Fabien Accominotti is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Visiting Fellow at the III. Prior to joining Wisconsin he earned his PhD from Columbia University and taught sociology at the LSE.
Accominotti’s 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, it focuses on unsettled fields, uncertain markets, and organizations, which Accominotti uses to study how we come to view different people as unequally valuable and how this affects their outcomes. He have written on the construction of value beliefs in the art world, the emergence of cultural hierarchy as a dimension of social class in Gilded Age America, and processes of consecration that entrench faith in hierarchies of worthiness. His latest 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.
Selected Work
Peer-reviewed articles
Fabien Accominotti. 2021. “The Aesthetics of Hierarchy: How Algorithmic Classifications Legitimize Inequality.” British Journal of Sociology 72: 196-202.
Fabien Accominotti. 2021. “Consecration as a Population-Level Phenomenon.” American Behavioral Scientist 65: 9-24.
Fabien Accominotti and Daniel Tadmon. 2020. “How the Reification of Merit Breeds Inequality: Theory and Experimental Evidence.” LSE International Inequalities Institute Working Paper Series 42: 1-37.
Fabien Accominotti, 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: 1743-1783.
Winner of the Charles Tilly Award for Best Article, ASA Comparative-Historical Sociology Section.
Honorable Mention, Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, ASA Consumers & Consumption Section.
Fabien Accominotti. 2009. “Creativity from Interaction Artistic Movements and the Creativity Careers of Modern Painters.” Poetics 37: 267-294.
Other writing
Fabien Accominotti. 2017. “Beyond the Beat: Musicians Building Community in Nashville, by Daniel B. Cornfield.” American Journal of Sociology 122: 2015-2017.
Fabien Accominotti. 2015. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Prophet: Review of Manet: A Symbolic Revolution, by Pierre Bourdieu.” European Journal of Sociology 56: 433-437.