I joined the LSE as an Assistant Professor of Sociology after receiving my PhD from Columbia University. My work explores the construction of status hierarchies and how they contribute to produce and reproduce inequality in society. It asks how we come to view different people as unequally deserving or valuable, and how this affects their outcomes.
My first book, to be published by Princeton University Press, studies these processes in the context of the art world. It shows how, in the heyday of modern art, market institutions created value for artists – and inequality between them – by consecrating the field of modernism – that is, by asserting the existence of a reliable hierarchy of worth between artists in a field premised on constant revolution in the norms defining artistic worthiness. You can read more about the project here.
My current research brings these same interests to bear on broader issues of stratification and inequality. I first serve as a principal investigator on a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project using the New York Philharmonic archives to understand how cultural capital emerged as a source of social status in the United States. The database for that project is publicly available here.
My other current work relies on experimental designs to test how the quantification of employee merit in organizations makes us more accepting of inequality in the rewards employees receive. This project is funded by a Research Innovation grant from LSE’s International Inequalities Institute.
Selected Work
Book
Consecrated: Modern Art in Paris between Revolution and Hierarchy. Book manuscript under contract, Princeton University Press.
Journal articles
Fabien Accominotti. 2019. “Consecration as a Population-Level Phenomenon.” Forthcoming, American Behavioral Scientist. (Read the article here).
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. (Read the article here).
Winner of the Charles Tilly Award for Best Article, ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section.
Winner of the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award (Honorable Mention), ASA Consumers & Consumption Section.
Fabien Accominotti. 2009, “Creativity from Interaction: Artistic Movements and the Creativity Careers of Modern Painters.” Poetics 37: 267-294. (Read the article here).
Fabien Accominotti. 2008, “Market and Hierarchy: The Social Structure of Production Decisions in a Cultural Market.” Histoire & Mesure 23: 177-218. (Read the article here).
Other writing
Fabien Accominotti. 2017. “Beyond the Beat: Musicians Building Community in Nashville, by Daniel B. Cornfield.” American Journal of Sociology 122: 2015-2017. (Read here).
Fabien Accominotti. 2015. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Prophet: Book Review of Manet: A Symbolic Revolution, by Pierre Bourdieu.” European Journal of Sociology 56: 433-437 (Read here).