We can understand social inequality from a macro-sociological perspective because

Social Inequality

Social inequality has been debated from the times of Aristotle and Plato to those of Rousseau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and innumerable contemporary authors (Beteille, 1987). The classic triumvirate, ‘class’ (economic order), ‘status’ (honor), and ‘party’ (power) are widely cited as its essential dimensions, with power – the ability to prevail over others – as the virtual independent variable. Powerful people are privileged; powerless people are rarely so, and then only under sponsorship of the powerful. Their perspectives on inequality reflect their places in the system: those who look from below see and experience a different world than those whose gaze and experience it from above, and the latter are the ones in a position to define and explain the system, as well as to enforce it.

This article draws on understandings of social inequality obtained, primarily by anthropologists, through cross-cultural and cross-temporal research focused on peoples who have been otherwise largely ignored: those commonly labeled, if noticed at all, as primitive, aboriginal, tribal, native, indigenous, heathen, nomadic, peasant, untouchable, colonial, minority, ethnic, immigrant, and refugee – in short, those rendered vulnerable for whatever reason, or unreason.

Abstract

Social inequality in education is universally observed in countries in which children are brought up in unequal families; they enter school with unequal linguistic, cognitive, and cultural assets and attain unequal levels of achievement. Moreover, they make unequal choices, leading to unequal levels of education and social reproduction. However, the latter varies across countries, demonstrating that the way school itself is organized matters. The timing of the selection process and the degree of segregation within the system are especially important, along with the student social mix they generate. As countries implement policies to fight educational inequality, simply expanding education does not prove efficient since it only delays social selection. More qualitative policies then seem necessary, such as limiting early inequalities and focusing on disadvantaged families, which in turn requires broader social policies.

Abstract

Under the label of social inequality, social scientists study differential access to goods and services, rights and entitlements, power, and prestige, especially those that are problematic because they violate the popular sense of justice and fairness. They focus attention on structured social inequalities, that is, hierarchical differences between social positions and groupings (e.g., occupational classes, ethnoracial minorities, and gender categories) that endure over many generations. Social inequalities are typically studied in three aspects: “inequalities of endowments” (resources, capitals, assets); “inequalities of treatment,” that is, segregation, discrimination, and exclusion in social relations; and “inequalities of opportunity” for social mobility. Inequalities of endowments are the key focus of social stratification. Students of stratification analyze hierarchical “layers” or “strata” of positions sharing similar endowments, typically conceptualized as assets, resources, and capitals (material, cultural, political, etc.). Such hierarchies are represented as “social ladders” of classes, status groups, and power strata (e.g., elites and masses; see Etzioni-Halevi, 1996). Inequalities of treatment are the key subject matter for students of intergroup (typically ethnoracial minority) relations who analyze social segregation, distances, and exclusions. They chart such asymmetric relations and study their consequences, including intergroup prejudice, discrimination, antagonism, and conflict. Finally, inequalities of opportunity are the key topics for students of social mobility and attainment. Social mobility refers to movements up and down social hierarchies. Studies of attainment identify the key “propellants” of social advancement, such as education and family background. Thus, the students of occupational attainment identify and compare the main causes of occupational career advance, in particular the relative impact of “ascribed factors,” such as parental backgrounds, and “achievement factors,” such as the level of education. Low mobility or social closure, especially when based on ascriptive factors, is seen as evidence of inequality of opportunity and the rigidity of the social structure.

1.6.2 Social Inequality

An expression of the social inequality frame can be noted in Manderscheid (2009). She uses the work of Castells, with his “space of flows,” and the plurality of networked places. Spatialities are linked to the material infrastructures and to the sociodemographic differentiated needs. Castells sees spatial polarization arising in late capitalist societies, with more connected regions, and regions that are more or less bypassed in modern society. These latter regions contain far lower network capital. However, it remains difficult to see how this frame fits into the reality of the involuntary transport disadvantaged. Is, for example, social exclusion via transport indeed a greater problem in Castell’s flyover regions? Carson (2003) notes that households in deprived areas are more reliant on public transport services, but that the scale of these areas seems smaller than the scale of spaces in the work of Castells. To my knowledge no research has been done on this theme. In Chapter 3, Transport Disadvantages: Social and Societal Perspectives, I will look at transport disadvantages and related social inequality production for several groups in society, such as ethnic groups, elderly, unemployed.

