Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health

From the Publisher

“Scholars have long known that purely materialist accounts cannot explain the steep health gradients we observe within and across societies. This provocative collection of essays forcefully offers an alternative perspective exhorting us to consider how culture, institutions, social networks and other intangible aspects of status (and development) get under our skin – literally – to affect population health. Imagine Amartya Sen meets Erving Goffman...” - Dalton Conley, New York University

“Successful Societies is an extraordinary achievement. It establishes robust connections among fields that have been examined largely in isolation from one another and shows scholars how – and why – to weave together cultural, institutional and socio-structural analysis. The volume is filled with vivid examples of the explanatory payoff provided by the approach to explaining ‘hard’ societal outcomes that it introduces.” - Robert M. Fishman, University of Notre Dame

“A diverse group of scholars, united by their quality, desire to understand, and top class ability to communicate, form a successful group and lay out what constitutes a successful society. They bring together a wide array of perspectives and create a clear understanding of the determinants of health and of inequalities in health. This is a special achievement in a brilliantly written book.” - Michael Marmot, Chair, Commission on Social Determinants of Health

“This outstanding volume does an outstanding job crossing borders: disciplines, countries, time periods, types of evidence, modes of reasoning. It uses the voyage to great affect, as a model of outstanding interdisciplinary cooperation. It links people from anthropology and sociology to epidemiology, medical sociology, and political science raise fascinating questions about what makes societies work. By comparing countries, the volume forces us to challenge common modes of reasoning. This book is wonderful piece of ‘collaborative public intellectuals.’ It should be read all over the academy and by the general public.” - Peter Gourevitch, University of California at San Diego

“Hall and Lamont have assembled an insightful, provocative and readable set of essays that challenge social scientists to consider the puzzle of what makes a successful, healthy society. The answer is: there is no one universal answer; there are multiple models of well-being. Together the volume builds a powerful argument for the significance of culture. Economic resources and societal inequality are significant. Yet so are those diverse cultural practices and structures that provide meaning and a view of who am I, who are we, what is the good life, what is possible, what is just, who counts and who doesn't.” - Hazel Rose Markus, Stanford University

“With an exquisite sense of timing this remarkable collection of uniformly excellent essays by a dazzling array of social scientists, historians, and epidemiologists arrives after an almost 70-year long wait for a contemporary sequel to Karl Polanyi’s paradigm-changing critique of the ‘standard of living’ axiom that higher wages are enough to improve the well-being of a society torn apart by unfettered laissez-faire policies. Just as Polanyi demonstrated that the societal health of a people depends on market-embedding institutional arrangements and a cultural ethic of solidarity, so too Successful Societies represents nothing less than a paradigm-shifting challenge to prevailing market models of what counts as societal success and why some achieve this more than others. Deploying an enormous range of empirical data, the inspiration of thinkers from Amartya Sen to Pierre Bourdieu, and a newly humanized understanding of societal success, the volume is also an urgently needed normative manifesto for the indispensability of egalitarian and inclusive ‘social imaginaries’ in tandem with institutional foundations for democratic participation.” - Margaret Somers, University of Michigan

"This is a remarkably coherent edited volume in which all of the contributors interact with the same set of questions about the interrelationships between health, economics, social relations, and political and cultural values such as equality, cultural tolerance, and civic participation.... Recommended." - Choice

"Successful Societies is a valuable resource for considering the influence of culture and institutions on population health. It is a shining example of the good that can be produced by interdisciplinary collaborations, and it widens our considerations of the social determinants of health. It also provides rich examples of why we need to do more than create opportunities for economic growth in developing nations in order to produce positive changes in population health." - Brian C. Kelly, Purdue University, Canadian Journal of Sociology