| Title | : | The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0674009924 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780674009929 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 408 |
| Publication | : | First published December 4, 2000 |
Morality is at the center of these workers' worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the "disciplined self" and blacks on the "caring self." Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined.
This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as "part of us" and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different "moral offenders" in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of "cultural membership" that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.
The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration Reviews
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Lamont’s classic ethnography on working men remains essential reading. Her interviews stretch back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nevertheless, the substance they uncover in how blue collar workers in America and France give meaning to their worlds remains crucial for understanding the current political anxieties gripping workers across the developed world. There is much to unpack and the book is certainly worth a read even if you just focus on the chapters where she studies American workers. True, her language and writing are academic; but jargon is minimal and doesn’t detract from the overall clarity of her findings. In so many respects, this book is a classic in the genre of gender, class, and economic relations.
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Lamont published this comparison of the values of white and non-white (African-American in the case of the US, North African in the case of France) working class men 20 years ago. One interesting element of reading it is comparing our different ways of thinking about race, class, and values since then. What hasn't changed is the extent to which the issues academic researchers focus on (then: multiculturalism; now: intersectionality) are absent from the issues their subjects care about. An interesting reminder of the ways in which humans seem to need to define themselves in part in opposition to people who aren't like them, even if they have to invent characteristics to ascribe to people who aren't like them.
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Lamont’s work offers a rather convincing argument on how morality and the moralization of one’s self and the ‘Other’ play a central role in bridging people’s subjective values and their social world. The strength of Dignity is its accessible, direct, and clear writing. Lamont uses a lot of direct citations that help the reader to connect the theoretical concepts that she attempts to manifest in her case.
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really readable study of ny/nj-area and metro-paris workers. i'm not sure that lamont addresses all the distinctions between immigrants and racial minorities, but still the interviews and analysis are intriguing.
read for my race in the americas course. -
Great book describing the ways we justify how we feel about others-- couching our objections in terms of morality.
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This is a great book in sociology, digging on those borderlines between class and race... Impressive sociological work!
