Co-Edited Volumes

Cousin, Bruno and Michèle Lamont. 2020. La morale des sociologues. Paris : Presses universitaires de France.

Morality and emotions, and the ways in which they constitute reasons for action and shape our worldviews, have been extensively studied by sociology. Far from abandoning their analysis to psychology and the neurosciences, the comprehensive approach at the heart of much sociological research has endeavored to describe and explain morality and feelings by approaching them in an empirical and non-normative way. This perspective has experienced a particularly fruitful theoretical and epistemological renewal in recent years. The suffering of love, the place of victims in society or the role of emotions and symbolic boundaries in recruitment procedures are some subjects covered in this book, which presents a rich panorama of contemporary comprehensive sociology.

Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont, eds. 2013. Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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.

Lamont, Michèle, and Nissim Mizrachi, eds. 2012. Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective. New York, NY: Routledge.

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.

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.

Camic, Charles, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont, eds. 2011. Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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-scientific and related forms of knowledge about the social world.

The essays collected here tackle a range of previously unexplored questions about the practices involved in the production, assessment, and use of diverse forms of social knowledge. A stellar cast of multidisciplinary scholars addresses topics such as the changing practices of historical research, anthropological data collection, library usage, peer review, and institutional review boards. Turning to the world beyond the academy, other essays focus on global banks, survey research organizations, and national security and economic policy makers. Social Knowledge in the Making is a landmark volume for a new field of inquiry, and the bold new research agenda it proposes will be welcomed in the social science, the humanities, and a broad range of nonacademic settings.

Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont, eds. 2009. Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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.

Lamont, Michèle and Laurent Thévenot. 2000. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States. London: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Presses de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.

This book provides a powerful new theoretical framework for understanding cross-national cultural differences. Researchers from France and America present eight comparative case studies to demonstrate how the people of these two different cultures mobilize national "repertoires of evaluation" to make judgments about politics, economics, morals and aesthetics. This approach goes beyond essentialist models of national character to compare varying attitudes on topics ranging from racism and sexual harrassment to identity politics, publishing, journalism, the arts and the environment. The book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists alike.

Lamont, Michèle and Marcel Fournier. 1992. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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.

Journal Special Issues

Lamont, Michèle, and Paul Pierson, ed. 2019. “Inequality as a Multidimensional Process”. Special Issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Science 148 (3).

Lamont, Michèle, and Amy Tsang, ed. 2018. “Cultural Sociology and China”. Special Issue of The Journal of Chinese Sociology 4(15), 4(17), 4(18), 4(19), 5(7), and 5(15).

Dodd, Nigel, Michèle Lamont, and Mike Savage. 2017. “The Trump/Brexit Moment: Causes and Consequences”. The British Journal of Sociology 68 (S1):S3-S10.

Lamont, Michèle, and Mabel Berezin. 2016. “Mutuality, Mobilization, and Messaging for Health Promotion: Toward Collective Cultural Change”. Special Issue Section, Social Science and Medicine 165:1-296.

David J. Harding, Lamont, Michèle, and Mario Luis Small. 2010. “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty”. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (1):6-27.