Person:

Lamont, Michele

Meaning-making is an essential feature of social life: as humans make their way through their daily lives, they inevitably interpret themselves, their actions, those of others, and the environment that surround them. Thus, understanding social life requires attending to the cultural dimension of reality. Yet, when it comes to the study of low-income populations, factoring in culture has often been a contentious project. This is because explaining poverty through culture has been equated with blaming the poor for their predicaments. Lamont and Small (2008) and Harding, Lamont and Small (2010) have tried to move the debate forward by making a case for integrating culture in explanations of poverty. They have suggested that this requires going beyond the “culture of poverty” debate to incorporate concepts that cultural sociologists have developed and used over the last thirty years to understand the role of meaning making in basic social processes: concepts such as frames, narratives, institutions, repertoires, and boundaries.1 These concepts are analytical devices typically used to capture intersubjective definitions of reality, as opposed to normative positions. They have been useful for identifying a diversity of frameworks through which low-income populations understand their reality and develop paths for mobility. The present paper builds on these contributions by exploring the place of culture in studies of American low-income populations in three important areas of social life: family, neighborhood, and work. The three core sections of this paper describe scholarship that has incorporated culture concepts from cultural sociology, as well as other approaches to culture, to illuminate crucial aspects of social processes related to poverty considered as an explanans or an explanandum. Each section concludes with a few proposals for future research.

In two recent contributions to the study of peer review we went beyond stating the obvious that peer review produces valid judgments. We draw on in-depth analyses of five fellowship competitions in the United States, and of four grant panels organized by the Academy of Finland. We analyze and compare the intersubjective understandings academic experts create and maintain in making collective judgments on research quality. More specifically, we analyze the social conditions that lead panelists to an understanding of their choices as fair and legitimate, and to a belief that they are able to identify the best and less good proposals.

This paper examines how panelists serving on interdisciplinary funding panels produce evaluations they perceive as fair, drawing on 81 interviews with panelists serving on multidisciplinary fellowship competitions. We identify how peer reviewers define “good” interdisciplinary proposals and the rules they follow: respect for disciplinary sovereignty, deference to expertise and methodological pluralism. These rules ensure the preponderance of the voices of experts over non-experts. Panelists also adopt strategies to make other reviewers who lack expertise trust that their judgments are disinterested and unbiased, while reviewers who lack expertise are not afraid to make decisions based on idiosyncratic tastes rather than substantive quality.

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, but neglected how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision making. The normative literature suggests that evaluators should overcome their epistemological differences by "translating" their preferred standards into general criteria of evaluation. However, little is known about how procedural fairness actually operates. Drawing on eighty-one interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, we show that (1) Evaluators generally draw on four epistemological styles to make arguments in favor of and against proposals. These are the constructivist, comprehensive, positivist, and utilitarian styles; and (2) Peer reviewers define a fair decision-making process as one in which panelists engage in "cognitive contextualization," that is, use epistemological styles most appropriate to the field or discipline of the proposal under review.