The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration

by Michèle Lamont

Michèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men--the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society.

Morality is at the center of these workers' worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the "disciplined self" and blacks on the "caring self." Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined.

This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as "part of us" and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different "moral offenders" in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of "cultural membership" that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Race, Class, Labor

408 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2000

About the author

Michèle Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and professor of sociology and African and Africa American Studies at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lamont’s classic ethnography on working men remains essential reading. Her interviews stretch back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nevertheless, the substance they uncover in how blue collar workers in America and France give meaning to their worlds remains crucial for understanding the current political anxieties gripping workers across the developed world. There is much to unpack and the book is certainly worth a read even if you just focus on the chapters where she studies American workers. True, her language and writing are academic; but jargon is minimal and doesn’t detract from the overall clarity of her findings. In so many respects, this book is a classic in the genre of gender, class, and economic relations.

[Tafadzwa Kwaramba · Rating 4 out of 5]

An academic book that is written in an accessible format without excessive jargon and written in a very factful manner. The author compares the attitudes of white and black working class workers in America towards issues such as morality in general and their attitudes towards each other and the middle class. The author then compares the attitudes of white French working class workers towards migrant workers from North Africa as well as the attitudes of both groups towards each other and the middle class and morality in general.

A key take away from the book is how all groups define morality using frameworks that put them on top of the food chain. Generally all workers with few exceptions described the middle class as immoral as those within it are superficial and that career orientation comes at the cost of genuine bonds. Black workers in America described white workers as largely racist and immoral as they judge people based on their skin colour rather than on their abilities. On this front, black workers assert ability and humanism as a metric for morality. However, because of white workers view black workers as lazy, their metric for morality is a work ethic and ambition which they perceive that black workers lack and hence this places them on top of the morality hierarchy according to their definition of morality. This perhaps points to the difficulties of having discussions on race, class and gender within society given how each group uses a different standard or morality that puts itself on top of other groups.

A comparison between American workers and French workers showed the impact of history and national identity on worker identity. With the gospel of the American dream, many American workers tie achievement to value while French workers have roots in socialism and communist traditions and thus root do not tie achievement to value but instead that value comes from how deep one is in solidarity with others.

Bringing it into the Zimbabwean context, the question becomes how do progressives understand the unemployed and peasant farmers that have emerged from the post-2000 economic structure in Zimbabwe. Understanding the roots of which these emergent "classes" are anchored and their perceived version of morality and value based on these rooots would certainly be a huge step.

[Ceil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lamont published this comparison of the values of white and non-white (African-American in the case of the US, North African in the case of France) working class men 20 years ago. One interesting element of reading it is comparing our different ways of thinking about race, class, and values since then. What hasn't changed is the extent to which the issues academic researchers focus on (then: multiculturalism; now: intersectionality) are absent from the issues their subjects care about. An interesting reminder of the ways in which humans seem to need to define themselves in part in opposition to people who aren't like them, even if they have to invent characteristics to ascribe to people who aren't like them.

[Pepe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lamont’s work offers a rather convincing argument on how morality and the moralization of one’s self and the ‘Other’ play a central role in bridging people’s subjective values and their social world. The strength of Dignity is its accessible, direct, and clear writing. Lamont uses a lot of direct citations that help the reader to connect the theoretical concepts that she attempts to manifest in her case.

[Gracie]

interesting and not super complicated to understand like a lot of academic books. tony kind of sucked lowkey like you don’t hate ur coworkers because of their race you hate them because they mess around at work… take a deep breath bro

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

really readable study of ny/nj-area and metro-paris workers. i'm not sure that lamont addresses all the distinctions between immigrants and racial minorities, but still the interviews and analysis are intriguing.

read for my race in the americas course.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book describing the ways we justify how we feel about others-- couching our objections in terms of morality.

[Soha Bayoumi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book in sociology, digging on those borderlines between class and race... Impressive sociological work!