Table 4 - uploaded by Michele Lamont
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Using the culture module of the 1993 General Social Survey, this study proposes a multicausal model to assess the determinants of moral and cultural boundaries in the American population. We find that structural position - education, income, class, and gender - affects the likelihood that individuals draw one type of boundary rather than another. F...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... in high culture lifestyle clusters can mediate individual exposure and appreciation for culture and separate participants from the large and heterogeneous group of non-college graduates. Table 4 presents the coefficients from the model in which we investigate the effects of geographic location and involvement in lifestyle clusters on the drawing of moral boundaries for the college graduates and non-college graduates. ...
Context 2
... hypothesis 3e predicted that religious lifestyle cluster variables would more often be significant as predictors of moral boundaries among non-college graduates than among college graduates. In our results, several measures of participation in the religious lifestyle cluster are significant predictors of moral boundaries for college Table 4 Unstandardized coefficients for regressions of structural position, geographic, and lifestyle enclave variables on moral boundary items among college degree holders and non-college degree holders: 1993 General Social Survey graduates: religious attendance and Evangelical affiliation are strongly significant on three and two moral boundaries items respectively. Therefore, participation in the religious lifestyle cluster appears to play an important role in supplying moral bound- aries independently of college education. ...
Similar publications
Does Social Trust Increase Ethnic Tolerance? An Analysis of Cultural Reservations
Previous research has emphasized that social trust makes modern societies more cohesive. Social trust is commonly defined as a faith in the unknown other. A number of previous studies have shown that trusters are also tolerant toward ethnic minority members. This arti...
Does who we know impact how strongly we believe? The claim seems reasonable, but research linking social network composition to political beliefs has produced conflicting results. We argue that methodological differences in measuring close ties can explain these inconsistencies and that work on the sacred umbrella provides a useful framework for mo...
Schwartz's theory of human values, as operationalized using different instruments such as the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), was confirmed by multiple studies using Smallest Space Analysis (SSA). Because of its success, a short version of the PVQ was introduced in the European Social Survey (ESS). However, initial tests using Confirmatory Fac...
In this article, we investigate the factors that influence the work-life conflict of working couples. Specifically, we look at differences and commonalities of the relationship between working conditions and work-life conflict between men and women before and after the financial crisis of 2008. We apply multilevel analysis to 18 European countries,...
Citations
... These boundaries are divided into three types: cultural (based on education, manners, and cultural practices), socio-economic (based on wealth and professional success), and moral (based on honesty, solidarity, and consideration for others). Moral boundaries are particularly significant for our research as they encompass political (Sivonen and Heikkilä, 2024) and religious (Lamont et al., 1996) values, thus allowing us to interrogate the roles of morality and culture in the appreciation of conservative art. While the boundary approach is primarily used to understand how people categorise others, these evaluative frameworks are also applied to include and exclude cultural objects. ...
This study explores how conservative/Islamic art audiences in Turkey describe and classify good taste in art and how their cultural repertoires inform their notions of 'us' and 'them'. Despite the significant popular attention conservative art and its associated taste communities have received with the rise of political Islam, little is known about how such art is understood by its audience or its position within existing taste hierarchies. Drawing on cultural classification literature, our analysis of 36 interviews with conservative/Islamic art audiences in Turkey addresses this gap through an inductive, qualitative approach. The findings reveal three modes of appreciation-eclectic, moralist, and cosmopolitan-each associated with different levels of identification with conservative taste communities, challenging assumptions about the existence of a homogeneous conservative art audience. This study also provides a nuanced view of how political and moral values influence aesthetic judgements and create unique strategies for boundary-making and boundary-crossing, contributing to discussions on localised forms of cultural eclecticism and exclusion.
... "Political polarization" has been the dominant paradigm in studies of political division in the United States for the past half-century. It is the frame through which articles, books, labs, institutes, federal grants, and conferences (and much more) have expressed their mission of studying and communicating findings related to the increasing political turmoil and animosity between parties and people in contemporary U.S. society. 1 This work has established key insights into the nature of political division in the United States, including how partisans continue to be more suspicious and antagonistic toward their cross-partisans (i.e., affective polarization; Iyengar et al. 2019;Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012;Iyengar and Westwood 2015), how parties are reflecting more divergent beliefs and policy positions over time (i.e., issue or ideological polarization; Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;Pew Research Center 2014), and how partisans are increasingly choosing to live in different parts of the country (i.e., geographic polarization; Lamont et al. 1996;Martin and Webster 2020;Nall 2015). ...
