Fabien Accominotti

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Curriculum Vitae

Biography

Fabien Accominotti is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work studies how status hierarchies are made and how they sustain inequality in society. He has written on the emergence of cultural hierarchy as a dimension of social class in the United States, the construction of value beliefs in the art world, and processes of consecration that entrench faith in hierarchies of worthiness. Accominotti’s recent projects bring his interests in status and hierarchy to bear directly on contemporary issues of stratification and inequality. In one line of work, he examines the conditions of possibility of elites as upper-status groups in societies premised on ideals of status equality. In other research, he studies how postindustrial forms of work expand workers’ occupational identities in ways that both entrench and undermine old occupational status hierarchies. His latest project looks at meritocracy as a status system and explores how, in a variety of social settings, the reification of merit hierarchies fuels inequality in the rewards received by the winners and losers of meritocratic contests.

CDE Research Area Affiliation:

Demography of Inequality

Selected Publications:

Accominotti, Fabien, and Michael Sauder. 2026. “The Making of Meritocratic Status Orders.” Forthcoming, Annual Review of Sociology. 52: 301-318.

Accominotti, Fabien. 2026. “Elites as Status Groups in Democratic Societies.” The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Global Elites, edited by María Luisa Méndez, Mike Savage, and Annette Lareau: 670-684.

Accominotti, Fabien. 2024. “Status Inequality and Status Hierarchies.” L’Année sociologique 74(2): 297-319.

Hénaut, Léonie, Jennifer C. Lena, and Fabien Accominotti. “Polyoccupationalism: Expertise Stretch and Status Stretch in the Postindustrial Era.” American Sociological Review 88, no. 5 (2023): 872-900.

Accominotti, Fabien, Freda Lynn, and Michael Sauder. 2022. “The Architecture of Status Hierarchies: Variations in Structure and Why They Matter for Inequality.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(6): 87-102.

Summers, Kate, Fabien Accominotti, Tania Burchardt, Katharina Hecht, Liz Mann, and Jonathan Mijs. 2022. “Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality.” Social Justice Research 35(4): 379-400.