The award panel commented:

While all of the shortlisted articles exhibited significant levels of scholarly excellence, we felt that one article stood out for its innovative approach and potential to make a significant contribution to both theoretical and empirical debates. Our choice for the winning paper of the 2017 sage prize is ‘Other’ Posts in ‘Other’ Places: Poland through a Postcolonial Lens?’ by Lucy Mayblin, Aneta Piekut, and Gill Valentine (Feb 2016). The paper is theoretically innovative, empirically rich and represents sociological scholarship at its best. We commend the authors for their sophisticated and imaginative use of post-colonial theory, used and extended here to problematize the triple position of Poland between East and West. We felt this was done whilst retaining a finely grained analysis of the data which never lost sight of the lived realities of research participants. The paper also draws on Polish scholarship and makes this accessible to those who can’t read the language, in doing so broadening the scope of British sociology whilst demonstrating the international relevance of the journal.