Research on U.S. political media has demonstrated that mainstream and right-wing news are qualitatively distinct in a variety of ways. However, the dominant paradigm of political polarization and its attendant assumptions have restricted researchers from putting these descriptive insights into new and potentially generative theoretical context. In this article, we propose a way forward, arguing for the merits of conceptualizing right-wing news as a quasi-religious phenomenon. Putting empirical findings in dialogue with core theoretical insights from the sociology of religion, we argue that the right-wing news ecosystem has epistemic, functional, and ecological features that are more characteristic of religion than its mainstream media counterpart. We illustrate the usefulness of these distinctions by applying them to the case of Fox News and their reporting of the 2020 presidential election. Finally, we discuss how our conceptual framework advances current and future research on mis/disinformation, international politics, and the structural causes and consequences of right-wing news media’s ascendance.
... Situations of threat can therefore easily function as occasions of moral othering, a process in which the moral category of evil is used to construct individuals or groups as fundamentally different and of less value than persons perceived as similar to oneself. Moral others are constructed through moral boundary-making (Dieterich 2023;Lamont et al. 1996). Depending on the context, different types of persons and groups can be the focus of moral othering, such as drug dealers, rapists, war criminals, Trump supporters, religious fundamentalists, refugees, cosmopolitan elites or members of stigmatized minorities. ...
The debate about the relationship between migration-related diversity and threat is shaped by an opposition between, on one hand, positions that understand migration as a threat to established forms of social cohesion, and, on the other, positions that emphasize its emancipative, creative or economic potential. This opposition rests on a simplistic and static understanding of threat and diversity. Drawing on literature on moral economy,this article develops an alternative understanding of the nexus between threat and migration-related diversity. It turns the initial question around, shifting the focus from whether migration or diversity is threatening, to how threats affect interpretations of migration-related diversity. Working from a case study of the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015, I assert that we can understand threat as a dynamic with a specific operational logic that inscribes its moral signatures upon the social space. The operational logic of threat sets processes in motion, which alter configurations and representations of diversity. This article demonstrates how in 2016, in the aftermath of the events of NewYear’s Eve, the operational logic of threat helps to explain why public opinion turned against refugees and led to the rise of right-wing populism in Germany.
... I don't think there's a specific problem with sex work. [Ron] Lamont et al. (1996) argued that a person draws moral boundaries when they feel superior to people with low moral standards, or who are considered dishonest and selfish. For Ron, portraying the world in "black or white" is not only dishonest, but also a sanctimonious moral shield. ...
This study examined the internal moral debate that takes place among Israeli men who pay for sex (MWPS) while traveling abroad. We explored how they construct their sense of moral worth and present themselves as moral subjects in light of the intensified stigmatization of their actions. Using the theoretical frameworks of pragmatic morality and boundary work, we conceptualize four main moral justification regimes that MWPS use to construct themselves as moral subjects: Cultural normalization; Conditional freedom of choice; The altruistic act of charity; and Unpacking the Stigma Discourse. The findings highlight how these justification regimes are anchored in three intersecting fields-cultural, spatial, and power relations-which produce various matrices of conflict, compromise, or collaboration in different situations. Thus, the flexible switching between various justification regimes reveals how MWPS define themselves and their activities and negotiate various moral dispositions-akin to various cultural logics-in the context of moral taint and stigma.
... In defining cultural contentiousness, it is helpful to describe the components of the concept. First, drawing on the sociology of culture, I define culture as a set of tools people rely on to solve problems and make sense of the situations they navigate in their lives (Lamont et al., 1996;Swidler, 1986). Rather than assume that people are immersed in a milieu that determines their actions, this perspective conceives of culture as a "toolkit" of skills, styles, or habits, i.e., a set of resources, which people use in varying configurations to problem-solve, make sense of, or justify their behavior within a given context (Campeau, 2015). ...
