About

Fabien Accominotti is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work lies at the intersection of cultural sociology, economic sociology, and stratification research, focusing on the making and unmaking of status hierarchies and their role in sustaining inequality in society. Empirically, he concentrates on unsettled fields, uncertain markets, and complex organizations to study how perceptions of individuals' worth are constructed and how these perceptions influence social outcomes. His research explores the emergence of cultural hierarchies as a dimension of social class in the United States, the construction of value beliefs in the art world, and processes of consecration that reinforce hierarchies of worthiness. Recent projects examine how postindustrial work expands occupational identities, affecting traditional status hierarchies, and how the quantification of merit through ratings and scores in social settings fuels inequality. Accominotti has previously taught at the London School of Economics and remains a faculty affiliate at the International Inequalities Institute. His scholarly contributions include numerous publications on status orders, hierarchy aesthetics, and inequality, and he has delivered public lectures and podcasts on related topics.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Geography
• Epistemology
• Demographic economics
• Engineering
• Economic growth
• Pure mathematics
• Mathematics
• Mathematical analysis
• Demography
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• Elites as Status Groups in Democratic Societies

  2026-04-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter makes the case for conceptualizing elites as upper status groups—that is, as groups whom others perceive as having superior value in one respect or another. This conceptualization delineates an original research agenda for the study of elites in democratic societies premised on the reduction of status asymmetries between individuals. In such societies, the chapter argues, elites owe their existence to social processes that affirm or reaffirm, against a backdrop of democratic ideals, the very idea that people come in unequal degrees of value. Studying these processes means advancing a sociology of elites that goes beyond the analysis of elite personnel or of the attributes of elite status to instead chart, social domain after social domain, the emergence of beliefs in the existence of worthiness hierarchies among individuals. To illustrate what such a sociology might look like, the chapter revisits two empirical cases showing how a cultural and an academic elite, respectively, were made possible by the emergence of beliefs in the existence of (1) a hierarchy of cultural tastes in the Gilded Age United States and (2) a hierarchy of intelligence in the wake of the French and American revolutions.

  PublisherDOI

• The Making of Meritocratic Status Orders

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2026-04-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article surveys a growing body of work examining the concrete consequences of implementing meritocracy in social life. To date, this work remains compartmentalized into the separate subfields of cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational science, and the sociology of education and stratification. We bring these literatures together by arguing that they describe the consequences of constructing merit-based status orders, or merit orders. Merit orders are status hierarchies—sets of relations of value superiority, equality, or inferiority people perceive among others—based on assessments of others’ merit, achievement, or performance. We explore the nature of merit orders, argue that they exist as cultural objects and cultural schemas, and explain how they can be studied for their shape and for their sharedness. Most importantly, we show that a focus on merit orders enriches our understanding of how meritocracy enters social stratification processes. Meritocracy, this approach highlights, shapes stratification not only by sorting individuals into unequal social positions, but also by creating merit orders that have stratifying effects of their own. In particular, the making of merit orders has a tendency to moralize inequality by framing disparities in social advantage as differences in individual merit, it teaches observers to perceive quality differences among social actors in hierarchical terms that undermine egalitarian beliefs, and it can directly exacerbate inequality in merit-based rewards when the architecture of merit orders is more hierarchy-like.

  PublisherDOI

• How the reification of merit breeds inequality: theory and experimental evidence

  London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · 2025-09-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In a variety of social contexts, measuring merit or performance is a crucial step toward enforcing meritocratic ideals. At the same time, workable measures are bound to obfuscate the fuzziness and ambiguity of merit, i.e., to reify performance into an artificially crisp and clear-cut thing, for example a rating. The talk explores how the reification of employee performance in organizations contributes to inequality in employee compensation. It reports the findings of a large-scale experiment asking participants to divide a year-end bonus between a set of employees, based on their annual performance reviews. In the experiment’s non-reified condition, reviews are narrative evaluations. In the reified condition, the same narrative evaluations are accompanied by a crisp rating of the employees’ performance. Accominotti shows that participants are willing to reward employees more unequally when performance is reified, even though their levels of performance do not vary across the two conditions. Further analyses suggest that reification acts by making participants more accepting of the idea that individuals are indeed more or less talented and valuable, thereby increasing their willingness to reward them unequally. This has direct implications for understanding the legitimacy of inequality in contemporary societies – and ultimately for working toward curbing this inequality.

