M Lamont
Biographic Data
| ID | 5133 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Lamont |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Lamont |
| SIGNATURE | LAMONT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0221-0402 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 103 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 103 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 26 |
Como Enfrentar o Grande Embaralhamento Simbólico de Trump para Promover Reconhecimento
Esta conferência examina o “Grande Embaralhamento Simbólico” em curso nos Estados Unidos e em outros contextos nacionais, tomando como eixo analítico os processos de reconhecimento e estigmatização. A partir de uma abordagem comparativa e multiescalar, o texto analisa como fronteiras simbólicas e sociais são produzidas, contestadas e transformadas por lideranças políticas, instituições, produtores culturais, movimentos sociais e grupos marginaliz…
Seeing Others for what
Lights, Camera, Activism
Against the background of the #MeToo movement and the national reckoning with American racism, we assess how professionals in two fields of cultural entertainment engage in strategies to promote recognition. We draw on seventy in-depth interviews with creatives working in television production in Hollywood and professional comedy to advance a three-part argument: First, we describe seven distinct recognition work strategies they highlight, which …
Feeling overlooked
The farmers' protests sweeping across Europe during the early month of 2024 have highlighted the discontent felt by many residing in rural areas. Protests have been motivated by increasing input costs, falling prices of agricultural produce and more stringent regulations. In this paper, we go beyond the economic rationale for the protests and ask what broader sociological factors could be driving rural discontent. To this aim, we investigate poli…
Seeing "Seeing Others" differently
Comments from Lorenza Fontana, Tiffany Joseph, Ali Meghji, and Ann Morning shed different lights on Seeing Others, and bring me to see the book differently. They draw a connection between its argument and my past research on worth, racism, group boundaries, ordinary universalism, and other themes. Some are particularly drawn to how I describe change as proceeding from ongoing cultural processes, even in periods of cultural backlash like the one w…
Recreating a Plausible Future
This article analyzes how young adults draw on cultural resources to understand their identities, aspirations, and goals when taken-for-granted scripts of success are perceived as less desirable or achievable. Drawing on pragmatism, we propose the concept of 'plausible futures' to capture how people rearrange elements within cultural repertoires as a practical and moral project to define their identities, aspirations, and goals. We draw on interv…
How American college students understand social resilience and navigate towards the future during covid and the movement for racial justice
Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity…
Sociology of Work Meets Cultural Sociology
Antidemocracy in America
Membership without Social Citizenship? Deservingness & Redistribution as Grounds for Equality
Western societies have experienced a broadening of inclusive membership, whether we consider legal, interpersonal, or cultural membership. Concurrently, we have witnessed increased tensions around social citizenship, notably harsher judgments or boundaries over who “deserves” public assistance. Some have argued these phenomena are linked, with expanded, more diverse membership corroding solidarity and redistribution. We maintain that such a concl…
Inequality Generation & Persistence as Multidimensional Processes
For a 'sociology as a team sport
From 'having' to 'being
With growing inequality, the American dream is becoming less effective as a collective myth. With its focus on material success, competition and self-reliance, the intensified diffusion of neoliberal scripts of the self is leading the upper-middle class toward a mental health crisis while the working class and low-income groups do not have the resources needed to live the dream. African Americans, Latinos and undocumented immigrants, who are pres…
Getting Respect
Racism is a common occurrence for members of marginalized groups around the world. This book illuminates their experiences and responses to stigmatization and discrimination by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The book delves into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents individuals encounter in each country, how they respond to these occurrences, and what they view as t…
How can cultural sociology help us understand contemporary Chinese society
In this editorial for the Thematic Series: Cultural Sociology and China, we discuss the global growth of cultural sociology as a sociological sub-discipline, its current state and future prospects in mainland China, and the aims of this special issue in promoting the subfield’s further growth domestically in China
Sociology's Response to the Trump Presidency
In this essay, I discuss the ways in which a national organization like the American Sociological Association can fight against government policies that threaten conditions essential for knowledge production
Addressing Recognition Gaps
This Presidential Address offers elements for a systematic and cumulative study of destigmatization, or the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth. Contemporary sociologists tend to focus on inequality in the distribution of resources, such as occupations, education, and wealth. Complementing this research, this address draws attention to "recognition gaps," defined as disparities in worth and cultural membership between gr…
Getting Respect
"Racism is a common occurrence for members of marginalized groups around the world. Getting Respect illuminates their experiences by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The authors delve into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents individuals encounter in each country, how they respond to these occurrences, and what they view as the best strategy--whether individually, co…
Introduction to BJS special issue
The articles in this issue were all commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the UK's Brexit referendum result in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in November 2016 to present a rapid sociological response to the challenges and questions posed by these tumultuous events. Ostensibly these are two very different kinds of political events. The Brexit referendum in the UK was an unprecedented popular vote …
Trump's electoral speeches and his appeal to the American white working class
This paper contributes to the study of social change by considering boundary work as a dimension of cultural change. Drawing on the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of 73 formal speeches made by Donald Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign, we argue that his political rhetoric, which led to his presidential victory, addressed the white working class's concern with their declining position in the national pecking order. He addressed this …
Bridging cultural sociology and cognitive psychology in three contemporary research programmes
From the study of racism to destigmatization and the transformation of group boundaries
The powerful film "I am not your Negro" concludes with novelist James Baldwin reflecting on how the United States made African-Americans into a "problem". He states that addressing this "problem" i
A post-Bourdieusian sociology of valuation and evaluation for the field of cultural production
Responses to Discrimination and Social Resilience Under Neoliberalism
The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences
In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex ine…
Cultural Capital
The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their wo…
Money, Morals, and Manners
Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing
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 …
Social Knowledge in the Making
Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to Social Knowledge in the Making turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is the first comprehensive effort to study and understand the day-to-day activities involved in the creation of social…
Addressing Recognition Gaps
This Presidential Address offers elements for a systematic and cumulative study of destigmatization, or the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth. Contemporary sociologists tend to focus on inequality in the distribution of resources, such as occupations, education, and wealth. Complementing this research, this address draws attention to "recognition gaps," defined as disparities in worth and cultural membership between gr…
What is missing? Cultural processes and causal pathways to inequality
This paper provides a framework for understanding the ways in which social processes produce social inequality. Specifically, we focus on a particular type of social process that has received limited attention in the literature and in which inter-subjective meaning-making is central: cultural processes. Much of the literature on inequality has focused on the actions of dominant actors and institutions in gaining access to material and non-materia…
Boundary processes
Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms
In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shap…
Trump's electoral speeches and his appeal to the American white working class
This paper contributes to the study of social change by considering boundary work as a dimension of cultural change. Drawing on the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of 73 formal speeches made by Donald Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign, we argue that his political rhetoric, which led to his presidential victory, addressed the white working class's concern with their declining position in the national pecking order. He addressed this …
Ordinary people doing extraordinary things
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 ordinar…
How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher
How can a 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 Derrida's work in the two countries and develops hypotheses about the process of legitimation of interpretive theories. The legitimation of Derrida's work resulted from a fit between it and highly structured cultural and i…
Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity…
From 'having' to 'being
With growing inequality, the American dream is becoming less effective as a collective myth. With its focus on material success, competition and self-reliance, the intensified diffusion of neoliberal scripts of the self is leading the upper-middle class toward a mental health crisis while the working class and low-income groups do not have the resources needed to live the dream. African Americans, Latinos and undocumented immigrants, who are pres…
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, pee…
Destigmatization and health
African Americans respond to stigmatization
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 relativ…
Particular universalisms
This article examines how ordinary victims of racism rebut racist beliefs communicated to them by the mass media and encountered in daily life. We describe the rhetorical devices that North African immigrant men in France use to respond to French racism, drawing on thirty in-depth interviews conducted with randomly selected blue-collar immigrants residing in the Paris suburbs. We argue that while French anti-racist rhetorics, both elite and popul…
Everyday Antiracism
This exploratory study makes a contribution to the literature on antiracism by unpacking the cultural categories through whicheveryday antiracismis experienced and practiced by extraordinarily successful African Americans. Using a phenomenological approach, we focus on processes of classification to analyze the criteria that members of the African American elite mobilize to compare racial groups and establish their equality. We first summarize re…
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 improve…
Membership without Social Citizenship? Deservingness & Redistribution as Grounds for Equality
Western societies have experienced a broadening of inclusive membership, whether we consider legal, interpersonal, or cultural membership. Concurrently, we have witnessed increased tensions around social citizenship, notably harsher judgments or boundaries over who “deserves” public assistance. Some have argued these phenomena are linked, with expanded, more diverse membership corroding solidarity and redistribution. We maintain that such a concl…
Cultural and moral boundaries in the United States
Meaning-Making in Cultural Sociology
MICHELE LAMONT Princeton University Arts Management, Law, and Society 28 (4): 297-313. Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press. Mukerji, Chandra. 1997. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Cary, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg. 1992. Studies: An Introduction. Pp. 1-22 in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg,…
How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States
The essay discusses the impact of Bourdieu on modern U.S. sociology. Specifically, I offer five observations about the reception and adoption of Bourdieu by U.S. sociologists from the perspective of someone who was involved in the process I describe as an active but not fully invested participant
The Practice of Everyday Life. Michel de Certeau , Steven F. Rendall
How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher
How can a 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 Derrida's work in the two countries and develops hypotheses about the process of legitimation of interpretive theories. The legitimation of Derrida's work resulted from a fit between it and highly structured cultural and i…
Cultural Capital and the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals
From Paris to Stanford
Lamont Michèle. From Paris to Stanford. In: Politix, vol. 1, n°3-4, Été-automne 1988. Science politique. pp. 22-29
Cultural Capital
The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their wo…
Power in the Organisation
Présentation
Slipping the World Back In
Understanding Toscanini
Betwixt and Between
French Modern
Money, Morals, and Manners
Boudon on Truth; or, Some Cognitive Explanations for Theoretical Seduction
Cultivating Differences
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 cle…
Money, Morals, and Manners
Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michele Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class--the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves--and their class--fr…
Money, Morals, and Manners
Money, Morals and Manners
National Identity and National Boundary Patterns in France and the United States
American scholars working on France have long been interested in exploring France's national identity and cultural specificity. Stanley Hoffman's classic In Search of France is one of the most important benchmarks in this literature.' More recently, social scientists have renewed their interest in these issues, exploring collective definitions of the French nation and its internal diversity,2 French national identity as expressed through national…
Claims to Fame
Das Wesen der Tugend. Symbolische Grenzen in der französischen und amerikanischen oberen Mittelklasse
An Essay on Culture
Watergate in American Memory
Cultural and moral boundaries in the United States
Cultivating Differences
Self-Determination and Self-Administration
A seminal collection of the papers and commentary presented at the First and Second International Conferences on Self-Determination, attended by representatives of more than 80 nations. Extensive appendixes contribute to the value of this comprehensive sourcebook.
Sociology (83 works) · Political science (58 works) · Law (45 works) · Psychology (38 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (35 works) · Epistemology (34 works) · Gender Studies (29 works) · Social science (29 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Politics (27 works)