Cultural contentiousness is defined as an attribute of innovation due to which it encounters resistance because of its incompatibility with hegemonic cultural assumptions. I argue that culturally contentious innovations are likely to be adopted when antecedents have productive symbolic force, i.e., they reveal contradictions between dominant cultural assumptions and the material outcomes of existing institutions or enable social actors to resolve such contradictions. On the other hand, antecedents with incapacitative symbolic force tend to obfuscate the above contradictions or decrease social actors' capacity to resolve them, encouraging the adoption of less contentious innovation. Applying these arguments to citizen oversight agencies (COAs) for the police, I examine the antecedents of contentious (investigative) as opposed to less contentious (non-investigative) COAs. In support of the above argument, I find that productive antecedents (e.g., a consent decree, an increase in civil rights nonprofits) are associated with adopting investigative COAs. In contrast, incapacitative antecedents (e.g., a Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights, an increase in the violent crime rate) are associated with adopting non-investigative COAs. The findings broadly demonstrate that policy adoption scholars ought to distinguish policies in terms of cultural contentiousness and account for the symbolic force of antecedents. Further theoretical contributions are discussed.
... 5 As such, attitudes surrounding sex and raunch culture may be different in the midwestern United States than they are on either coast. In line with this notion, research suggests that rural communities espouse more conservative values and endorse greater gender role stereotyping (Lamont et al., 1996). As such, more conservative views about sexual behavior may be associated with diminished endorsement of raunch culture, and one may find larger effects between the associations investigated in this study in other geographic locations. ...
"Raunch culture" is a term describing the promotion of overtly sexual representations of women. This concept may provide people opportunities to engage in positive social comparisons, but also negative social comparisons. As such, this concept could also relate to the phenomenology of depression in women. In an attempt to further investigate the effects of raunch culture, this study examined relationships between raunch culture, depression, and social media use in undergraduate students. Participants (N = 199) from a moderately-sized university in the Midwest completed measures of raunch culture, depression, social comparison, and social media use via an online platform. Primary hypotheses centered around the impact of raunch culture on depressive symptoms, as well as other variables such as social comparison and social media behaviors and their involvement regarding the relationship between endorsement of raunch culture and depression. Findings suggest that students with greater depressive symptoms were more likely to be accepting of behaviors associated with raunch culture, and that this effect may be more prominent in women. Results also indicate that raunch culture may be associated with an unfolding pathway, wherein endorsement of these features is associated with more intense consumption of social media, which in turn can lead to higher rates of social comparison and ultimately affect depressive symptoms. Future research may benefit from examining raunch culture and social media involvement in the context of other important psychosocial variables.
... Boundary work is the process through which individuals draw conceptual distinctions between "us" and "them" and make judgments about what actions, behaviors, and lifestyles are appropriate or not (Lamont and Molnar 2002). Symbolic boundaries establish a hierarchy of worth among people and practices (Jarness and Flemmen 2019;Lamont et al. 1996;Lamont and Fournier 1993). ...
Scholars posit that lower-income undergraduates experience “cultural mismatch,” which undermines their sense of belonging, promotes withdrawal from campus, and limits mobility upon graduation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 103 undergraduates at an elite university, we examine how students’ diverse trajectories to college affect how they identify as members of the community and modulate the relationship between social class and sense of belonging. While upper-income undergraduates find commonalities between themselves and college peers and integrate into the community, lower-income students offer divergent accounts. The doubly disadvantaged—lower-income undergraduates who attended local, typically distressed public high schools—felt a heightened sense of difference, drew moral boundaries, and withdrew from campus life. Alternatively, the privileged poor—lower-income undergraduates who attended boarding, day, and preparatory high schools—adopted a cosmopolitan approach focused on continued expansion of horizons and integrated into campus. Through detailing this overlooked diversity among lower-income undergraduates, our findings expand theoretical frameworks for examining sense of belonging to include boundary work that shapes students’ agendas, thereby deepening our understanding of the reproduction of inequality in college.