  OA PDFDOI

• Status inequality and status hierarchies

  L Année sociologique · 2024-09-23 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Le statut – la valeur accordée aux individus par autrui – est une dimension fondamentale de la stratification sociale. Il existe cependant une ambiguïté quant à ce que les sociologues entendent par différences de statut : s’agit-il de différences dans la quantité globale d’estime que les individus reçoivent d’autrui, ou dans la manière dont ils répartissent leur estime entre divers autres ? À partir de cette distinction, cet article propose d’organiser la recherche récente sur le statut en deux grandes approches : la première étudie l’inégalité de statut, ou l’inégalité dans la somme d’estime ou de respect que différents acteurs reçoivent des autres ; la seconde étudie les hiérarchies de statut, ou les relations de supériorité, d’égalité, et d’infériorité de valeur que chacun perçoit entre les autres. Passant en revue des travaux sur les hiérarchies raciales, professionnelles, de genre, ou sur la dynamique des petits groupes, je montre que l’inégalité de statut est un phénomène structurel dont on cherche généralement à expliquer l’intensité, tandis que les hiérarchies de statut sont des schémas culturels dont on peut examiner le contenu, la forme, le caractère plus ou moins partagé, et les modes d’acquisition, qu’il s’agisse de hiérarchies spécifiques ou d’un œil hiérarchique plus générique porté sur le monde social.

  PublisherDOI

• Polyoccupationalism: Expertise Stretch and Status Stretch in the Postindustrial Era

  American Sociological Review · 2023 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Psychology

  Past research has posited that occupations are distinct and exclusive communities of workers and used single-entry questions in surveys to measure occupational self-identification. Our study challenges that view by reporting the existence of polyoccupationalism, or workers’ simultaneous identification with multiple occupations. We predict this phenomenon co-occurs with postindustrial forms of work organization and that its expression varies with workers’ position in the occupational structure. Using a survey on creative workers that uniquely allowed respondents to identify with multiple occupations, we find individuals report higher levels of polyoccupationalism when their work is more contract- and project-based, net of other individual and occupational attributes. We further show that polyoccupationalism takes different forms at the top and the bottom of the occupational hierarchy: whereas the polyoccupationalism of high-status “entrepreneurs” stretches expertise—they identify with occupations that are similar in status but functionally distinct—that of lower-status “hustlers” stretches status—the occupations they report involve similar tasks but stand farther apart on the occupational status scale. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding workers’ occupational identities and the dynamics of occupational hierarchies.

  PublisherDOI

• The Architecture of Status Hierarchies: Variations in Structure and Why They Matter for Inequality

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Mathematics
  • Pure mathematics
  • Geography

  We argue that the properties of status hierarchies, independent of the positions actors occupy within them, have important effects on the degree of inequality in material rewards generated by status processes. We first discuss how a focus on status hierarchies differs from, complements, and extends the traditional focus on individual-level status positions. Drawing on a range of empirical case studies, we then identify three architectural features of status hierarchies—variations in their verticality, the clarity of their distinctions, and their rigidity—that affect the extent of inequality in the rewards received by the incumbents of high versus low status positions. We conclude by highlighting promising research questions and hypotheses that this macroscopic, status hierarchies approach raises.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Correction to: Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality

  Social Justice Research · 2022-09-27

  articleOpen access

  Published version

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality

  Social Justice Research · 2022 · 15 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design-a blueprint-to study how people's understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people's understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people's understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people's discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people's lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11211-022-00389-0.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The aesthetics of hierarchy

  British Journal of Sociology · 2021-03-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic

  American Journal of Sociology · 2018-05-01 · 87 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adam Storer

  École de management de Lyon

  26 shared

• Shamus Khan

  Princeton University

  26 shared

• Donald Mackenzie

  University of Strathclyde

  25 shared

• David Clifford

  University of Southampton

  25 shared

• Carsten Sauer

  Bielefeld University

  25 shared

• Noah Mark

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  25 shared

• Kevin Lewis

  25 shared

• John N. Loeb

  Columbia University

  25 shared