Dimensions of Inequality

5 Key excerpts on "Dimensions of Inequality"

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  Poverty

  • Ruth Lister(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The chapter begins by placing poverty briefly but firmly in the context of socioeconomic inequality and social class. It then paints an impressionistic picture of the material impact of poverty in wealthy societies before turning to look at the ways in which the social divisions of gender, ‘race’ and disability shape and mediate how it is experienced. As Sandra Fredman points out, most ‘groups which suffer discrimination on status grounds are disproportionately represented among people living in poverty’ (2011: 567). In addition to structural inequalities, it considers how poverty is experienced at the two ends of the life-course – a notion that captures the complexity of individuals’ passage through a lifetime and is of particular relevance to a gendered understanding of poverty (Bennett and Daly, 2014; Bennett, 2015; Dermott and Pantazis, 2018) – childhood and old age. In practice, individual social divisions intersect and interact with one another and with phases of the life-course either to reinforce or to mitigate their individual impact (Bassel and Emejulu, 2018; Dermott and Main, 2018); but for ease of analysis they will be discussed separately here.

  The final dimension considered is spatial. This also raises an issue about the levels at which poverty is lived simultaneously: most basically, as an individual of a particular gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, religion, social class, age, sexual orientation and with or without disabilities; plus, in many cases, within a family or multiperson household, which can affect the degree and nature of poverty; and finally within the wider neighbourhood and the physical and social environment created by it (Burchardt et al., 2002). Moreover, power is exercised at these levels and beyond – from the micro-household to the macro-national/global – to exclude individuals and groups from access to adequate resources (Jordan, 1996).

  Inequality, social class and polarization

  John Scott has analysed this process of exclusion through the representation of deprivation and privilege as ‘polarised departures from the normal range of lifestyles that are enjoyed by the citizens of a society’ (1994: 173). Differential power and opportunity at each end of the hierarchy of inequality mean that ‘the deprived are excluded from public life; the privileged are able to exclude the public from their special advantages’ (1994: 151; see also Dorling 2015). Scott emphasizes that deprivation and privilege are distinct ‘conditions and social statuses’ and not simply rankings at the bottom and top of a statistical hierarchy (1994: 173). He concludes that the causes of poverty are inseparable from the causes of wealth (see also Ridge and Wright, 2008; Platt and Dean, 2016). This echoes R. H. Tawney’s famous dictum that ‘what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice the problem of riches’ (1913). And when ‘the problem’ is thereby understood as inequality, it clarifies ‘the need for structural change’ (Titmuss, 1965, cited in Shildrick and Rucell, 2015: 34; see also O’Hara, 2020).

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  Cities Transformed

  Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World

  • Mark R. Montgomery, Richard Stren, Barney Cohen, Holly E. Reed(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Diversity and Inequality

  Diversity is among the defining features of city life. Seen from one perspective, diversity is a manifestation of the concept of the city as lottery, a social arena where risks and rewards are on display. It is evidence of mobility and possibility. But from another perspective, diversity is experienced as inequity, a reminder of immobility and possibilities frustrated. This chapter explores several of the dimensions of urban socioeconomic diversity and inequality. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances of the urban poor.

  On close inspection, the housing and living conditions of the urban poor prove to be more varied than might have been thought, and it is not easy to reduce indicators of urban housing quality to estimates of the population living in slums. Even the term “slum” tends to be avoided in careful research on urban housing, although it can be employed as a convenient shorthand. The tone adopted in scientific studies resembles that of the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) (1996:205): “How simplistic and often inaccurate it is to assume that most low-income groups [live] in ‘slums’ or ‘slums and squatter settlements’.” On the question of changes in the percentages of urban dwellers in slums, UNCHS (1996) does not find sufficient evidence to draw conclusions, although it does concede that the total numbers living in such settlements are large and probably have been rising. Not until 1990, when UNCHS began its Housing Indicators Programme, was a sustained effort made on a large scale to bring order and coherence to empirical measures of urban housing, enabling cross-country comparisons in a few key dimensions. This study (described in UNCHS [1996:196]; see also Malpezzi [1999]) laid the groundwork for a more nuanced understanding of urban living conditions and drew attention to the variety of housing markets in which the urban poor participate.

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  Origins of Inequality in Human Societies

  • Bernd Baldus(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  When sociology emerged as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, the search for the causes of social inequality was the primary concern of Saint-Simon, Comte, Spencer, Sumner, Marx and Durkheim. If they were the founding fathers of the new field of sociology, inequality was its founding problem. They created the archetypical explanations of social inequality as a result of domination and power, as a reflection of inherited differences or biological advantages, or as a functional response to societal needs. These views laid the groundwork for later, more specialized debates: whether inequality was a product of social conflict or impersonal imperatives, whether it was a functional structure of empty spaces waiting for competent applicants or a segmented labor market shaped by economic and political power, whether it was based on material differences or on identity and status, or whether in modern societies class divisions were replaced by a fluid post-modern diversity.