... Moral change might likewise be an artifact of selection, with people who enroll in higher education already differing in their moral commitments from those who do not. For example, individuals from families with high socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to pursue higher education (Blau and Duncan 1967;Campbell and Horowitz 2016;Conley 2001;Schnittker and Behrman 2012) and to express principles consistent with a liberal moral profile than are individuals from families with fewer social and economic resources (Lamont et al. 1996;Longest, Hitlin, and Vaisey 2013;Miles 2014;Sayer 2010;Vaisey and Miles 2014). 1 Individuals might also self-select into pursuing greater higher education based on their moral attitudes (Mitchell et al. 2008;Vaisey 2010). This is especially true following enrollment, where personal values influence decisions about the extent and direction of continuing studies (Mullen, Goyette, and Soares 2003;Stolzenberg 1994). ...
Moral differences contribute to social and political conflicts. Against this backdrop, colleges and universities have been criticized for promoting liberal moral attitudes. However, direct evidence for these claims is sparse, and suggestive evidence from studies of political attitudes is inconclusive. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we examine the effects of higher education on attitudes related to three dimensions of morality that have been identified as central to conflict: moral relativism, concern for others, and concern for social order. Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism. These effects are strongest for individuals majoring in the humanities, arts, or social sciences, and for students pursuing graduate studies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for work on political conflict and moral socialization.
... Scholars have found that gender is an important factor in highbrow cultural consumption. To some degree, men are less likely than women to participate in highbrow cultural activities (Bihagen and Katz-Gerro 2000;Bryson, 1996;Christin, 2012;DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985;Katz-Gerro, 1999;Katz-Gerro and Shavit, 1998;Lamont and Fournier, 1992;Lamont et al., 1996;Roose and Stichele, 2010;Van Eijck, 1997). For example, Schmutz et al. (2016) suggested that gender differences in arts consumption have early roots among adolescents, and that girls attend more than boys do. ...
In this paper, the zero-inflated negative binomial model is adopted to identify the determinants of the likelihood and frequency of live performing arts attendance in mainland China. The data are collected from a face-to-face national sampling questionnaire survey (N = 12,262) conducted in mainland China from January to March 2017. Age, occupation, income, education level, art courses, individual preference, and performance information attainment are found to be significant determinants of the likelihood and frequency of attendance. Gender, amateur cultural activities, and participation media determine the frequency but not the likelihood of attendance, while conversely, interest influences the likelihood but not the frequency. The effect of marital status is not significant. The above results mainly indicate that leisure time, cultural capital, interest, and information are vital factors influencing live performing arts attendance in mainland China. In addition, the effect of income and occupation imply that live performing arts attendance is not an elitist behavior in mainland China. Specifically, audience members are not wealthier or from a higher social class. This is special and may be attributed to the effective and observable efforts of the Chinese government to promote the equality of cultural rights.
... Hitlin and Vaisey argue that individuals and social groups struggle with each other to determine "which kinds of actors and which kinds of persons are more or less worthy and what kinds of practices are permitted or forbidden" (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013:59). Similarly, Lamont's theory of boundary work maintains that although moral boundaries are an important aspect of all cultures, the prominence, features, and success in constructing and enforcing such boundaries can vary greatly by geographic, structural, and social location (Lamont et al. 1996). Moreover, norms that shape concepts of "good" versus "bad" come to define imagined communities who are like them and who are not. ...
Two competing activist narratives dominate public conversation around the morality of abortion, yet little empirical research examines how women talk about the morality of their own abortion experiences. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 156 accounts from an abortion storytelling website, I find that traditional pro-choice moral arguments invoking privacy and bodily autonomy were apparent but not dominant in women’s accounts. Three other frames emerged as ways to confront the problem of abortion as a morally controversial action: “abortion as morally unremarkable,” “abortion as morally problematic, but justified,” and “abortion as morally desirable.” These frameworks varied in the degrees to which they aligned with politically acceptable abortion narratives. Throughout these frameworks were a number of overlapping themes, including motherhood, responsibility, and religion. Drawing on theories of morality work and moral accounts, I posit that subjects are able to hold a “tension of opposites” while still maintaining cohesive narratives and presenting positive moral identities. For example, many women assigned their fetus a moral status as a life or potential life, yet ultimately felt other factors outweighed the obligation to sustain that life. I argue that this tension is a significant feature of morality work that warrants more attention.
