NEWS RELEASE, 4/17/97 Three UC Berkeley scholars win Guggenheim Fellowships to support their wide-ranging research

by Patricia McBroom

Berkeley -- With subjects ranging from 10th century monks and marriage alliances to the wine and beer industry of 20th century America, scholars at the University of California at Berkeley have again captured prestigious fellowships awarded annually by the Guggenheim Foundation. Three UC Berkeley professors are among the 164 artists, scholars and scientists nationally who will receive awards totaling almost $4.89 million for 1997. There were 16 recipients altogether at the nine campuses of the University of California. This is the 73rd year for the awards by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation which are based on distinguished achievement in the past and the promise of future exceptional accomplishment. The UC Berkeley recipients this year are: Glenn R. Carroll, Paul J. Cortese Professor of Management at the Haas School of Business, for "The strategy and organization of specialty producers." Carroll's research demonstrates that -- contrary to all expectations -- many small specialty producers are able to thrive in some industries that are moving toward increased concentration in large organizations. Instead of crowding out the small producers, the giants out compete each other. The survivors then move to the "center of the market," creating homogenized products and leaving room for small businesses to produce a diversity of new specialty products, Carroll has found. He documents his theory with data from the beer brewing and wine-making industries. Brewers after almost a century of declining numbers, increased from 42 firms in 1982 to more than 900 firms in 1996, nearly all of which are specialists, says Carroll. Similar trends have been found in book publishing, music recording, newspaper publishing, passenger airlines and banking. Carroll also explores the often cooperative values of the new specialty producers and the reasons consumers may prefer their products. Geoffrey Koziol, associate professor of history, for "Monks, marriage and discourses of power in 10th-century France." Koziol aims to show that in the absence of any coherent, centralized government, medieval kingdoms in France nevertheless had a political structure that held them together. The nobility were allied through complex networks of "brotherhoods" that had been created through marriage alliances and also through the exchange of monks, says Koziol. Marriage alliances made brothers-in-law, while the exchange of monks created spiritual brothers. "Anthropologists know there can be coherent societies without centralized government," says Koziol who has long been interested in how kings and magnates of 10th-century Europe achieved political structure through the practice and the ideals of mutual alliance. The Guggenheim will support Koziol's intent to rewrite the history of monasticism from the ninth through the 11th centuries in France, after the decline of the Carolingians. He also has received the President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities from the University of California. Lydia He Liu, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Comparative Literature, for "Missionary linguistic enterprise in 19th-century China." Liu has studied how Protestant missionaries undertook biblical and secular translations and publishing in China to create some of the first moments of translatability between European and Chinese languages. While Jesuit monks in China had done Bible translations earlier, no printed copies of such work exist. Robert Morrison, who in 1807 became the first Protestant missionary to enter China, set up a print house there and began a "golden age" of missionary publishing. The work by Protestant missionaries lasted through the 20th century. "The missionaries' translations began to allow different cultures and peoples to talk to each other, not just about each other," said Liu, who joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1990. "Such talk has never stopped since." Her study "seeks to re-open the questions of universalism, cultural relativism, colonial modernity, global circulation of books, technology and meanings," she said, "by examining the key texts in the missionary-Chinese translations of the period." Some of these texts include early classical Chinese versions of the Bible, translations of international law and grammar books. Liu's work on this topic is connected to her recently published book, "Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity -- China 1900-1937," (Stanford University Press, 1995). The Guggenheim award -- combined with a 1997-98 fellowship from the National Humanities Center in North Carolina -- will help Liu afford to take off the next academic year to write a book on her study. She will do so at the National Humanities Center.