Social Science Seminar – Dr. Daniel Chambliss

All the time, all around us, otherwise normal, even ordinary people are doing extraordinary things: running marathons, saving lives, creating beautiful works of art. From the outside, it may seem impossible to accomplish such tasks. Using examples from Olympic sports, health care, the arts, and college education, I will show how these people do it and how we can do it as well.

On Tuesday, April 15 at 4 p.m. in the Reilley Room, Dr. Daniel Chambliss, professor emeritus of sociology and the inaugural holder of the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professorship at Hamilton College, will present “How Ordinary People Accomplish Extraordinary Things.” He is the winner of the American Sociological Association’s Theory section prize for his work on organizational excellence in his widely-reprinted article, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic
Swimmers”, and he is the author of Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers, which was named the Book of the Year by the U.S. Olympic Committee on which this presentation is based.

The talk is the final in the 2024-2025 Social Science Seminar series.