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Learning Objectives
- To define social inequalities.
- To recognize the importance of the historical context of social inequalities.
- To understand how sociologists think about and study social inequalities.
- To identify the competing theories that clarify aspects of social inequalities.
- To understand the concepts of social justice, neoliberalism, intersectionality, and interlocking disadvantages.
Summary
Sociology and the Study of Social Inequalities
People have been arguing about social inequality and the right way to address it for at least two centuries. History has shown us that we cannot eliminate social inequality, but we can reduce it through research, planning, and legislation. This is important because even if social inequality is inevitable, it is harmful if it is too severe.
Some societies are more open than others, meaning that there are greater overall opportunities for advancement and fewer impediments to upward mobility. Canada has become far more open today than it was 50 years ago, due to equity legislation and the expansion of higher education. However, it is still far from fully and equally open.
C. Wright Mills introduced the idea of the sociological imagination, which refers to the ability to see the interconnections between individual experiences and larger societal patterns, trends, or forces. This is key to understanding poverty and inequality as social (rather than individual) problems requiring collective social change. Sociologists use both micro-level analysis (focused on interactions among people in small groups) and macro-level analysis (focused on the whole society) to connect personal troubles and public issues.
Sociological Approaches to Inequality
Functionalism is concerned with how different social forms and practices contribute to the survival of society. The “functional theory of stratification” suggests that social stratification recruits and motivates people into key roles in the social structure. The system pays high rewards to positions that require specialized knowledge, skills, and credentials; other occupations have lower status and pay. These unequal rewards give rise to stratification. However, the theory does not account for the role of inheritance, disagreements about society’s most important roles, or anomalies such as the high status of athletes and actors.
Conflict theorists view society as a collection of varied groups struggling to dominate society and its institutions. Social inequalities reflect differences in power and wealth in society. Conflict theory began in the nineteenth century with the work of Marx and Weber, and it became a reaction against functionalism in the mid-twentieth century.
Symbolic interactionism focuses on micro interactions between people. Its underlying assumption is that people collectively create shared understandings of reality. Inequality is socially constructed as people set up narratives of blame that degrade others and justify oppressing them, and the people so labelled set up counternarratives to explain their disadvantaged circumstances.
Feminists study the ways gender inequality makes women’s lives different from men’s. Feminists view the subjugation of women as a result of socio-economic and cultural forces and are committed to erasing women’s continued social inequality. Common concerns include the gendering of experiences, the problem of victimization, and intersectionality.
Marx and Weber: Two Main Approaches to the Struggle for Power
Karl Marx identified two key classes in a capitalist industrial society: the capitalists (bourgeoisie) and the workers (proletariat). The bourgeoisie own the means of production, and the proletariat must sell the bourgeoisie their labour to survive. These two classes have opposing interests and are permanently locked in conflict. The proletariat experience exploitation and alienation at the hands of the bourgeoisie, and in turn use every possible means to improve their wages, working conditions, and job security. Marx’s goal was for the proletariat to develop class consciousness and overthrow capitalism via revolutionary action.
Max Weber focused on the distribution of power among classes and identified three ways that people could gain power: market position, parties, and status groups. Market position refers to a person’s economic power in a given market. Parties are associations and organizations that give people non-economic power and influence. Finally, status groups are sets of people who share a social position in society (e.g., education, religion, ethnicity, region, or race), with a common degree of prestige, esteem, and honour.
Neo-Marxists and neo-Weberians continue to build on the theories of Marx and Weber. Neo-Marxist thought includes critical theory, Wallerstein’s world system, and Chomsky’s manufacturing of consent. Critical theory is an analysis of politics and society that focuses on the historical and ideological forces that influence culture and human behaviour. Wallerstein focused on global inequality and how the capitalist world order allows core nations to exploit peripheral nations. Chomsky proposed that the American mass media are powerful ideological institutions that produce propaganda supporting the capitalist economic system.
Neo-Weberian thought incorporates the idea of racialization: the social processes of distinguishing or classifying people according to their believed race or ethnicity. Critical race theory is a form of analysis that explores the way that beliefs about race organize all social structures. Pierre Bourdieu was a particularly influential neo-Weberian theorist who focused on the role of symbols and non-financial capital (including cultural capital and social capital) in establishing social position.
Sociological Approaches to Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism refers to the deregulation of global markets, largely through the reduction of state power. It rests on the assumptions that humans can be economically rational and that free markets, running without state control, will enlarge human well-being. This view is most compatible with a functionalist approach to social organization. In the Global North, neoliberalism became increasingly common and supported about forty years ago. Since then, it has shaped capitalism throughout the world.
Neoliberal ideas have been attacked from various standpoints. The sociological perspective is that ideal markets have never existed and never will. Markets let people with large amounts of wealth, power, and information use their resources to gain even more power, information, and wealth. The main result of neoliberalism since 1980 has been a worldwide increase in inequality, both between and within nation-states. Conflict theory suggests that capitalism is an inherently expansionist economic system, as well as a system of world domination. Capitalists want to manipulate markets, populations, and, if necessary, governments, and neoliberalism is the perfect means by which they can chase these goals.
Social Justice
Social justice refers to the fair and just treatment of members of society. Concern for social justice grows out of the notion that all members of society have a natural right to satisfy certain basic needs. In Canada, these basic rights were guaranteed by the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Social justice is related to identity politics, which focus on removing discrimination against social minorities (e.g., women, racial groups, sexual minorities, etc.). Social justice is concerned with fairness and equity: it asserts that everyone deserves equal economic, political, and social rights and opportunities, but does not assert that complete equality will result.
A socially just society promotes a fair distribution of economic resources, respect for people’s rights, and respect for morally acceptable laws. Societies with strong social justice practices usually have less economic and political inequality.
Another feature of the social justice approach to inequality is the emphasis it places on social construction. This perspective asserts that most social inequalities rest on differences that are not “natural,” but invented and shared through social interaction.
Intersectionality and Interlocking Disadvantages
The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s. Intersectionality recognizes that one person may face several different types of inequality that interact and influence one another. It views each person’s experience of discrimination as nearly unique, because each life contains a nearly unique combination of social advantages and disadvantages.
Intersectionality was originally used to describe the experiences of Black women, and some feel that the term should be reserved for that purpose. Therefore, we will use the term interlocking disadvantages to refer to the ways in which multiple identity characteristics can overlap and intersect to worsen life chances.
Another important point is that what most people consider to be objective is subjective—a picture of the world from their own perspective. Many of the views that we think of as neutral or unbiased belong to (and favour) dominant groups. We must remember that opinions, views, and attitudes are subjective and biased.