Fredric M. Jablin Dissertation Awards

2005-2006

D. Michael Lindsay, Sociology, Princeton University
Lindsay's 2006 CV
Paper he presented at International Leadership Association 
International Leadership Association information with free downloads to members

Typically, social scientists examine social movements as grassroots phenomena, but public leaders and elite actors play important roles in the advance of particular social movements.  This paper examines their role in one contemporary social movement, American evangelicalism.  Through semi-structured interviews with over 350 elite informants as well as archival and ethnographic research, I explore the mechanisms through which leaders have enabled evangelicalism’s advance between 1976 and 2006.  Informants for this study include two former Presidents of the United States; over 25 Cabinet secretaries and senior White House staffers; over 100 CEOs or senior executives at large firms (both public and private); two dozen accomplished Hollywood professionals; over 10 leaders from the world of professional athletics, and a handful of leaders from the artistic and philanthropic arenas, among others.  Through the expenditure of four kinds of resources—political influence, financial capital, academic cachet, and the ability to inspire and create—these public leaders have founded organizations, formed networks, exercised convening power, and drawn upon formal and informal positions of authority to advance the evangelical movement.  This empirical study demonstrates the persistence of institutional differentiation among America’s leadership cohort, but it also points to a religious identity that has provided vital, cross-domain cohesion among many who occupy positions of public power.