Fabien Accominotti

Fabien Accominotti is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work, which sits at the intersection of stratification research and cultural sociology, explores the making and unmaking of status hierarchies and how they sustain inequality in society. Empirically, he focuses on unsettled fields, uncertain markets, and complex organizations, which he uses to study how we come to view different people as unequally valuable, and how this affects their outcomes. 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. In recent research he examines how postindustrial forms of work expand workers’ occupational identities in ways that both entrench and undermine old occupational status hierarchies. Another ongoing project uses experimental designs to show how, in a variety of social settings, the quantification of merit through ratings and scores 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. 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.