Research Interests

Recent and Forthcoming Papers

Selected Abstracts

Curriculum Vitae

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How Professors Think

Teaching

Michèle Lamont

Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and
Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies

Senior Adviser on Faculty Development and Diversity,
Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Biographical Note

MICHÈLE LAMONT is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is co-director of its research program on Successful Societies.

Lamont’s scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on how culture contributes to ethno-racial and class inequality and on the evaluation of excellence in higher education. Recent areas of interest include racism and anti-racism (how discriminated people -including immigrants- respond to exclusion and understand the relationship between themselves and others), the sociology of the social sciences, and the impact of self-identity on health. A former Guggenheim fellow, her research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Lilly Endowment, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has also received several grants from the National Science Foundation.

Born in Toronto in 1957, Lamont received a B.A. (1978) and a Masters (1979) in political theory at Ottawa University, before pursuing her doctoral research in sociology at the Université de Paris, where she graduated in 1983. She held a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University (1983-1985) and took her first position at the University of Texas at Austin (1985-1987). Appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University in 1987, she was promoted to tenure in 1993 and to the rank of full professor in 2000. She moved to Harvard University in 2003 and was appointed Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies in 2006. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband, Frank R. Dobbin, and her three children, Gabrielle (11), Pierre (8) and Chloé (8).

New!

How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment
The book draws on interviews with scholars who serve on funding panels to analyze cultures of excellence across disciplines. How do we decide what is good? How do we come to think of our judgments as fair? How do we understand the place of self-interests and interpersonal connections in our evaluation? How do we blend diversity and excellence? How do economists, philosophers, anthropologists English professors, historians, and political scientists compare? What is the role of emotions and interaction in the evaluation process? This book opens up the black box of peer review to offer a unique peek into what happens behind the door of secretive deliberative chambers.... To order a copy of the book, click here.

The Evaluation of Systematic Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences (National Science Foundation, November 2008, with Patricia White). As an expert on evaluation in the social sciences, Lamont was asked by the National Science Foundation report to convene a panel of anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists and law and society scholars to discuss how to evaluate qualitative social science research. This report describes the standards that are shared across disciplines. It also includes papers written by more than twenty contributors on various dimensions of the evaluation process and on how to produce excellent proposals.

Forthcoming

Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Matter for Health (Cambridge University Press, August 2009, with Peter A. Hall) Why are some types of societies more successful than others at promoting individual and collective well-being? Focusing on population health as an indicator of social success, this book opens up new perspectives on the ways in which social relations condition health and the public policies that address it. Based on four years of dialogue among scholars from diverse disciplines, it offers social epidemiologists broader views of the social determinants of health and social scientists a sense of the fascinating puzzles of population health. The chapters consider health inequalities in the developing, as well as developed, world. They locate their roots, not only in economic resources, but in the social resources provided by the institutions and cultural repertoires constitutive of social relations. They examine the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the sources of the health gradient, the role of collective imaginaries, destigmatization strategies, and the historical basis for effective health policies. This project was featured at the 2008 National Summit on Poverty and Communication (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia). For a summary, see "What makes a society succeed?" and "Successful Societies".

Research:

Lamont has published over sixty articles and book chapters on topics such as the comparative study of racial and class boundaries in France and the United States; working class and upper-middle class culture; the transformation of collective identity, including among North African-immigrants living in France; rhetorics of racism and anti-racism and scripts of cultural membership; destigmatization strategies and their impact on health; the role of culture in poverty; the institutionalization of academic excellence; national cultural repertoires; models of evaluation and justification; and the institutional and cultural conditions that lead to successful societies. Her work is published in a wide range of journals including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociological Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, Research Evaluation, French Politics, Culture and Society, Poetics, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Science, Technology and Human Values. She is the author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000); and Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The Dignity of Working Men received the 2000 C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Mattei Dogan Award for the Best Comparativist Book in 2001 from the Society for Comparative Research. It was also selected as a 2000 Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics of the Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University. The Dignity of Working Men was published in French in 2002; Money Morals and Manners was published in French in 1994 and chosen by Le Monde as one of the best books of the year.

