The Dignity of Working Men – Morality & the Boundaries of Race, Class & Immigration: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration (Russell Sage Foundation S.) - Hardcover

Lamont, Michele

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674003063 ISBN 13: 9780674003064

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Michele Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men - the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society. Morality is at the centre 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.

About this title

Review

Was there actually a set of values that could be considered distinctly "working class" in character, that represented a distinctly working-class worldview? One of the most sophisticated recent attempts to answer this question appeared in the recent study "The Dignity of Working Men..".YLamont recognized that asking workers to choose their most important values from a prepared list would essentially force their replies into a predetermined mold that had little to do with their real-world thoughts and feelings. Lamont used instead open-ended and non-directive questions. She interviewed 150 blue-collar workers, black and white, in the United States and in France, and compared them with middle-class people in both countries. Her questions asked workers to describe people who were similar to them and people who were different, people they liked and disliked, and those to whom they felt superior or inferior. Follow-up questions probed why they felt as they did, spontaneously eliciting a complex pattern of moral judgements and values. Both work and family did indeed emerge among the blue-collar workers' core values. But the real significance lay in how those were perceived. -- Andrew Levinson "The Nation"

About the Author

Michele Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674003063
• ISBN 13: 9780674003064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 406