e's behavior vis-a-vis institutions of society and culture.
Why this is important becomes evident when Lamont explains that her universe of study subjects--white upper-middle-class men of a certain acknowledged social status whose work or position entitles them to pass judgments on others' access to social advancement, including access to the "insider" social group. Her view is that their most basic attitudes about themselves and others can be translated into their actions affecting others' social and cultural experience. As she explains:
[B]y documenting differences in symbolic boundaries across groups, I am documenting differences in the structure of potential exclusion across groups. In other words, I understand the criteria at work in an interviewee's description of his friends, his feelings of inferiority and superiority, etc., as reflective of the general mental maps and boundaries . . . and as subjective boundaries that only potentially can lead to the drawing of objective boundaries, i.e., to actual exclusion from groups, institutions, and so forth (1991, p. 12).
In describing the critical foundations informing her work, Lamont acknowledges a debt to the social theory of Durkheim, whose work deals with social inclusion and exclusion. Among Durkheim's fundamental points of analysis is the idea that "social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labor" (Durkheim, 1933, p. 110). This can be likened to Lamont's conception of insiders and outsiders, with the insiders the subjects of her study and the outsiders those whom the insiders characterize or as it were erect and maintain boundaries against. Fundamental to the character of a highly organized society is what Durkheim refers to as the division of labor, which is the linchpin of a theory of society that he uses to describe the laws governing human interaction. Divisions, or segments of society are discrete, but together at...