Lamont has led the production of two collective volumes that present the results of four-year international collaborative projects. In addition to Successful Societies, which brought together prominent scholars from a range of disciplines (see above), she has produced Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States(with Laurent Thévenot, Cambridge University Press, 2000). This project brought together sociologists at Princeton University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) working on logics of worth. Lamont has also edited agenda-setting books such as the Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (with Marcel Fournier; University of Chicago Press, 1992) and The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Lamont is currently chairing an international panel charged with evaluating the peer review process at the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She served as a member of the National Research Council Committee on Assessing Behavioral and Social Science Research on Aging. Until recently, she served as Chair of the Council for European Studies, the learned society of American social scientists and historians working on Europe.

Lamont has also written on the impact of culture of poverty. She recently co-authored for the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity a background paper on Cultural Diversity and Poverty Eradication (with Mario Small; 2007). With the support of the Ford Foundation, together with David Harding, Lamont and Small are organizing a conference to examine the role of culture in the reproduction of poverty, to be held in Chicago in December 2008. A special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences is in preparation.

Other ongoing projects:

Over the next three to five years, Lamont’s research focuses on three areas 1) explaining variations in responses to racism and their impact on health; 2) the production and evaluation of knowledge; and 3) processes of evaluation.

1) Responses to racism; This line of work involves three different projects that are embedded in one another:

A) African-American Responses to Racism and Discrimination (funded by the National Science Foundation, with the assistance of Crystal Fleming and Jessica Welburn). Having completed 160 in-depth interviews with African-Americans living in and around New York, the study analyzes the discursive and behavioral strategies that members of stigmatized groups use to cope with racism and discrimination. It compares the accounts of these strategies produced by middle and working class men and women ages 25-60 and considers how the range and salience of strategies are affected by perceived discrimination. The project also considers the association between strategies and mental health outcomes, with the goal of contributing to the literature on mental health and racial disparity, which has traditionally been more concerned with risk than with resilience, and with intra-individual processes as opposed to meaning-making. The intellectual significance of the project is to lay the bases for a grounded theory of everyday anti-racism that draws on insights from other literatures.

B) A Comparative Study of Responses to Discrimination by Members of Stigmatized Groups (funded by the Weatherhead Initiative in International Affairs, in collaboration with Crystal Fleming, Hanna Herzog, Nissim Mizrahi, Elisa Reis, Graziella Silva, and Jessica Welburn). This international multidisciplinary project analyzes the discursive and behavioral strategies that members of stigmatized groups use to cope with racism and discrimination. We compare the accounts of these strategies produced by middle and working class men and women ages 18 to 70. We focus on members of minority groups living in mixed cities: /negros/ in Rio de Janiero, African-Americans in New York (see above), and Ethiopian immigrants, Mizrahis , and Muslim Palestinian citizens in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. We study how the range and salience of strategies are affected by perceived discrimination across these national contexts. The project also considers the association between strategies and mental health outcomes, with the goal of contributing to the literature on mental health and racial disparity, which has traditionally been more concerned with risk than with resilience, and with intra-individual processes as opposed to meaning-making. As of March 2009, the interviews are completed and we are now coding the data. We will present preliminary findings at a conference to be held at Harvard in October 2009. We are preparing a volume that will offer a systematic comparison of the US, Brazil and Israeli cases. Another volume will present our results as well as those of several related projects (led by faculty members or graduate students) on collective myths in Quebec, the maintenance of Jewish collective identity among Canadian youth, the social psychology of discrimination, and responses to racism by immigrants in Sweden, blacks in France, members of First Nation tribes in Canada, Muslims in the Us and the UK after 9/11, and members of the black middle class in Brazil and South Africa. This project involves Harvard faculty from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and from other schools at Harvard, as well as faculty associated with the Successful Societies Project.

C) Successful Societies -- Phase 2. (funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, in collaboration with Peter A. Hall, project co-director). This five-year project expands our inquiry in the conditions that foster societal success and well -being by focusing on a) the impact of welfare regime on health inequality; b) institutional transfers; and c) collective identity and recognition. Researchers consider how resilience is fostered by institutions and cultural repertoires, such as collective myths and shared conceptions of cultural citizenship. This program is directly connected to the Weatherhead Initiative project, but include a broader range of American and international collaborators.

