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Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality.
Abstract
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. The essays cover four topic areas: the institutionalization of cultural categories, from morality to popular culture; the exclusionary effects of high culture, from musical tastes to the role of art museums; the role of ethnicity and gender in shaping symbolic boundaries; and the role of democracy in creating inclusion and exclusion. The contributors are Jeffrey Alexander, Nicola Beisel, Randall Collins, Diana Crane, Paul DiMaggio, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Joseph Gusfield, John R. Hall, David Halle, Richard A. Peterson, Albert Simkus, Alan Wolfe, and Vera Zolberg.
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Citations
Cited by
Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore
Peterson, R. A., & Kern, R. M. (1996) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2096460 · Cited by 2,418
Legitimacy as a Social Process
Johnson, C., Dowd, T. J., & Ridgeway, C. L. (2006) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.32.061604.123101 · Cited by 1,027
Why Status Matters for Inequality
Ridgeway, C. L. (2014) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/0003122413515997 · Cited by 965
Atheists as “other”: Moral boundaries and cultural membership in American society
Edgell, P., Gerteis, J., & Hartmann, D. (2006) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/000312240607100203 · Cited by 914
Music as a technology of the self
DeNora, T. (1999) · Poetics · doi:10.1016/s0304-422x(99)00017-0 · Cited by 495
Metadata
- Authors
- Hoffman, L. M., Lamont, M., & Fournier, M.
- Venue
- Contemporary Sociology
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1993-11
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 868
- ISSN
- 0094-3061 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2115738514
- Cited by
- 1,196
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 36.59
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Hoffman, L. M., Lamont, M., & Fournier, M. (1993). Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Contemporary Sociology. https://doi.org/10.2307/2076007
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
