explained by the ways scientific efforts to solve social and industrial problems have imposed new tasks on workers, ultimately making their jobs more—not less—complex.