2) The Production and Evaluation of Knowledge:

A) Social Sciences in the Making (funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, in collaboration with Charles Camic and Neil Gross). Over the past quarter century, the interdisciplinary field of science studies has grown enormously as scholars have examined the physical and biological sciences through a variety of social and historical lenses. By contrast, the social study of the intellectual fields that comprise the social sciences and the humanities remains underdeveloped. Although a large number of scholars are interested in the social dimensions of knowledge production in the social sciences and are engaged in both theory building and empirical research in the area, their ideas and findings have yet to be interlinked and brought into dialogue with one another. As a result, there is little coherent understanding of the processes of knowledge production, organization, and distribution in these fields. Two conferences we held at the Radcliffe Institute and the Russell Sage Foundation. A collective volume that analyzes aspects of knowledge production and evaluation practices across a range of disciplines is in preparation and should come out in 2009.

B) Successful Interdisciplinarity (funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, in collaboration with Veronica Boix-Mansilla and Kyoko Sato). This project analyzes the development of shared cognitive platforms in the research networks of the Santa Fe Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and CIFAR. To advance and support productive interdisciplinary integration we must understand the phenomenon of integrative cognitive platforms in its emotional, epistemic, cognitive, social and institutional dimensions alike. One must ponder: in projects where knowledge integration is deemed crucial, what cognitive coordination strategies and shared intellectual platforms enable successful interdisciplinary groups to integrate disciplinary perspectives? How do these groups establish and negotiate trust, authority, and belonging vis-à- vis their shared topical focus? What instruments do funding agencies have to facilitate institutional restructuring toward knowledge integration? What can the recipient organizations do to facilitate effective synthesis? A close investigation of how effective interdisciplinary groups at different points of development construct and sustain integrative platforms can inform the development of an actionable framework designed to support interdisciplinary initiatives in the future.

3) Processes of Evaluation

A) “Towards a Sociology of Valuation: Convergence, Divergence, and Synthesis,” with Ezra Zuckerman. In preparation for Annual Review of Sociology, 2010. This paper discusses the literatures on evaluation in a range of fields (including cultural sociology and economic sociology) and identifies fundamental processes at work across domains.

B) Real Estate Agents as Cultural Brokers (funded by the Real Estate Initiative, Harvard University, in collaboration with Lauren Rivera.) More than mere brokers of material goods, realtors are cultural brokers whose work is intimately intertwined with the production and signaling of value. Their livelihood is dependent upon successfully reading the tastes and economic worth of clients, finding properties that match these characteristics, and convincing clients that the properties they find are worth investment. Realtors are charged not only with convincing buyers that they have found the “right” property, but they are the “right” person to make the sale. Successful realtors must also be able to signal to clients that they are competent, trustworthy professionals who possess the skills, local knowledge, and cultural expertise necessary to identify the most appropriate properties for their clients. Thus, they are “experts” in detecting and communicating cultural signals. Yet, existing studies of realtors have neglected their role as cultural intermediaries to focus primarily on the demographic characteristics of agents, particularly the overwhelmingly white, educated, and female nature of the profession. We aim to fill this significant gap by analyzing realtors as cultural brokers and as an occupational group with a distinct cultural identity. The project draws on in-depth interviews conducted with realtors in New York City and Boston.

Teaching and Service:

In recent years Lamont has taught undergraduate courses on "Culture, Power, and Inequality," "Racism and Anti-Racism in Comparative Perspective," and "Knowledge Production and Evaluation." At the graduate level, she taught "Qualitative Data Analysis," "Classical Sociological Theory," and "Culture and Inequality." Lamont has been active as a mentor of post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students, advising research on a wide range of topics (link). Her collaborators and advisees have been hired by top departments such at Cornell University (Maureen Waller), Harvard University (Natasha Warikoo), London School of Economics (Jonathan White)New York University (Ann Morning), Northwestern University (Gregoire Mallard), The New School (Virag Molnar), UCLA (Abigail Saguy), University of Arizona (Josh Guetzkow), the University of California at Berkeley (Marion Fourcade), and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Margarita Mooney). For the last five years, she has co-organized the Culture and Social Analysis Workshop, where faculty, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students and visitors come together to share their work in progress. She is also the co- organizer of the Study Group on Exclusion and Inclusion in an Expanded Europe of the Center for European Studies, which has been holding monthly meetings since 2005.