  An Outline of the Book

  This book offers a comprehensive new theoretical analysis of the nature of social inequality in human societies. There are two reasons for such a project. First, theories matter because they guide our research. They tell us what evidence to collect and what questions to ask of it. They can lead us to important features of the social world but can also obstruct our view. If we think that social processes are governed by laws, we are unlikely to see the causal role of chance in human affairs. If we presume that human actions are shaped by external determinants or rational constraints, we will not have much interest in creative or non-rational behavior. If we assume that the long-term effects of inequality are beneficial or inevitable, we will see harmful outcomes as transient and unimportant and dismiss the search for more egalitarian social structures as pointless. Such assumptions are reflected in research. Scientific journals overwhelmingly publish articles reporting strong relationships between variables, whereas only a small portion of those that find null (chance) results are written up and submitted, and few of these are accepted (Mervis 2014 ). It is rare to find studies which argue that failing rather than efficient markets, and irrational rather than rational choices, contributed to inequality in current societies (Hacker and Pierson 2010 ; Stiglitz 2012 ), or that its history is turbulent and unpredictable rather than a steady progress towards ever greater prosperity (Piketty 2014

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  Inequality in Economics and Sociology

  New Perspectives

  • Gilberto Antonelli, Boike Rehbein(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part III

  Dimensions of Inequality

  Passage contains an image

  7   Gender and inequality

  Emanuelle Silva

  The category of gender has been closely associated with that of inequality right from the start. It was also closely linked to the political scene, since it was mainly promoted by feminist movements. We can distinguish three overlapping phases of the feminist movements, which relate to three different concepts of gender inequality. The first phase, starting in the nineteenth century, consisted of the emancipatory movements against limits of democracy and connected struggles against male domination with those against racism, colonialism, capitalism and others. The second phase rendered the discussion more academic and specialized. This also led to more sophisticated approaches to gender inequality. The third phase reconnects gender to other Dimensions of Inequality but also questions the assumptions of the earlier phases of the discussion.

  The category of gender was only developed in the course of these discussions, first as a means to distinguish the social construction of gender from the biological category of sex. It became evident, however, that this simple distinction had all kinds of theoretical implications and rested on problematic assumptions itself. Against this backdrop, the debates about gender have produced a great deal of literature that is relevant to the epistemology, political framing, methodology and empirical body of inequality research.

  This chapter will not summarize the history of research on gender. Neither will it give much attention to the political realm. It will rather focus on the theoretical implications of the discovery of the category itself and the debates around it. The first section deals with the concept, the second develops the social construction of gender, the third studies how this social construction is incorporated, while the fourth relates the notion of gender to that of class. The final section summarizes important aspects of contemporary debates about the concept of gender.

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  Education, Inequality and Social Class

  Expansion and Stratification in Educational Opportunity

  • Ron Thompson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  PATTERNS OF INEQUALITY IN EDUCATION

  This chapter presents quantitative evidence on patterns of inequality in educational opportunity, drawing on research from the United Kingdom and on international comparative studies. The chapter begins with a discussion of how educational inequality is to be conceived and measured, followed by an overview of research findings based on this conceptual framework and relating particularly to the transitions between lower secondary, upper secondary and higher education. Although it is mainly concerned with class-based inequality, the chapter discusses the use of eligibility for free school meals (FSM) as a social background variable. Debates on the relationship between cognitive ability, educational attainment and social background are also briefly outlined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of educational inequalities related to gender and ethnicity.

  Measuring inequality of educational opportunity

  In his book Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality , Raymond Boudon (1974, p. xi) makes the following definition:

  By inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) I mean the differences in level of educational attainment according to social background … Thus a society is characterized by a certain amount of IEO if, for instance, the probability of going to college is smaller for a worker’s son than for a lawyer’s.

  This definition can be extended in obvious ways to inequalities of race and gender. However, it is incomplete without specifying how attainment and social background should be measured. There is no single answer to this question, and the practicalities of data collection and analysis will influence how IEO is made operational in a particular piece of research. More fundamentally, decisions about how to capture attainment and social background may be grounded in a conception of social justice, as well as taking into account factors such as policy concerns and objective features of the educational systems being studied. To allow for ‘credential inflation’, a relative rather than absolute measure of attainment may be used (Sullivan et al. 2011). A further consideration is the disciplinary context within which researchers work and the problems that occupy them most intensely. For example, economists have tended to measure social background in terms of income or other attributional properties, whilst sociologists have preferred to work with relational properties such as social class or status. These distinctions are by no means fixed, and for both theoretical and practical reasons various social background measures may be used in addition to or in place of social class and income, including parental education, FSM eligibility, neighbourhood or school location, and measures of cultural environment (Ferreira and Gignoux 2011; Blanden and Macmillan 2016). In some studies, a single continuous measure of socio-economic status (SES) is constructed from several individual measures. Because educational inequality may evolve in different directions according to different measures of these, some researchers use a multidimensional approach, in which a number of these measures are used both singly and together (Bukodi and Goldthorpe 2013). However, for traditional class analysts there is a crucial distinction between class and properties such as income or residential location. Any association between attributional properties and educational attainment would be seen as an epiphenomenon

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