Michèle Lamont

Cultivating differences : symbolic boundaries and the making of inequality

How are boundaries created between groups in society? And what do these boundaries have to do with social inequality? In this pioneering collection of original essays, a group of leading scholars helps set the agenda for the sociology of culture by exploring the factors that push us to segregate and integrate and the institutional arrangements that shape classification systems. Each examines the power of culture to shape our everyday lives as clearly as does economics, and studies the dimensions along which boundaries are frequently drawn. The essays cover four topic areas: the institutionalization of cultural categories, from morality to popular culture; the exclusionary effects of high culture, from musical tastes to the role of art museums; the role of ethnicity and gender in shaping symbolic boundaries; and the role of democracy in creating inclusion and exclusion. The contributors are Jeffrey Alexander, Nicola Beisel, Randall Collins, Diana Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Joseph Gusfield, John R. Hall, David Halle, Richard A. Peterson, Albert Simkus, Alan Wolfe, and Vera Zolberg.

Reconsidering Culture and Poverty

Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors. An example is Prudence Carter (2005), who, based on interviews with poor minority students, argues that whether poor children will work hard at school depends in part on their cultural beliefs about the differences between minorities and the majority. Annette Lareau (2003), after studying poor, working-class, and middleclass families, argues that poor children may do worse over their lifetimes in part because their parents are more committed to “natural growth” than “concerted cultivation” as their cultural model for child rearing. Mario Small (2004), based on fieldwork in a Boston housing complex, argues that poor people may be reluctant to participate in beneficial community activities in part because of how they culturally perceive their neighborhoods. David Harding (2007, 2010), using survey and qualitative interview data on adolescents, argues that the sexual behavior of poor teenagers depends in part on the extent of cultural heterogeneity in their neighborhoods. Economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2002), relying on the work of other scholars, argue that whether students invest in schooling depends in part on their cultural identity, wherein payoffs will differ among “jocks,” “nerds,” and “burnouts.” And William Julius Wilson, in his latest book (2009a), argues that culture helps explain how poor African Americans respond to the structural conditions they experience.

How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida

How can an interpretive theory gain legitimacy in two cultural markets as different as France and the United States? This study examines the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and social conditions of legitimation of Jacques Derridas work in the two countries and develops hypotheses about the process of legitimation of interpretive theories. The legitimation of Derridas work resulted from a fit between it and highly structured cultural and institutional systems. In France, Derrida capitalized on the structure of the intellectual market by targeting his work to a large cultural public rather than to a shrinking group of academic philosophers. His work appealed to the intellectual public as a status symbol and as a novel and sophisticated way to deal with late 1960s politics. In the United States, Derrida and a group of prestigious literary critics reframed his theory and disseminated it in university departments of literature. His work was imported concurrently with the work of other French scholars with whom he shared a market. Derridas support is more concentrated and stronger in one discipline than the support for other French intellectuals. In America, professional institutions and journals played a central role in the diffusion of his work, while cultural media were more central in France.

How Blacks Use Consumption to Shape Their Collective Identity

This article develops a ‘social identity’ perspective to the study of consumption. It builds on Richard Jenkins’ distinction between internal and external definitions of collective identity and explores the interplay of these definitions in the realm of consumption. Evidence is collected from interviews with marketing professionals who specialize in the African-American market segment to show that this theoretical approach complements and improves on existing approaches. Marketing professionals’ interpretations of the black consumer’s distinctiveness are used to map the twin processes of internal and external definitions of collective identity for African-Americans. The interviews suggest that marketing professionals (1) actively shape the meanings of the category of ‘the black consumer’ for the public at large; (2) promote powerful normative models of collective identity that equate social membership with conspicuous consumption; (3) believe that African-Americans use consumption to defy racism and share collective identities most valued in American society (e.g. middle-class membership); and (4) simultaneously enact a positive vision of their cultural distinctiveness.

What is Originality in the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Drawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researchers moral character, especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines.