Lamont is regularly invited as visiting professor to various European universities. Most recently, she served as “professeure invitée” at the Fondation nationale de science politique (juin 2006 and 2008) and at the Université de Paris VIII (juin 2007).

Lamont has been elected to a number of positions in professional associations. After serving as chair of the Culture Section and the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association, she was elected Member-at-Large of the Council of this organization where she served from 2005 to 2008. She served on several committee of this organization, most recently as Chair of the Committee on Awards in 2007-2008. She has also served on committees of the Eastern Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association. She has been serving as Chair of the Council for European Studies since 2006. Since moving to Harvard, Lamont has served on a number of committees of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, such as the Social Science Advisory Council and the Educational Policy Committee. Her current commitments include the University Taskforce on Common Space, the Steering Committee and the Executive Committee of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Executive Committee of the Center for European Studies, the Committee for the Status of Women, the Board of Advisers of the DuBois Institute, and the Interdisciplinary Standing Committee on Global Health. She also serves as Director of the European Network on Inequality of the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

Since 1996, Lamont has been the co-editor of the Princeton Series in Cultural Sociology, Princeton University Press (with Paul DiMaggio, Robert Wuthnow, and Viviana Zelizer) (put link here). She also serves on the editorial board of a number of journals in the United States and Europe.

Selected publications
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Culture, Inequality, and Boundaries
Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992) The interviews used for this book are available online here.

Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (1992)

"How Culture Matters for the Understanding of Poverty: Enriching our Understanding." Chapter in The Color of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Exist, edited by David Harris and Ann Lin. Russell Sage Foundation. (with Mario Small; 2008)

"Unesco Background Paper on Cultural Diversity and Poverty Eradication" (with Mario Small; 2007)

"Boundary Processes: Recent Theoretical Developments and New Contributions" (with Mark Pachucki and Sabrina Pendergrass; 2007)

"The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences" (with Virag Molnar; 2002)


Racism, Race, and Immigration

The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000) The interviews used for this book are available online here.

The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries (2000).

"Race-bridging for Christ? Conservative Christians and Black-White Relations in Community Life." (with Paul Lichterman and Prudence Carter; forthcoming)

"Sur les frontières de la reconnaissance. Les catégories internes et externes de l'identité collective" (with Christopher Bail; 2005)

"Everyday Anti-Racism: Competence and Religion in the Cultural Repertoire of the African American Elite" (with Crystal Fleming; 2005)

"North African Immigrants Respond to French Racism: Demonstrating Equivalence Through Universalism" (with Ann Morning and Margarita Mooney; 2002)

"Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries among Working Class Men" (with Sada Aksartova; 2002)

"How Blacks Use Consumption to Shape their Collective Identity: Evidence from African-American Marketing Specialists" (with Virág Molnár; 2001)

"Immigration and the Salience of Racial Boundaries among French Workers." (2001)

Definitions of Excellence in Higher Education

How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (forthcoming, 2009; Harvard University Press)

“Beyond Blind Faith: Overcoming the Obstacles to Interdisciplinary Evaluation” (with Grégoire Mallard and Joshua Guetzkow; forthcoming)

“Fairness as Appropriateness: Negotiating Epistemological Differences in Peer Review” (with Grégoire Mallard and and Joshua Guetzkow; 2008)

"What is Originality in the Humanities and the Social Sciences?" (with Josh Guetzkow and Gregoire Mallard; 2004)

"From Character to Intellect: Changing Conceptions of Merit in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, 1951-1971" (with Angela Tsay, Andrew Abbott, and Joshua Guetzkow; 2003)

"The Best of the Brightest: Definitions of the Ideal Self among Prize-Winning Students" (with Jason Kaufman and Michael Moody; 2000)

"How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida" (1987).

Health and Identity

Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Matter for Health (Cambridge University Press, August 2009, with Peter A. Hall)

Comparative Sociology and Qualitative Methods

Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (with Laurent Thevenot; 2000)

Contemporary Sociological Theory

"Betwixt and Between: Recent Cultural Sociology in Europe and the United States" (with Robert Wuthnow; 1990) in Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Synthesis , edited by George Ritzer.

"The Power-Culture Link in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Social Research, 1989

"Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments" (with Annette Lareau; 1988)

06/29/2009

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