Two Harvard Star Sociologists at Sciences Po

I’m an organisational sociologist. I have been studying diversity programmes since the 1980s, when I graduated from Stanford University. My work focuses on what companies and universities do to promote diversity and prevent discrimination, as well as how effective their Equal Employment policies are.

I use quantitative data to find where the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusivity (DEI) programmes appeared and how they spread to corporations, first, and then universities. My expertise is to make sense of which programmes work and which one don't. I've seen time and again that the most popular policies are not always the most effective. They often tend to backfire and lead to even less diversity!

One thing I’m currently working on is the general effect of the reduction of faculty hiring in universities, and particularly on the diversity of faculty.

It has already been studied, crisis like the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID pandemic lead to fewer faculty hiring which leads to fewer diversity. Donald Trumps's decisions to cut federal funding for many universities and to outlaw DEI programmes have the same impact. The next faculty hiring cycles will be much less diverse.

This trend is a real setback: universities with diverse faculty members are more likely to retain diverse students. Providing access for all students to a college degree is important, it's the best – and almost only – way to have a better income in the United States.

The CEE has been a great research centre to visit, I’ve known many people here for many years. People are very interested in the politics of DEI nowadays, I met many colleagues working on those topics.

One of the things that has made it possible to do research in the US is that the federal government has collected data about race and diversity. The most difficult thing in Europe, and France in particular, is precisely the prohibition against that.

How can you make progress when you can’t access where you are? We don’t have many quantitative data about immigrant groups and racialised minorities. Specialist can sustain conflicted views partly because there is not enough data. That being said, I don't believe that France would change its laws.

I'm a professor of sociology at Harvard University, specialising in culture and inequality, class and boundaries. I came to Paris for my graduate work, and then to the United States, at Stanford and Princeton.

I started as a political theorist and then took part in opening a whole new field of empirical studies on culture and inequality. For example, I compared upper middle class in New York, Paris, and Clermont-Ferrand. It allowed me to develop novel approaches. I also studied how professors define excellence and understand the peer review process.

For instance, I co-edited with Laurent Thevenot (one of the founders of the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology) a book titled Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of evaluation in France and the United States, we criticised the "national character" approach through comparative cases studies to document similarities and differences in criteria of evaluation and symbolic boundaries mobilised in the two countries in a range of contexts.

My new research  is on “recognition, globally”, and concerns how various groups are seeking recognition through different paths.

The first case study will compare “invisible” working class youth from two cities that are the birthplaces of the industrial revolution in their countries: Manchester (New Hampshire, United States) and Manchester (United Kingdom). A Finnish researcher has joined our project to study a third industrial city, Tampere, in Finland, a country that still has a safety net for workers.

We will then compare the First Nations near Ottawa (Canada), which are resisting a disposal site for nuclear waste on their territory, and indigenous communities in Guam and Saipan, Japan which are being impacted by the US creating airfields on their lands. We are exploring whether and how members of these communities are seeking recognition through work and environment justice.

The third comparative case study would be the “impossible cases”: LGBTQI+ in Senegal, race in France and Germany, religion in China.

I have a large number of friends and colleagues here whit whom I have been in conversations for decades. This was the opportunity to receive their feedback on my current project. And, of course, I am very interested in learning about the research that is happening here right now, and learning about new developments in the society as a whole.

I have worked on comparisons of France and the US my whole life, and I had not spent much time here since before the pandemic. I spent June visiting the Institut d'études avancées (IEA, the Paris Institute for Advanced Study) de Paris in Île Saint-Louis and will be back to deliver the 2025 Marc Bloch Conference at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) on 8 December.

Teaching at Harvard, what’s happened with Donald Trump’s election is at the top of my mind. The possible election of the Rassemblement National (the French far-right political party) in 2027 is critical for universities. Institutions such as Sciences Po have to be prepared and vigilant.