Social Resilience In The Neoliberal Era

Introduction Peter A. Hall and Michele Lamont Part I. Neoliberalism: Policy Regimes, International Regimes and Social Effects: 1. The neoliberal era: ideology, policy, and social effects Peter Evans and William H. Sewell, Jr 2. Narratives and regimes of social and human rights: the Jack Pines of the neoliberal era Jane Jenson and Ron Levi 3. Neoliberal multiculturalism? Will Kymlicka Part II. The Social Sources of Individual Resilience: 4. Responses to discrimination and social resilience under neoliberalism: the case of Brazil, Israel, and the United States Michele Lamont, Jessica S. Welburn and Crystal Fleming 5. Stigmatization, neoliberalism, and resilience Leanne S. Son Hing 6. Security, meaning, and the home: conceptualizing multi-scalar resilience in a neoliberal era James Dunn Part III. Social Resilience on a Macro-Scale: 7. Neoliberalism and social resilience in the developed democracies Lucy Barnes and Peter A. Hall 8. Social resilience in the neoliberal era: national differences in population health and development Daniel Keating, Arjumand Siddiqi and Quynh Nguyen Part IV. Communities and Organizations as Sites for Social Resilience: 9. Neoliberalism in Quebec: the response of a small nation under pressure Gerard Bouchard 10. Can communities succeed when states fail them? A case study of early human development and social resilience in a neoliberal era Clyde Hertzman and Arjumand Siddiqi 11. Cultural sources of institutional resilience: lessons from chieftaincy in rural Malawi Ann Swidler 12. The origins and dynamics of organizational resilience: a comparative study of two French labor organizations Marcos Ancelovici.

Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health

Introduction Peter A. Hall and Michele Lamont 1. Population health and the dynamics of collective development Clyde Hertzman and Arjumand Siddiqi 2. Social interactions in human development: pathways to health and capabilities Daniel P. Keating 3. Health, social relations and public policy Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor 4. Population health and development: an institutional-cultural approach to capability expansion Peter Evans 5. Responding to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: culture, institutions, and health Ann Swidler 6. Responses to racism, health, and social inclusion as a dimension of successful societies Michele Lamont 7. Collective imaginary and population health (how health data can highlight cultural history) Gerard Bouchard 8. Making sense of public health: citizenship regimes and public health in Victorian England Jane Jenson 9. The multicultural welfare state? Will Kymlicka 10. From state-centrism to neoliberalism: macro-historical contexts of population health since World War II William H. Sewell, Jr.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things: responses to stigmatization in comparative perspective

Abstract This special issue offers a first systematic qualitative cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in a wide variety of contexts. This research is the culmination of a coordinated study of stigmatized groups in Brazil, Israel and the USA, as well as of connected research projects conducted in Canada, France, South Africa and Sweden. The issue sheds light on the range of destigmatization strategies ordinary people adopt in the course of their daily life. Articles analyse the cultural frames they mobilize to make sense of their experiences and to determine how to respond; how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries; and how responses are enabled and constrained by institutions, national ideologies, cultural repertoires and contexts. The similarities and differences across sites provide points of departure for further systematic research, which is particularly needed in light of the challenges for liberal democracy raised by multiculturalism.

Fairness as Appropriateness Negotiating Epistemological Differences in Peer Review

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, but neglected how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision making. The normative literature suggests that evaluators should overcome their epistemological differences by ‘‘translating’’ their preferred standards into general criteria of evaluation. However, little is known about how procedural fairness actually operates. Drawing on eighty-one interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, we show that (1) Evaluators generally draw on four epistemological styles to make arguments in favor of and against proposals. These are the constructivist, comprehensive, positivist, and utilitarian styles; and (2) Peer reviewers define a fair decision-making process as one in which panelists engage in ‘‘cognitive contextualization,’’ that is, use epistemological styles most appropriate to the field or discipline of the proposal under review.

African Americans respond to stigmatization: the meanings and salience of confronting, deflecting conflict, educating the ignorant and ‘managing the self’

Abstract Drawing on interviews with 150 randomly sampled African Americans, we analyse how members of a stigmatized group understand their experience of stigmatization and assess appropriate responses when asked about the best approach to deal with stigmatization and about responses to specific incidents. Combining in-depth interviews with a systematic coding of the data, we make original contributions to the previous literature by identifying the relative salience of modalities and tools for responding. We also examine closely through qualitative data the two most salient modalities of response, ‘confronting’ and ‘deflating’ conflict, the most salient tools, teaching out-group members about African Americans, and ‘the management of the self’, a rationale for deflating conflict that is largely overlooked in previous studies. We find that ‘confronting’ is the more popular modality for responding to stigmatization among African Americans.