Consecration as a population-level phenomenon

We tend to think of consecration as something happening to individuals: We say that someone has been consecrated when they have been declared a saint, inducted into a hall of fame, or presented with a lifetime achievement award. The present article explores the analytical payoffs of looking at consecration as a population-level phenomenon, that is, as the delineation of clear-cut divides between the chosen and the rest in a population of candidates. This approach, I argue, brings out the unique character of consecration as an abstract process of status formation: It enhances the perceived worth of the consecrated, not by confirming that they are individually worthy, but by asserting the existence in a field of a reliable hierarchy of worthiness. A population-level approach also implies that consecrating institutions derive some of their authority from the forcefulness of the divides they draw between elected individuals and others. The article shows how this explains some of the salient features of retrospective consecration projects. To make these points I analyze cases of consecration in a variety of empirical domains, from politics to the arts, sports, and religion

How the reification of merit breeds inequality: theory and experimental evidence

In a variety of social contexts, measuring merit or performance is a crucial step toward enforcing meritocratic ideals. At the same time, workable measures – such as ratings – are bound to obfuscate the intricacy inherent to any empirical occurrence of merit, thus reifying it into an artificially crisp and clear-cut thing. This article explores how the reification of merit breeds inequality in the rewards received by the winners and losers of the meritocratic race. It reports the findings of a large experiment (n = 2,844) asking participants to divide a year- end bonus among a set of employees based on the reading of their annual performance reviews. In the experiment’s non-reified condition, reviews are narrative evaluations. In the reified condition, the same narrative evaluations are accompanied by a crisp rating of the employees’ performance. We show that participants reward employees more unequally when performance is reified, even though employees’ levels of performance do not vary across conditions: most notably, the bonus gap between top- and bottom-performing employees increases by 20% between our non-reified and reified conditions, and it rises by another 10% when performance is presented as a quantified score. Further analyses suggest that reification fuels inequality both by reinforcing the authoritativeness of evaluation and by making observers more accepting of the idea that individuals can be meaningfully sorted into a merit hierarchy. This has direct implications for understanding the rise of legitimate inequality in societies characterized by the proliferation of reifying forms of evaluation

Marché et hiérarchie

En analysant un marché culturel, cet article explore la dimension sociale des décisions de production en situation d’incertitude économique. Il introduit, pour décrire ces décisions, un modèle simple inspiré de la littérature sociologique sur les marchés. Ce modèle conçoit cet aspect particulier de l’activité économique comme intrinsèquement social, faisant intervenir à la fois des interactions stratégiques entre producteurs et des considérations statutaires de leur part. Empiriquement, l’article se concentre sur les choix de distribution des galeries d’art moderne à Paris dans les années 1920. Des matériaux historiques qualitatifs permettent dans un premier temps de fixer les paramètres du marché ; ils donnent aussi un aperçu des mécanismes microsociologiques qui sous-tendent le modèle des choix de distribution. Des méthodes d’analyse de réseaux sont ensuite utilisées pour révéler la structure des interactions de production entre galeries : elles fournissent une description de la structure sociale du marché comme un réseau ordonné de rôles, ou positions, émergeant de ces interactions. La confrontation de cette description avec des données socio-économiques indépendantes, portant notamment sur le statut marchand des différentes galeries, permet enfin une validation du modèle initial : quand on s’intéresse à la structure des interdépendances entre les choix de production de ses acteurs, il semble pertinent de concevoir ce marché particulier comme une hiérarchie de statut.This article introduces a sociological model for understanding production decisions in a context of economic uncertainty. Drawing on the structural literature on markets, the model regards this particular aspect of economic activity as inherently social, involving both strategic interactions and market status considerations between producers. The paper specifically focuses on the production choices of Parisian modern art galleries in the late 1920s. Historical material first illuminates broad market features and provides preliminary qualitative insight into the micro-level model of production decisions. Social network methods then help unveil the pattern of interactions between galleries suggested by the model, and allow for a description of the market’s social structure as a network of roles emerging from these local interactions. Confronting this description with independent socio-economic data ultimately provides a validation of the proposed model. Therefore, as far as production choices are concerned, it seems relevant to conceive of this particular market as a status hierarchy

