Please join me in congratulating the winner of the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History;
- Dylan Gottlieb (Princeton University), for his 2020 dissertation, “Yuppies: Young Urban Professionals and the Making of Postindustrial New York.”
This year, the committee was chaired by Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia), and also included Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) and Gerardo Con Díaz (University of California, Davis).
The committee decided "unanimously to award the 2021 Herman E. Krooss Prize to Dylan Gottlieb for his work entitled “Yuppies: Young Urban Professionals and the Making of Postindustrial New York.” Gottlieb’s dissertation explores how the influx of financial workers changed New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s. That demographic came to be known colloquially as “yuppies” or “young professionals.” The dissertation takes the category of “yuppies” seriously to understand “how young professionals remade the city, and how it in turn remade them,” as Gottlieb puts it. Each thematic chapter of the dissertation examines a seemingly familiar phenomenon like the Zagat restaurant guide or the marathon, uncovering how particular notions of yuppies’ behavior and habits shaped urban life, while also disadvantaging others such as low-income workers driven out of their homes to make space for yuppie residences in Hoboken, New Jersey. Gottlieb demonstrates brilliantly how business history can combine a cohort study with urban history, oral history, labor history, and cultural history. Finally, the dissertation was compellingly written, filled with a fine eye for fascinating detail. Once you read Gottlieb’s analysis of the rise of Zagat restaurant guides, you will never forget that their size was designed to fit into a yuppie’s suit pocket. We congratulate Dylan Gottlieb on writing an important new work in the field of business history."
For more information on the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History click
here.