Another line of thinking stems from Markovitch and Lucas (2011), when they state that distributional impacts of transport remain underexamined. Distributional issues, are for example, road casualties, lack of safety and personal security, pollution, poor quality environments, and access to infrastructures and services (Titheridge et al., 2014). Markovitch and Lucas (2011) consider three elements to be responsible for this state of art. At first, these issues cut across a number of different disciplines, are thus conceptualized differently and treated separately, and there are a number of institutional barriers to be overcome before they are more widely disseminated within policy environment. Second, impacts are not all readily quantifiable in the way that environmental and economic impacts are, thus making them more difficult to assess and be integrated into transport policy. And last, these issues have generally been assigned low priority. Related is the situation that social impacts of transport are often forgotten in cost–benefit analyses or appraisal schemes.

Inequality in Different States

Attention should be focused on social inequality and levels of participation. This is relevant in all spheres of life, socially, culturally, politically, and especially in the labour market. It is important to pay attention to levels of social inequality and labour-market participation. There are inequalities on various scales. First of all there is much inequality between states. Gini coefficients showing income inequality reveal that Sweden and Denmark still belong to the societies with much social equality, followed by countries such as Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Norway. The United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as Poland and the Southern European states (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) have more unequal profiles. In contrast to what is frequently suggested, social divisions are not generally increasing. Over the period 1995–2005, an increase in income inequality actually only occurred in a few European countries, such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and especially Poland.

At the level of the urban region also, there are major inequalities. We clearly have relatively rich and relatively poor urban regions in Europe. However, there is a lot of change going on as well. Of course the financial crisis recently had a very serious impact, but earlier data show that almost all European major cities experienced a structural increase of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per inhabitant. Berlin appeared to be the only capital with a decline of the GDP per inhabitant over the period 1995–2005 (index 97).

These figures do not tell us much about the differences within the urban regions and cities; however, if we go down the spatial scale, interesting differences can be shown. In some regions such as Greater London, core cities are rather wealthy; whereas adjacent areas may experience relative poverty. In general, however, European cities to justify a are much less polarised and segregated in socioeconomic terms compared with the reference category US cities. There are some exceptions, such as the city of Antwerp, which shows a high level of segregation of the poor. What is very important – and something many European cities distinguish themselves with – is the fact that, in Europe, the lower-income classes are generally not disconnected from the middle class. This is expressed in segregation indices for lower-income categories, which tend to be low (and not increasing). Populations with high incomes are much more segregated in the European city than populations with low incomes.

Participation in the labour market is another vehicle to measure inequality. In this regard there is no clear pattern within Europe. Cities with high levels of unemployment can be found in Eastern, Western, and Southern Europe – among them cities from the new member states, as well as from old member states. This may also be related to the fact that in some contexts it is relatively easier to be unemployed, because there are welfare arrangements for them; whereas, in other contexts these arrangements are lacking. The figures, therefore, are very difficult to interpret without taking the institutional contexts into account. Some cities experience much higher levels of youth unemployment compared with others. These differences will have serious implications. Therefore, it is interesting to see how these differences might be explained. Again, there is no simple answer to this question, as there are various theories about how inequalities arise. Some focus on individual behaviour as a major force; others refer to structures in society that could cause inequalities; and again others refer to both. There is reason to underline the importance of structural conditions, as processes of globalisation do have a great impact. Some of the European cities are better connected to the rest of the world than others, and therefore experience more opportunities than others; however, they also generate more social inequality and immigration. Historically developed structures and pathways of cities will play a role in whether they have the ability to connect with the rest of the world or not. The economic structure that has developed over time, especially the current structure of the economy, and the ongoing economic restructuring play a major role in the understanding of today’s inequalities as well. Cities that have problems with transforming their economies from standardised manufacturing profiles to flexible creative-knowledge profiles will show higher levels of nonparticipation.

