Fabien Accominotti

About

Fabien Accominotti is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work, which lies at the intersection of cultural sociology, economic sociology, and stratification research, explores the formation of status hierarchies and how they fuel 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 Gilded Age America, 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. Prior to joining UW-Madison he taught at the London School of Economics, where he remains a faculty affiliate at the International Inequalities Institute.

CDE research theme area affiliation

Demography of Inequality

Selected Publications

Hénaut, Léonie, Jennifer Lena, and Fabien Accominotti. 2023. “Polyoccupationalism: Expertise Stretch and Status Stretch in the Postindustrial Era.” Forthcoming, American Sociological Review.

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.

• Morton Deutsch Best Article Award, International Society for Justice Research, 2023.

Accominotti, Fabien. 2021. “The Aesthetics of Hierarchy: How Algorithmic Classifications Legitimize Inequality.” British Journal of Sociology 72(2): 196-202.

Accominotti, Fabien. 2021. “Consecration as a Population-Level Phenomenon.” American Behavioral Scientist 65(1): 9-24.

Accominotti, Fabien, Shamus Khan, and Adam Storer. 2018. “How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic.” American Journal of Sociology 123(6): 1743-1783.

• Charles Tilly Best Article Award, ASA Comparative-Historical Sociology Section, 2020.
• Honorable Mention, Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, ASA Consumers and Consumption Section, 2019.