Forms Of Social Inequality Research Articles

Causes and Trends of the Digital Divide

In modern societies, the digital divide indicates the emergence of a new form of social inequality. To analyse this conc ept we study causes of private computer and Internet access with a three-fold model including human capital, family context and social context. The 1997, 2001, and 2003 German Socio-Economic Panel waves contain data on private com-puter and Internet use, as well as information on past and present socio-economic circumstances. In 2003, membership of technical generations and ethnic background to a large extent determined the use of new technologies. By illustrating the importance of human capital and family context we are able to explain additional differences found for computer and Internet use. Effe cts of income, gender, and living in a single household are significant. Our study shows that some of the long-term consequences of the 40-year German separation are diminishing with regard to computer use. We demonstrate that human and social capital are more important than economic capital in explaining private computer and Internet use. Indications for higher social classe s to secure or even increase their favourable social positions exist.

Los procesos de la complejidad social en el Noroeste peninsular: arqueología y fuentes literarias

The general aim of this paper is the analysis of the forms of social inequality in Northwestern “castro” communities, taking into account both the regional diversity and the Roman influence before the conquest. Two models are proposed: one segmentary and the other of large castro settlements, in order to define and interpret the diversity of social relations and the processes of change. This allows us to overcome the traditional homogenising points of view and to put forward an integral analysis from both the archaeological record and the ancient literary sources.

Public or Private Responsibility? Early Childhood Education and Care, Inequality, and the Welfare State

Although early childhood education and care provision (ECEC) is increasing in all the industrialized welfare states, institutional arrangements for providing and financing services still vary substantially across countries at similar levels of economic development. These policies have potentially important implications for the reduction of income and labor market inequalities. In this paper we document variation in the institutional arrangements for ECEC in fourteen industrialized countries. Institutional variation is associated with equally varied levels of public responsibility for the care of young children - across countries, and between age groups within some countries. The extent to which care is socialized has implications for the reduction of several forms of social inequality.

A Remarkable Sociological Imagination

This paper reviews the scope of Basil Bernstein's sociology, indicating some of the research that his ideas have inspired, shaped or provoked. Although it takes a roughly chronological approach to the development of his ideas, the paper emphasizes how consistently he explored the making of societies and social classes, and the structuring of social interaction. The title of the paper reflects how successfully Bernstein met Wright Mills' criterion for a true sociological imagination--that it seeks to grasp the extent to which 'personal troubles' are 'public issues' arising from the changing forms of social inequalities as these are produced from generation to generation.

International Inequality in the Age of Globalization: Japanese Economic Ascent and the Restructuring of the Capitalist World-Economy

This paper shows how Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state constructed a development model based on the steel industry as a generative sector that drove Japan’s economic ascent in the world-historical context of U.S. hegemony. We make three arguments in this paper. First, there is a new model of capital accumulation that does create new forms of social inequality by redistributing costs and bene?ts in very di?erent ways than earlier models. Second, Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state created this new model of capital accumulation and social inequality via mechanisms including joint ventures, long term contracts, and other forms of international trade and investment, not U.S.-based transnational corporations, as is usually assumed. Third, world-systems theory reconstructed through the lens of the new historical materialism explains this restructuring of the capitalist world-economy as the outcome of Japan’s economic ascent over the last ?fty years. Further, we argue that this new model of capital accumulation has had similar impacts on redistributing the costs and bene?ts of development between core and peripheral regions of the capitalist world-economy in a wide range of global industries. These strategies created a tightly linked set of technological and organizational innovations to overcome the natural and social obstacles to Japanese development, dramatically increase Japan’s international economic competitiveness by lowering production costs in all sectors of the economy, turn Japan into the world’s largest exporter of manufactured products, restructure a range of global industries, and recreate the world-system hierarchy in support of Japanese development. In particular, organizational inno-vations in the use of long term contracts and joint ventures in raw materials industries to foster global excess capacity and lower rents to resource extracting ?rms and states reallocated the costs of providing the material building blocks of Japanese development to the states and ?rms of its new raw materials periphery. This competitive advantage drove Japanese capital accumulation and economic ascent, and simultaneously drove underdevelopment in Japan’s periphery. These Japanese innovations became key elements of globalization as U.S. and European transnational corporations and states sought to compete with Japan. Joint ventures, long-term contracts, and other forms of inter?rm cooperation have replaced vertically integrated foreign direct investment, the earlier U.S. model of capital accumulation and international economic linkage, as the model for global industries.

The Pacs and marriage and cohabitation in France

Change in marriage and cohabitation began in France thirty years ago. 2.5 million cohabiting couples and more than 40 per cent of births outside marriage reveals not only a new acceptability of cohabitation and family formation out of wedlock, but a new social signification of marriage itself. In this paper, we analyse what appears to have been a 'soft' revolution, widely accepted, and a paradoxical mutation. While the abandonment of a strictly matrimonial conception of the family is generally accepted in France, attitudes are much more contradictory with respect to legal rights of unmarried couples. The long, complex and controversial story of the evolution of the Pacs (Parte Civil de Solidarite, shows, behind the issue of homosexuality, how difficult it is for French culture to conceive a legal status of non-married couples. The Pacs, as a new possibility for heterosexual as well as homosexual cohabitees, is not easy to define from a legal point of view. This intermediate status, neither a union nor a contract, neither private nor public, expresses the ambiguity of the French way of responding to increasing cohabitation. Analysing the Pacs as a transitory law, we suggest that a complex jurisprudential story is now beginning in France. This paper ends with a broader perspective on the interpretation of family change: no consensus exists in academic and political circles. The new forms of social inequalities will certainly represent one of the main issues in the public, academic and political debate in the future.