Abstract

In the current economic climate, social inequality and exclusion have become even more prominent and as a result promoting community resilience is emerging as a key priority at a local and national level. In this context, grassroots movements and local community initiatives that aim to develop community resilience, social regeneration and transformation are a growing force. As digital technologies are now ubiquitous and readily available in our everyday lives, several of these local movements and initiatives start to consider ways of harnessing the potential of digital technologies. Two such initiatives are the focus of this work: the Bristol Pound, which seeks social change through changing the money system in a local area, and iGirls, addressing intergenerational poverty through educating and empowering teenagers. This chapter sets out the strategies employed and the challenges faced by the members of these two initiatives as they worked to innovate their current practices by integrating digital technologies to achieve their goals of social transformation. The analysis suggests that adoption of digital technologies involves nontrivial identity work that becomes a framework for how the members assessed the appropriateness of technologies according to how they fit with their community’s respective identities. Based on our findings we discuss the potential of digital participation for community resilience initiatives and propose guidelines for facilitating the process of adopting and integrating digital technologies within such settings.

Why Is Measuring Societal Well-Being More Important Today Than Before?

In a world characterized by growing social and health inequalities, measuring well-being at a societal level allows for comparison of development between and within countries. The well-being framework, therefore, maps the complex issues that promote inequalities within and between groups and/or countries with an aim of providing better ways of addressing them through the formulation of normative policies. For example, the OECD BLI has demonstrated such possibilities by comparing its member states along the different dimensions of well-being such as material conditions, quality of life, and sustainability of current status of well-being into the future. Such comparisons have been criticized given that well-being measurements are context specific and culturally dependent, and the questions asked may have varying meanings or different translation in different contexts.

While critics against well-being comparisons exist, evidence suggests that well-being measurement may provide avenues for evaluating policies and government's performance. Such evaluations are important in the achievement of better and sustainable future. In addition, well-being measurement may also improve policy coherence and promote integration of policies for better management of resources locally and internationally.

Today's global and local developmental agendas are centered on sustainability, with the overall goal of achieving a better and sustained societal well-being for all. Societal progress therefore needs to be assessed beyond the individual, subjective, and single economic-based metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP) to include a broad range of dimensions, both monetary and nonmonetary, all of which make life worthwhile. Additionally, since human flourishing is more than economic growth and happiness, a more inclusive and comprehensive framework that incorporates both subjective well-being and interconnected societal issues, including economic, environmental, political, and social problems, is necessary.

Networks and Social Inequalities

The role played by networks in preserving and creating social inequalities has been investigated by research on social mobility, where macro-outcomes at the level of social stratification and microstrategies are analyzed jointly by means of network techniques. Moreover, studies on the labor market have evidenced that people acquire information about job opportunities mainly from informal relations, and ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ interpersonal ties determine differential chances of entering employment according to the segmentation of the labor market based on skills (Granovetter, 1973; Grieco, 1987) or gender (Lin, 2004).

Education and Social Inequalities

The direct relationship between education and various forms of social inequality has probably been the earliest and most widely theorized and researched topic in educational sociology. The general pattern in all societies is that the more education a person has attained, the greater will be other valued social attainments. But educational attainment is not equally distributed, so that those groups which acquire more education also enjoy more social benefits. The dimensions of these attainment inequalities generally are many, ranging from gender, ethnic and race origins, rural–urban residential locations, government and private school attendance, types of family socialization practices, and social and cognitive disabilities, to name just a few. What has been most striking is that, with the exception of gender inequalities, most of the traditional inequalities have persisted in spite of much research on education and educational reforms. Furthermore, these inequalities exist across societies.

