The 2022 Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize was awarded to Mustafa Yavas, PhD, who is currently a a postdoctoral scholar at NYU Abu Dhabi. In a dissertation entitled “White-Collar Blues?: The Making of the Transnational Middle Class in Turkey,” Yavas asks: how do “good jobs” endow elite workers with alienating work lives? Focusing on the quality of work life of Turkish business professionals and managers in Istanbul and New York City via over 100 in-depth interviews, Yavas analyzes the vicissitudes of the employment life course: selecting into; opting out of, and surviving in high-prestige, high-salary jobs at today’s transnational corporations.
The Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize is an endowment created in 1993 by Marvin B. Sussman (Ph.D., 1951, Yale). The prize has been offered annually since 1994, and is awarded to the graduate student whose dissertation, completed within the previous two academic years, is judged to be the most outstanding.