Bryan Boyle Honored with ASA Distinguished Scholarly Article Award

MPIfG postdoc Bryan Boyle and his co-author Vandebroeck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) are the recipients of this year’s Distinguished Scholarly Article Award of the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Their award-winning paper, “The Labor of Distinction: Butlers, Service Work, and the Production of Elite Lifestyles,” appeared in American Sociological Review (90 [1]: 26–60) in 2025 and explores how elites use the labor of service workers to produce and reproduce distinct lifestyles. For his field research, Boyle himself trained and worked as a butler in the UK. The authors draw on the resulting “enactive” ethnography to identify four dimensions of the service work they call the “labor of distinction”: managing employers’ class symbols; relieving employers of practices that are considered vulgar; embodying employers’ status; and establishing social distance between worker and employer. In their paper, they show that service professions are part of a division of labor that contributes to elite symbolic power. The award will be presented in August 2026 at ASA’s annual conference in New York. The same paper received an honorable mention from the Clifford Geertz Prize for Best Article of the ASA Sociology of Culture Section. Bryan Boyle is a postdoctoral researcher in the Economic Sociology Research Area at the MPIfG. His main research interests are cultural and labor sociology, social class, elites, and ecology.