Figures of Purity: Consecration, Exclusion, and Segregated Inclusion in Cultural Settings

Like many sociologists, I am perplexed by the fact that in meritocratic societies, individuals whose abilities or talent does not differ widely nevertheless enjoy considerably different levels of achievement and success. The present dissertation seeks to uncover some of the reasons behind such non-meritocratic inequality. There are two main approaches one can take to that problem. The first and more classical one consists in observing inequality that matters – inequality in earnings or career prospects for example – and to show that such inequality can be traced back to broad categorical attributes such as class, gender, or race and ethnicity. This is not the approach I follow here. Rather, I strategically select cases that make it possible to uncover the fine-grained processes and mechanisms generative of non-meritocratic inequality. Among these “pure” cases are art worlds – winner-take-all settings typically marked by high inequality, and where success is often vastly disconnected from merit or intrinsic quality. The first part of this dissertation focuses on one such art world as a laboratory for studying the social processes underlying the formation of economic value, and therefore the formation of inequality in economic success. CONSECRATION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS OF VALUATION My approach to success and inequality rests on the intuition that we can partially explain them by studying social processes of valuation, i.e. processes that shape the value of things or individuals without affecting their underlying differences in ability, merit, performance, or talent. In the first two chapters this dissertation, I outline and test a theory of one such process, namely consecration. The first chapter develops a structural definition of consecration that makes possible to study its occurrence, conditions, and consequences in a variety of social settings. The chief features of that definition are identified using a series of empirical instances of consecration. The chapter then shows how that definition can be operationalized with simple network concepts, and suggests a network-based strategy for capturing consecration empirically – in art worlds for example. The chapter finally draws testable implications from that definition, and explores its relationship with the notion of retrospective consecration. The second chapter uses that notion of consecration to solve an empirical puzzle in the sociology of valuation. Markets for unique and novel goods are often seen as privileged settings for the powerful influence of market intermediaries: when quality is uncertain, or when it lacks definition altogether, intermediaries can play a crucial role in signaling or specifying it, thereby ultimately shaping the prices consumers are willing to pay for products. Products, meanwhile, do not get much more unique or novel than in the market for contemporary art. Yet economic sociologists have repeatedly failed to observe any influence of art market intermediaries on the value of the artists they distribute. This puzzling finding, I argue, arises from a misconception of how intermediaries shape the value of artists. We usually think of intermediation as acting through two chief processes of valuation: credentialing, or the signaling of unobservable quality, and qualification, or the establishment of specific quality criteria. Yet I suggest that it also can influence value through consecration, or the structural signaling of the existence of quality differences in a population. Using the market for modern art in early twentieth-century Paris as an empirical backdrop, this chapter shows that intermediation as consecration, not credentialing or qualification, was indeed how art market intermediaries shaped the value of their artists in the heyday of French modern painting. SOCIAL PROCESSES OF VALUATION AND ELITE CONSOLIDATION IN GILDED AGE AMERICA The remaining chapter is a logical development of the previous two. It builds on the fine-grained insights they offer – on social processes of valuation, and on the mechanisms of non-meritocratic inequality more generally – to address larger-scale issues of social inequality and social reproduction. The chapter uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to understand how cultural participation cemented the status – or social value – of elites in Gilded Age America. The database has information on who subscribed to the Philharmonic between 1880 and 1910 – a period of huge upheaval, of threats to the dominance of traditional elites, and ultimately of elite consolidation in the United States, and in the city of New York in particular. In analyzing these data I seek to understand how culture worked as an elite resource in that era. The classic account of culture and elite consolidation posits that the formation of an upper class and its continued dominance rest on a mechanism of exclusion. In this view, cultural participation reinforces elites by setting them apart – a process akin to consecration as I delineate it in earlier chapters. My work on the Philharmonic challenges that classic view. For the distinctiveness associated with elite cultural endeavors to reinforce elite dominance, I argue, these endeavors have to happen against a backdrop of general agreement over their value. In Gilded Age New York, this agreement happened not through exclusion, but through the inclusion of a group of cultural experts into the cultural institutions championed by the social elite. The inclusion of that cultured group served to testify to the quality of the cultural endeavors of the social elite, and provided them with a stamp of cultural legitimacy. In other words, it valued the elite through a process of credentialing. The second analytical contribution of that final chapter has to do with class consolidation and the reproduction of upper class dominance more generally. While consolidation is often seen as happening through exclusion and closure, I argue that in a context of rapid social differentiation, marked by the emergence of new areas of expertise, maintaining dominance does not necessarily involve barring access to outside groups. It can also mean being flexible enough to include the experts in emerging spheres. To remain atop the social hierarchy, elites may benefit from incorporating external elements that testify to their own continued relevance. Such inclusion is not necessarily full integration – instead, I show that at the Philharmonic it involved a built-in mechanism of protection, namely segregation. Hence cultural experts were included to help reify and support upper class status and social power, but in a segregated fashion to protect the upper class from threats of destabilization. Finally, a word on title: the notion of purity is the recurring motif in this work. It conveys ideas of social exclusion and social closure, as deployed in the third chapter. When thought about in relational terms, purity may also refer to one’s absence of ties to others whom one does not wish to be associated with in the public eye. This relational take on purity has strong affinities with the idea of consecration developed in chapters one and two. As a heuristic tool for the sociological imagination, purity is the thread that connects all the dots in this dissertation

