Antonio Schizzerotto (Ed.): Vite ineguali. Disuguaglianze e corsi di vita nell'Italia contemporanea (Unequal Lives. Inequalities and Life Histories in Contemporary Italy) Il Mulino: Bologna, 2002. 399 pp.

Abstract

This publication, edited by Antonio Schizzerotto, sets out to identify the changes in social inequalities that took place in Italy during the twentieth century. It also has two further objectives: on the one hand to combine an analysis of social stratification with a study of individual life cycles, and on the other to show the importance of longitudinal data for the empirical analysis and theoretical understanding of social change. It is, in fact, based on the first retrospective wave of a panel survey—‘Indagine longitudinale sulle famiglie italiane’ (ILFI or Italian Household Panel Survey)—which consists of five data collection waves (1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005). The first chapter defines the theoretical framework. Schizzerotto analyses the sociological literature from which theoretical hypotheses about temporal change in social stratification and the principal factors that structure inequality in advanced industrial societies can be extracted. This chapter features a severe and convincing critique of many recent sociological theories which take the view that contemporary societies are undergoing radical, monotonic and linear change which is capable of radically transforming them from what they were only a few decades ago. Whether they consider the increase in meritocracy, the weakening in the structured nature of inequalities or their pluralization, fragilization and individualization, each of the theoretical positions maintains that contemporary societies exhibit inevitable and deterministic change. Schizzerotto replaces these theories with a more subtle and plausible conception in which change in social stratification is a slow non-linear and non-monotonic process in which the present situation moves further away from and then closer to that of the past. This situation occurs because social inequality is the outcome of interdependencies between structural constraints and individual reactions to them. Likewise, the author criticizes the idea, much present in recent theoretical work, that social classes are ceasing to play an essential role in structuring and crystallizing inequalities. Schizzerotto puts forward an alternative hypothesis which he describes as neo-Weberian: classes continue to play a dominant role, although other factors of inequality—such as gender and generation—can also play an important role in the dynamics of stratification. A large part of the book is devoted to attempts to test these hypotheses empirically in the case of Italian society.