Michèle Lamont

Michèle Lamont (born in Toronto, Canada in 1957^[1]) is a sociologist and is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Career

Having completed a BA and MA in political theory at Ottawa University in 1979, Michèle Lamont received her PhD in Sociology from the Université de Paris in 1983. A post-doctoral Fellow at Stanford University from 1983–1985, Lamont later served as professor at the University of Texas-Austin (1985–1987), Princeton University (1987–1993), and Harvard University (2002–present).

Since 2002, Lamont has served as co-director of the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.^[2] The interdisciplinary program brings together leading social scientists who meet three times a years to discuss how societies met various types of challenges. The group has produced two books: Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health^[3] (2009) and Social Resilience in the Neo-Liberal Era^[4] (2013). Both books coedited by Peter A. Hall and Michele Lamont were published by Cambridge University Press.

In 2009 and 2010, Lamont served as Senior Advisor on Faculty Development and Diversity in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. In July 2015 Lamont began a five-year mandate to serve as director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA).^[5] This center is among the largest social science centers at Harvard.

Lamont has been a visiting professor at various institutions including the College de France, the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Science Po), Université de Paris 8, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Mainz University, and Tel Aviv University. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Studies at Stanford University, the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a fellow of the Russell Sage Foundation. From 2006-2009 she chaired the Council for European Studies and is the recipient of several scholarly awards and distinctions for her research and services.

Lamont was recently voted 108th President of the American Sociological Association.^[6]

Contributions to sociology

Lamont’s major works compare how people's shared concepts of worth influence and sustain a variety of social hierarchies and inequality. She is concerned with the role of various cultural processes in the creation and reproduction of inequality.

Lamont’s early writing formulated influential criticisms of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a leading sociologist with whom she studied in Paris. Her first book, Money, Morals, Manners,^[7] showed that Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and habitus ignore moral status signals and national repertoires that explain differences in American and French class cultures. This criticism set the stage for a large American literature that was critical of, but built upon, the work of Bourdieu. This movement coincided with the development of cultural sociology in American Sociology. With fellow sociologists Ann Swidler, Michael Schudson, and numerous others, Lamont contributed to setting the agenda for the scholarly study of “meaning-making” In sociology. The research of Lamont and colleagues demonstrated the importance of considering various aspects of culture as explanans and explanandum in the social sciences as something more than a “residual category.”

Lamont’s distinction between “symbolic” and “social” boundaries provides a framework within which to analyze the independent causal role of individual’s worldviews in explaining structural phenomena such as inequality. Symbolic boundaries are “conceptual distinctions made by social actors…that separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership.”^[8] Conversely, “social boundaries are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access to an unequal distribution of resources… and social opportunities.”^[9] In making this distinction, Lamont acknowledges that symbolic boundaries are a “necessary but insufficient” condition for social change. “Only when symbolic boundaries are widely agreed upon can they take on a constraining character… and become social boundaries.”^[10]

Lamont’s work has applied the “boundary-work” framework to the case of American and French race relations. In her award-winning^[11] Dignity of Working Men, Lamont shows how white and African-American conceptions of class are grounded in vastly different conceptions of self-worth. In a new collaborative project that grew out of this research, Lamont is comparing how stigmatized groups respond to ethnoracial exclusion in the United States, Brazil, and Israel.

In her 2009 book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, Lamont analyzes how experts in the social sciences and the humanities debate what defines originality, social and intellectual significance, and more. It also analyzes the place of the self, emotion and interaction in evaluation. This book has influenced current debates on funding, evaluation, and audit culture in the United States and Europe.^[12] Of particular interest is the question of whether social sciences should be evaluate with different criteria than the sciences. With this book, Lamont has launched a broader program in the sociology of evaluation (including her 2012 paper “Toward a Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation^[13]”).

Selected bibliography

• Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (Morality and Society series, ed. by Alan Wolfe). (2nd edition: 1999).'

'*Lamont, Michele (1992). Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-674-00992-4. 

• The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press and New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Paperback 2002. ISBN 0-674-00992-4
• How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009.

References

External links

• Michèle Lamont’s home-page at Harvard University
• The Successful Societies Program (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research).
• Culture of poverty and Social Resilience : An interview with Michele Lamont (Books & Ideas, 20/05/2011)