Understanding inequality through the lens of cultural processes: on Lamont, Beljean and Clair 'What is Missing? Cultural Processes and Causal Pathways to Inequality'

Abstract

The first chapter of my book Categorically Unequal, which Lamont, Beljean, and Clair specifically cite in their article, was entitled “How Stratification Works” and in it I sought to sketch out a simple theoretical framework to explain how inequality was produced, one that bridged the micro- and macro-levels of analysis. At the micro-level I drew heavily on the work of Susan Fiske (2003) and her stereotype content model (Fiske et al. 2002) whereas at the macro-level I drew heavily on the work of Charles Tilly (1998) and his theory of durable inequality. At the time I was writing in 2006, I was acutely aware that my synthesis elided a sizeable conceptual gap by failing to elucidate how categorical processes of stratification at the micro-level translated into categorical processes of inequality at the macro-level.