The 2013 George Herbert Mea Award for Lifetime Achievement was presented to Joel Best (University of Delaware). On behalf of the Award Committee Donileen Loseke honoured Joel for his work at the SSSI 2013 conference.
“The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction is surviving and thriving and doing it in style. The past three days have contained multiple indications that we are attracting energetic and engaged young scholars who will protect and grow the society into the next generations. And as members of the Mead Award Committee this year, Chuck Edgley, Mike Katovich, and I can tell you, that without a doubt, our senior scholars rival those in any organization. The accomplishments of award nominees are remakable.
This year’s award winner is such a person whose record of accomplishment is simply amazing in terms of quantity and quality and creativity. He is the author or editor of 17 books, and over 80 articles. His books have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, and German, many of his articles have been reprinted five times, ten times, fifteen times.
We are honored to call him one of our own. Joel Best.
Joel has taken symbolic interaction and social construction perspectives into strange new worlds, exploring topics from statistics to satanism to school quality and student loans; from prostitutes, to violence, from deviance to fads, to children. While Joel’s scholarly productivity is amazingly high, so, too, is the quality: He won the Cooley Award from this Society in 1991 for his book, Threatened Children and he gave the distinguished lecture at these meetings in 1997. An independent measure of his esteem among his colleagues is in the numbers of positions of responsibility and leadership he has held. He has been the President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and President of the Midwest Sociological Society. He has been the editor of Social Problems and on the editorial board for our journal, Symbolic Interaction.
It is my great honor to present the 2013 George Herbert Mead Award for lifetime achievement to Dr. Joel Best.”
(Donileen Loseke, Mead Award Committee Chair, 2013)
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