Publications by Author: Lamont%2C%20Mich%C3%A8le

2016
Lamont, Michèle, Matthew Clair, and Caitlin Daniel. 2016. “Destigmatization andHealth: Cultural Constructions and the Long-term Reduction of Stigma.” Social Science & Medicine 1 (10).
Lamont, Michèle, Mabel Berezin, Alonzo Plough, and Matthew Trujillo. 2016. “Mutuality, Mobilization, and Messaging for Health Promotion: Toward Collective Cultural Change.” Social Science and Medicine, no. Special Issue.
Lamont, Michèle, Jonathan J. B Mijs, and Elyas Bakhtiari. 2016. “Neoliberalism and SymbolicBoundaries in Europe: Global Diffusion, Local Context, Regional Variation.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 2: 1-8.
Lamont, Michèle, Monica Bell, Nathan Fosse, and Eva Rosen. 2016. “Beyond the Culture of Poverty: Meaning-Making among Low-Income Populations around Family, Neighborhood, and Work.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel
Lamont, Michèle, Graziella Moraes Silva, Joshua Guetzkow, Jessica Welburn, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis. 2016. Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Lamont, Michèle, Veronica Boix Mansilla, and Kyoko Sato. 2016. “Shared Cognitive-Emotional-Interactional Platforms: Markers and Conditions for Successful Interdisciplinary Collaborations.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41 (4): 571-612. Publisher's Version
2015
Lamont, Michèle, Stefan Beljean, and Phillipa Chong. 2015. “A Post-Bourdieusian Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation for the Field of Cultural Production.” Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture. London: Routledge. Publisher's Version Abstract

The Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Arts and Culture offers a comprehensive overview of sociology of art and culture, focusing especially – though not exclusively – on the visual arts, literature, music, and digital culture. Extending, and critiquing, Bourdieu’s influential analysis of cultural capital, the distinguished international contributors explore the extent to which cultural omnivorousness has eclipsed highbrow culture, the role of age, gender and class on cultural practices, the character of aesthetic preferences, the contemporary significance of screen culture, and the restructuring of popular culture. The Handbook critiques modes of sociological determinism in which cultural engagement is seen as the simple product of the educated middle classes. The contributions explore the critique of Eurocentrism and the global and cosmopolitan dimensions of cultural life. The book focuses particularly on bringing cutting edge ‘relational’ research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to bear on these debates. This handbook not only describes the field, but also proposes an agenda for its development which will command major international interest.

Lamont, Michèle, Sabrina Pendergrass, and Mark C. Pachucki. 2015. “Symbolic Boundaries.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., 23: 850-855. Oxford: Elsevier. Publisher's Version Abstract

Fully revised and updated, the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, first published in 2001, offers a source of social and behavioral sciences reference material that is broader and deeper than any other. Available in both print and online editions, it comprises over 3,900 articles, commissioned by 71 Section Editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes.

2014
Lamont, Michèle. 2014. “How Do University, Higher Education and Research Contribute to Societal Well-Being?” Higher Education in Societies: A Multi Scale Perspective. Boston: Sense Publishers. Publisher's Version Abstract

It has been a real pleasure for me to come to the CHER 2013 conference held in Lausanne. I first would like to thank Christine Musselin, as the CHER president, and Gaële Goastellec, as the conference organiser, for their invitation to think more systematically about the question of the potential impact of University, Higher Education and Research on the well-being of societies. This theme is particularly important to me as over the last years, my research has converged around the issue of societal well-being on the one hand, and on peer review on the other. I am thrilled that the CHER invitation has given me the opportunity to make connections between two of my main research lines, which have been pursued largely independently of one another until today.

Lamont, Michèle, and Nicolas Duvoux. 2014. “How Neo-Liberalism has Transformed France’s Symbolic Boundaries?” French Politics, Culture & Society 32 (2): 57-75. Publisher's Version Abstract

This paper considers changes in the symbolic boundaries of French society under the influence of neoliberalism. As compared to the early nineties, stronger boundaries toward the poor and Blacks are now being drawn while North-African immigrants and their offsprings continue to be largely perceived as outside the community of those who deserve recognition and protection. Moreover, while the social reproduction of upper-middle class privileges has largely remained unchanged, there is a blurring of the symbolic boundaries separating the middle and working class as the latter has undergone strong individualization. Also, the youth is now bearing the brunt of France’s non-adaptation to changes in the economy and is increasingly marginalized. The result is a dramatic change in the overall contours of the French symbolic community, with a narrowed definition of cultural membership, and this, against a background of growing inequality, unemployment, and intolerance in a more open and deregulated labor market.

