Harvey Molotch
Categories: Advisory Board
Harvey Molotch is renowned for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and has helped create the field of environmental sociology and, in recent years, that of the sociology of objects. His research interests span urban development and political economy; the sociology of architecture, design, and consumption; racial segregation and ‘white flight’; environmental degradation, especially the Santa Barbara Oil Spill; the mass media and frameworks of social construction. He received a BA in philosophy (Michigan) and an MA and PhD in Sociology (Chicago). Among several other awards, he received the Lifetime Career Achievement in Urban and Community Scholarship issued by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Urban and Community Studies Section (2003). Professor Molotch has published extensively on urban settings and their influences on people, including the book “Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place” (1987) with John Logan, which won sociology’s most prestigious prize for scholarship, the ASA’s Distinguished Scholarly Contribution to Sociology Award. This book draws on a seminal article, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” published in The American Journal of Sociology in 1976, which argues that the shape of cities and the distribution of their peoples is not due to interpersonal market of geographic necessities, but to social actions, including opportunistic dealing. In his recent book “Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are” (2003), Professor Molotch builds on the work of Howard S. Becker and Bruno Latour to view objects as the product of the joint work of many people, especially designers. Professor Molotch has been awarded several teaching and research fellowships, his publications have been highly acclaimed, and he has been interviewed in the New Yorker.
