Elsevier

Poetics

Volume 35, Issue 6, December 2007, Pages 331-351
Poetics

Boundary processes: Recent theoretical developments and new contributions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2007.10.001Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper takes stock of the most recent scholarship on symbolic boundaries and how these interact with social boundaries—more durable and institutionalized social differences. Our primary goal is to raise awareness of a growing body of empirical work, and to highlight key mechanisms which they address, among them: the strategic management of collective identities, cultural classification, the construction of authenticity, moral boundary maintenance, and genre-crossing. We introduce the articles included in this issue and discuss how ethno-racial boundaries intersect with class, immigration, and nationhood. We also describe new work on aesthetic boundaries, as well as recent efforts pertaining to gender, sexuality, the workplace, and religion. We close with a discussion of promising research on health, risk, and policy. We hope to demonstrate some of the intellectual rewards of interdisciplinary engagement, and encourage others to more systematically contribute to analyzing fundamental boundary processes.

Section snippets

Mark A. Pachucki is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. His research seeks to build theoretical and methodological bridges between social network methods and sociologies of culture. His current research examines creativity as a social process, and diffusion mechanisms in public health.

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  • Mark A. Pachucki is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. His research seeks to build theoretical and methodological bridges between social network methods and sociologies of culture. His current research examines creativity as a social process, and diffusion mechanisms in public health.

    Sabrina Pendergrass is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests are cultural sociology, race and ethnicity, inequality, and internal migration. Her dissertation examines the cultural dimensions of the reversal of the African American Great Migration.

    Michèle Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. She has written widely in the fields of inequality, culture, race, knowledge, and theory. She is the author of several books including the prize-winning The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration, the forthcoming Cream Rising: Evaluation and Excellence in the Social Sciences and the Humanities and the forthcoming, Successful Societies: How Institutions and Cultural Repertoires Affect Health and Capabilities (co-edited with Peter A. Hall).

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