A book by Edward J. Lawler, the Martin P. Catherwood Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, has won the 2008-09 Best Book Award from the Rationality and Society Section of the American Sociological Association.

"Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World," published in 2009 by the Russell Sage Foundation and co-authored with Shane Thye of the University of South Carolina and Jeongkoo Yoon of Ewha University, South Korea, also received an honorable mention by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Emotions Section.

Lawler will receive the awards at the association's annual meetings in August in Atlanta.

The association's Rationality and Society Section and the Sociology of Emotions Section are "very different intellectual subfields within sociology, and one of the aims of the book was to bridge these fields," Lawler said.

The book argues that people experience emotions as they interact with each other and associate those feelings with groups, especially when they engage in joint tasks that give them a strong sense of shared responsibility. It advances a theory of social commitments that people form group ties in a world where they increasingly have transactional associations based not on collective interests but on what provides the greatest personal advantage.

Recurring interactions -- virtual or face-to-face -- and group projects that make people feel good promote attachments to work teams, companies, unions, volunteer associations, local communities and nations, the authors argue.