Lamont, Michèle, Charles Camic, and Neil Gross. 2014. “Looking Back at Social Knowledge in the Making.” Sociologica 2. Abstract

We are grateful to Matteo Bortolini for initiating a symposium around Social Knowledge in the Making (SKM). As a collective project, this book was with us for several years and was a welcomed opportunity for stimulating dialogue between the three co-editors. It is with pleasure that we now respond to Matteo’s invitation to reflect on the fate of the adventure two years after the book’s publication. We address how it has been received, whether the reception has met our expectations, and respond to the specific reactions of Kelly Moore, Johannes Angermuller, and Kristoffer Kropp published in this symposium. We appreciate that these talented sociologists of the social sciences and the humanities took on the challenge of engaging our work.

This essay engages with Wimmer’s Ethnic Boundary Making to consider how cultural processes feed into inequality. It describes the strengths of the book, relates it to my early work, and draws on Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (forthcoming), to describe two types of identification processes (racialization and stigmatization) and two types of rationalization processes (standardization and evaluation) that contribute to an understanding of the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries. It stresses similarities and differences between approaches and suggests possible points for convergence.

Lamont, Michèle, and Joseph Guay. 2014. “Is Neoliberalism a Threat to Civil Rights?” Boston Globe. Publisher's Version
Lamont, Michèle, and Ann Swidler. 2014. “Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing.” Qualitative Sociology 37 (2): 153-171. Publisher's Version Abstract

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques.

mlamont_interviewing.pdf
Lamont, Michèle, Stefan Beljean, and Matthew Clair. 2014. “What is Missing? Cultural Processes and Causal Pathways to Inequality.” Socio-Economic Review 12 (3): 573-608. Publisher's Version Abstract

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-material resources, or on how ecological effects cause unequal access to material resources. In contrast, we focus on processes that contribute to the production (and reproduction) of inequality through the routine and taken-for-granted actions of both dominant and subordinate actors. We highlight two types of cultural processes: identification and rationalization. We describe and illustrate four processes that we consider to be significant analytical exemplars of these two types of cultural processes: racialization and stigmatization (for identification) and standardization and evaluation (for rationalization). We argue that attention to such cultural processes is critical and complementary to current explanations of social inequality.

2013
Hall, Peter A, and Michèle Lamont. 2013. “Why Social Relations Matter for Politics and Successful Societies.” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (23): 1-23. Publisher's Version Abstract
Political science can gain from incorporating richer conceptions of social relations into its analyses. In place of atomistic entities endowed with assets but few social relationships, social actors should be seen as relational entities embedded in social and cultural structures that connect them to others in multifaceted ways. Understanding those relationships requires a deeper understanding of how institutional and cultural frameworks interact to condition the terrain for social action. More intensive dialogue with sociology can inform such an understanding. We review the analytical tools cultural sociology now offers those interested in such a perspective and illustrate it in operation in studies of inequalities in population health and the effects of neoliberalism. We close by outlining several issues to which this perspective can usefully be applied, including the problems of understanding social resilience, how societies build collective capacities, and why some institutions remain robust while others deteriorate.
Download Paper
Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era
Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont. 2013. Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. New York: Cambridge University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

What is the impact of three decades of neoliberal narratives and policies on communities and individual lives? What are the sources of social resilience? This book offers a sweeping assessment of the effects of neoliberalism, the dominant feature of our times. It analyzes the ideology in unusually wide-ranging terms as a movement that not only opened markets but also introduced new logics into social life, integrating macro-level analyses of the ways in which neoliberal narratives made their way into international policy regimes with micro-level analyses of the ways in which individuals responded to the challenges of the neoliberal era. The book introduces the concept of social resilience and explores how communities, social groups, and nations sustain their well-being in the face of such challenges. The product of ten years of collaboration among a distinguished group of scholars, it integrates institutional and cultural analysis in new ways to understand neoliberalism as a syncretic social process and to explore the sources of social resilience across communities in the developed and developing worlds.

2012
Lamont, Michèle, and Nissim Mizrachi. 2012. Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective. New York: Routledge. Publisher's Version Abstract

Multiculturalism and diversity have raised a number of challenges for liberal democracy, not least the stigmatization of people in response to these developments. In this book, leading experts from a range of disciplines look at the responses to stigmatization from the perspectives of ordinary people. They use a range of case studies drawn from the US, Brazil, Canada, France, Israel, South Africa, and Sweden: the first systematic qualitative and cross-national exploration of how diverse minority groups respond to stigmatization in the course of their everyday lives.

The chapters in this book tackle a range of theoretical questions about stigmatization, including how they make sense of their experiences, how they shape subsequent behaviour, and how they negotiate and transform social and symbolic boundaries within a range of social and institutional contexts.

Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective provides new data and analysis of how stigmatization affects a range of societies, and its original research and analysis will be important reading for those studying Ethnicity, as well as Sociologists, Political Scientists, and Anthropologists. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Lamont, Michèle. 2012. “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation.” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (21): 201-221. DOI Abstract
This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.
Download Paper

Pages