How cultural capital emerged in Gilded Age America: musical purification and cross-class inclusion at the New York Philharmonic

This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture?s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency

Deliberating inequality: a blueprint for studying the social formation of beliefs about economic inequality

In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design—a blueprint—to study how people’s understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019

The Architecture of Meritocratic Evaluation and Its Impact on Inequality: Two Experiments

This study examines whether the architecture of meritocratic evaluation shapes the inequality third parties create when rewarding unequally performing actors for their performance, as signaled by evaluation. It is part of a larger research agenda exploring how the architecture of status hierarchies shapes inequality between the incumbents of high versus low positions in these hierarchies (for an overview, see Accominotti et al. 2022). By the “architecture of meritocratic evaluation,” we mean the features of the merit or performance hierarchies produced by meritocratic evaluation: these hierarchies can be more vertical vs. more horizontal (e.g., Espy and Lynn, 2023; Sauder 2006), more rigid vs. more fluid (e.g., Accominotti, forthcoming; Ridgeway 2019), or clearer vs. fuzzier (e.g., Accominotti 2021a, 2021b; Accominotti and Tadmon 2020). In particular, a more vertical hierarchy is one that involves a greater depth of differentiation between merit-based status positions, as in a hierarchy involving distinct tiers (or a greater number of distinct tiers), for example. Similarly, a more rigid merit hierarchy is one in which the status positions of various actors do not change vastly over time. The study comprises two distinct experiments. The first tests whether the greater rigidity of merit hierarchies makes third parties reward high- and low-merit actors more unequally. The second tests whether the greater verticality of merit hierarchies makes third parties reward high- and low-merit actors more unequally. Whether the greater clarity of merit hierarchies makes third parties reward high- and low-merit actors more unequally was tested in an earlier experiment that is not part of the present study

"Le monde est un monde d'événements" : entretien avec Andrew Abbott

CoFSS : Collectif d'auteurs associé à l'atelier d'épistémologie "Comment fait-on des sciences sociales ?" dont Mathieu Hauchecorne (LabToP), Florence Hulak (LabToP) et Olivier Roueff (CSU), avec Fabien Accominotti, Isabelle Drouet, Alexandre Hobeika, Morgan Jouvenet et Étienne Ollion.Dans cet entretien, Andrew Abbott revient sur sa trajectoire intellectuelle et personnelle. Parcourant plus de quatre décennies de recherche et d'enseignement, il aborde plusieurs thèmes qui ont été centraux dans son travail. Il évoque en particulier sa critique du positivisme, formulée dans les années 1980 et qui lui a permis d'interroger les méthodes des sciences sociales, les formes de savoir qu'elles autorisent, et l'inconscient épistémologique de la sociologie étatsunienne. L'entretien est surtout l'occasion pour lui d'évoquer en détail sa théorie processuelle du monde social en cours d'élaboration. Abbott en explicite les fondements et la positionne par rapport à différents auteurs contemporains ou passés