Money, morals, and manners : the culture of the French and American upper-middle class /

Lamont's study is a major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. Moreover, it offers fresh and exciting nuances to theories of social reproduction. Using 160 "semidirected" and randomly selected in-depth interviews with highly successful upper middle class individuals in France and the US, Lamont explores the "symbolic boundaries" elites draw in asserting their social eminence. Her insights into the multiple layers of "boundary work"--moral and cultural, as well as economic--reveal how the upper middle classes across cultures construct identities of class dominance. Her principle finding, that upper middle class Americans emphasized economic attributes while their French counterparts tended to impose cultural boundaries and that both cultures constructed moral boundaries, is placed in a structural and contextual framework. In doing so, Lamont goes beyond mere cross-cultural comparisons by offering a brilliant sociological analysis of these differences. This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. R. Granfield; University of Denver