Victor Nee, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology, has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is one of 189 artists, scholars and scientists from the United States and Canada selected from more than 2,800 applicants for this year's 83rd annual competition for awards totaling more than $7.6 million.

Guggenheim Fellowship award decisions are based on the recommendations of hundreds of expert advisers and the approval of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's board of trustees. Winners are selected based on distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Nee's grant will support his continued work on entrepreneurship and the rise of capitalism in China, and "will enable me to realize my goal of extending economic sociology to explain the rise of capitalism in China," said Nee, who also serves as director of Cornell's Center for the Study of Economy and Society.

The fellowship also will help Nee pursue research initially supported by a 2005 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, analyzing entrepreneurial action and performance in an important center of Chinese capitalism -- the Yangzi Delta region. It also will support analysis at the national level, based on the World Bank's 23-city survey of 4,000 firms, he said.