Frances Fox Piven is Professor of Political Science at Boston University, and is also vice-president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP). Richard A. Cloward is a sociologist and social worker on the faculty of Columbia University, and a member of the board of directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Together they have written extensively on urban politics and social movements. Their articles in The Nation are widely credited with stimulating the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), a grass-roots protest movement of welfare recipients.
Their book on the welfare system, Regulating the Poor, also published by Pantheon, won the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1971. A collection of their essays, The Politics of Turmoil, was published by Pantheon in 1974. Professor Cloward’s book, written with Lloyd E. Ohlin, on the origins of gang delinquency won the Dennis Carroll Award of the International Society of Criminology in 1965.