Sociology Theories of Money, Morals & Manners

The thesis of Money, Morals, and Manners is that dominant figures of the upper-middle class define valued cultural styles and experience through identifiable cultural categories, or the "prejudices and stereotypes" that are the "supraindividual by-products of basic social processes . . . shaped by the cultural resources" available to that class (Lamont, 1992, p. 2). The principal assumption governing Money, Morals, and Manners is directly stated, "that cultural differences--the shock of otherness--will make valued cultural traits salient" (p. 2). To put all this another way, Lamont appears to be saying that the subjects of her study use elements of their knowledge, education, and experience uniquely available to them as members of their social group to make judgments about themselves on one hand and members of outgr

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e and cultural capital, he refers to art competence as "the preliminary knowledge of the possible divisions [of art] into complementary classes of a universe of representations: A mastery of this kind of system of classification enables each element of the universe to be placed in a class necessarily determined in relation to another class" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 206). Later, Bourdieu refers to "the unconscious interiorization of the rules" governing art" (p. 207). The concept of differentiation is important to Lamont, as well as the elaboration of rules of social interaction that have been interiorized, on the part of upper-middle-class men. Indeed, Lamont seeks to stress what one could call the option or privilege of determining the differentiation of self and other that tends to reside more in higher-status classes than in lower-status counterparts. On this reasoning, the educational opportunities available to the French professor would have made the "high culture"--and the sense of superiority accompanying his awareness of and access to it--available to him in a way that would not have been possible for (say) the French workman who installed his bookshelves or (say) the comfortable bourgeois businessman with no interest in (say)
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Morals Manners, LamontÆs LamontÆs, David Thoreau's, Lamont Bourdieu's, Indeed Lamont, Lamont French, Pierre Bourdieu, Importantly Lamont, Durkheim Lamont, Michele Lamont, lamont 1992, morals manners, money morals, money morals manners, durkheim 1933, cultural capital, business owner, one's own, individual identity experience, society culture, social categories, converges social institutional, artistic taste, experience overlaps converges, overlaps converges social,
Approximate Word count = 2938
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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