Early theorizing about education and inequality was based on the functional perspective which argued that, because a social role of education is to sift, sort, and allocate the most talented and motivated students into the most important and lucrative social positions, the inequalities are a product of merit, and a sign that the education system is working. The complex process by which this comes about has been labeled the status attainment model. Basically the model assumes that there are many determinants of how much education a person attains, including home background factors, aspirations and expectations, and prior attainments. Then the amount and type of education acquired lead to other occupational and social attainments.

However, because the meritocratic process, studied in this way, always seemed to favor students from privileged backgrounds, countertheories argued that the continued existence of social inequalities in educational systems represented a form of social reproduction which was not merit based, but one based on hegemony, privilege, and power over the education system itself. Starting with Bernstein's research between class-based language codes in England, and their importance in academic achievement (Bernstein, 1971), Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) also found the mechanisms of the reproduction of social class in education in France, not because of a meritocracy but because of the transmission of what he later called ‘cultural capital.’ Thus the concept of cultural capital, and Coleman's related concept of social capital, provided an alternative explanation for the pervasiveness of social inequality and education.

Empirically, the quantitative studies of the link between education and social inequality found that the relationship existed in most western industrial societies (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992), and that class of social origin was a main contributor, although other research found that its effects were diminishing (Dronkers, 1993). Nevertheless the differences between the social classes and education have been found to be persistent across countries (Shavit and Blossfield, 1993).

The direct relationship between education and social inequality has also been found to vary between countries, depending on characteristics of the political and economic systems and also on characteristics of the educational systems. For example, countries with more social democratic systems tend to have lower educational and social inequalities than countries with liberal market economies (Beller and Hout, 2006). Similarly countries which have early selection of students into tracks based on presumed innate ability, or on vocational or academic occupational destinations, compared to countries with nontracked comprehensive education systems, tend to have stronger links between educational attainments and other social attainments (Marks, 2005). Furthermore, it has also been argued that even as the general levels of educational attainment in some societies have appeared to become more equal, for example in the expectation that everyone can attend university and obtain a university degree, there remain hidden factors which bring about negative and unequal consequences. These emerge when the realistic possibilities among students of attaining goals are not recognized or acknowledged, with the result that failures are worse than if realistic lower level goals were pursued to begin with (Rosenbaum et al., 2011). Thus, ironically, the ideal or perfectionist views about how to reduce or eradicate the link between education and inequality actually have been shown to maintain them, although through hidden processes. Clearly much sociological research remains to be done, and policies need to be developed, at both the school and the political and economic level to reduce the link between education and social inequality, if that is, indeed, the goal of a society.

Social Exclusion and Inclusion

Finally, issues of social exclusion and inclusion, social inequality, policy, and social work constitute other areas of research in which biography strongly matters. Practitioners in these areas always have been well aware of the fact that biographical processes and trajectories can be deeply shaped by experiences of discrimination and even exclusion resulting from an ascribed or felt belonging to a social group or category. Likewise, to find ways to overcome critical life situations, the biographical as well as collective resources have to be taken into account. Research on how to deal with crises and risks by understanding the individual perspective of those affected without individualizing them has been at the core of various research projects (Chamberlayne et al., 2002; Santos, 2010). Additionally, the consequences of professional intervention on the lives of subjects are investigated in order to develop, together with practitioners in social work, a self-reflexive attitude which is crucial, also as part of professional formation (Dausien et al., 2008; Siouti and Ruokonen-Engler, 2014). To understand oneself to a certain extent is regarded as necessary for understanding and helping others to cope with difficult situations. This area is also connected with educational sciences where biographical approaches are even more widespread than in sociology. Especially questions concerning education and lifelong learning have been at the center of interest over a long period of time (Alheit and Dausien, 2007; Olesen, 2012).