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Cultural and Moral Boundaries in the United States: Structural Position, Geographic Location, and Lifestyle Explanations
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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. Furthermore, geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters play an important role in supplying cultural repertoires that affect the drawing of boundaries. While both cultural and moral boundaries are predicted by structural position and geographic location, cultural boundaries are predicted by participation in high culture lifestyle clusters and moral boundaries are predicted by participation in religious lifestyle clusters. Geographic location and participation in lifestyle clusters have a stronger effect on the boundaries of non-college graduates than on those of college graduates, suggesting that local cultural repertoires have a less important impact on the boundaries of individuals who share a homogenizing educational experience.
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... 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.
Contrary to the previous definitions and the widely used of the Internet and electronic devices, we are now faced with the electronic lifestyle. This study aims to identify the e-lifestyle types among Iranian citizens which were done in two steps. In the first step, the influential components of the Iranian e-lifestyle were identified by reviewing related literature and surveying 25 experts using the fuzzy Delphi method. Fuzzy Delphi cycles were carried out in two rounds which resulted in the identification of 13 components. In the second step, a questionnaire was designed using the experts' opinions and previously reported literature and distributed among the 970 samples selected using multi-stage cluster-spatial sampling. Factor analysis was used to determine the number of clusters that resulted in five clusters. Clustering was used to identify e-lifestyles and the characteristics of these five lifestyles were identified. These clusters were named for their behavior as Interactive, Negativisms, Pioneers, Requisiteness Oriented, and Self-indulgent.
This chapter focuses on the prospects for the sociology of altruism in the context of the relations between the notions of altruism and morality. For this purpose, I briefly discuss three problems that, I believe, are important for the sociological comprehension of altruism—namely, those of moral worth, moral boundaries, and impartiality. Ascribing moral worth to the acts of altruism is a plausible mechanism for a normative maintenance of unconditional helping, suggesting that human morality contains certain important layers beyond those explained by the evolutionary-utilitarian factors. The idea of moral boundaries denotes the social processes that restrict altruism to the people of particular backgrounds, groups, and identities. The impartiality of altruism, on the contrary, refers to the normative perspective that recognizes the interests of everyone affected by the action, and it arguably also plays an important part in making meaning of one’s life. I suggest that elaborating on these issues would considerably advance the sociological studies of altruism.
This article explores the distinct social reproductive practices of the Black upper-middle class. In particular, this study focuses on the role of community organizations in socializing the collective habitus of a community at the intersection of Blackness and class privilege. I draw on interview data from members of one Black upper-middle class organization, Jack and Jill of America Inc., to identify how families and institutions collaborate to socialize children into a particular raced-classed habitus, passing on ideologies, discursive habits, and behavioral strategies aimed at producing citizens who are both culturally empathetic and socioeconomically mobile. I find that mothers rely on the blurred boundaries between family and social organizations to legitimate and reinforce the lessons taught at home. In particular, mothers explicitly socialize identity and affinity within a racial community while simultaneously socializing implicit, but powerful, behavioral habits related to social class.
Building on ethnographic research in Johannesburg, this article introduces the concept of figurations to segregation research to analyze the multi-layered relationships between unequal and diverse neighborhoods. In this way, the equation of residential with social segregation, which is often found in global segregation literature, can be overcome. The figurative lens enables us to grasp the dynamics of relational intra- and inter group processes in and across residentially segregated neighborhoods. I show this by means of three different figurations: 1) a victim-perpetrator figuration around the threat of criminality, 2) a Black-White figuration around the threat of losing Afrikaner identity, and 3) a locals-externals figuration around the threat of environmental pollution and health. The result is a more complex understanding of neighborhood relations. Instead of reifying a static picture of segregated areas and the assumption of omni-relevant categorizations, the figurational perspective facilitates the recognition of social change on the neighborhood level.