Analyzing Social Inequality in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization and Modernity Restructure Inequality

Introduction What are the key sociological ideas on social inequality that we should bring forward into the twentySfirst century, and what are the new ideas, theories, research topics that should be develS oped? Social inequality will enter the twentyS first century in new forms, but many of these will recapitulate themes that have been traditional to sociology for longer than the last century. The key to understanding the twentySfirst century is the analysis of two processes: globalS ization and modemization. Globalization is led by new information and communication techS nologies that are reshaping not only financial and capital markets but political and cultural processes. Globalization is fundamentally restructuring social institutions and their interS relationship, with consequences for the degree and forms of social inequality. Modernization is still ongoing, as the gender regime is slowly transformed from a domestic to public form and women enter the public sphere of employment and the state. While modernization is often conS sidered the completion of a transition from traS ditional to industrial society in the South of the globe, here I mean the modernization of gender relations around the developed world, as women emerge into more public arenas. Globalization and modernity should not be conflated, but rather seen as separate processes, with combined and uneven effects. I explore these processes in relation to new forms of working, the World Wide Web, and the restructuring of welfare and of politics.

Self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe: a refuge from poverty or road to riches?

Researchers analyzing self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe have frequently adopted a “dualist” model which relegates the self-employed to marginal sectors of the economy. This paper challenges the dualist approach and argues that the self-employed cannot be regarded as refugees from poverty with few resources and few opportunities to earn high incomes and accumulate wealth. Data from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia are used to show that self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe encompasses two distinct class locations: the individually self-employed on the one hand, whose socioeconomic status differs little from that of ordinary workers, and employers on the other, who receive incomes and possess assets far in excess of that of both the individually self-employed and ordinary workers. A proper understanding of the manner in which systems of stratification have changed in Eastern Europe thus requires that one acknowledge processes of differentiation among the self-employed as well as the importance of property ownership in generating new forms of social inequality in the post-communist period.

THE GENDER SYSTEM AND INTERACTION

▪ Abstract The gender system includes processes that both define males and females as different in socially significant ways and justify inequality on the basis of that difference. Gender is different from other forms of social inequality in that men and women interact extensively within families and households and in other role relations. This high rate of contact between men and women raises important questions about how interaction creates experiences that confirm, or potentially could undermine, the beliefs about gender difference and inequality that underlie the gender system. Any theory of gender difference and inequality must accommodate three basic findings from research on interaction. (a). People perceive gender differences to be pervasive in interaction. (b). Studies of interaction among peers with equal power and status show few gender differences in behavior. (c). Most interactions between men and women occur in the structural context of roles or status relationships that are unequal. These status and power differences create very real interaction effects, which are often confounded with gender. Beliefs about gender difference combine with structurally unequal relationships to perpetuate status beliefs, leading men and women to recreate the gender system in everyday interaction. Only peer interactions that are not driven by cultural beliefs about the general competence of men and women or interactions in which women are status- or power-advantaged over men are likely to undermine the gender system.

Embodying inequality: a review of concepts, measures, and methods for studying health consequences of discrimination.

Investigating effects of discrimination upon health requires clear concepts, methods, and measures. At issue are both economic consequences of discrimination and accumulated insults arising from everyday and at times violent experiences of being treated as a second-class citizen, at each and every economic level. Guidelines for epidemiologic investigations and other public health research on ways people embody racism, sexism, and other forms of social inequality, however, are not well defined, as research in this area is in its infancy. Employing an ecosocial framework, this article accordingly reviews definitions and patterns of discrimination within the United States; evaluates analytic strategies and instruments researchers have developed to study health effects of different kinds of discrimination; and delineates diverse pathways by which discrimination can harm health, both outright and by distorting production of epidemiologic knowledge about determinants of population health. Three methods of studying health consequences of discrimination are examined (indirect; direct, at the individual level, in relation to personal experiences of discrimination; at the population level, such as via segregation), and recommendations are provided for developing research instruments to measure acute and cumulative exposure to different aspects of discrimination.

Beyond the Myth of Self-Actualization: Reinventing the Community Perspective of Adult Education

In this contribution, we discuss two tendencies in mainstream adult and continuing education. First, there is the tendency to gear adult and continuing education towards individualized responses to present day processes of social transformation. We interpret these changes with reference to the concept of the risk society. Second, we comment on the tendency of adult and continuing eduction to increasingly frame these individualized responses in labor market terms. These tendencies provoke a privatization of identity development and may even contribute to new forms of social inequality. In contrast with these developments, we emphasize the importance of adult education for social participation and social responsibility. In this perspective we reconceptualize both the ethic and the aesthetic dimension of adult education.

Healthy Public Policy and the World Trade Organization: A Proposal for an International Health Presence in Future World Trade/Investment Talks

Poverty, other forms of social inequality and human impacts on the environment are increasingly recognized as important, perhaps fundamental, health determinants. These determinants, in turn, are largely conditioned and constrained by economic practices, and by government legislation that regulates such practices or seeks to mitigate inequalities that arise from them. Over the past two decades the ability of national governments to intervene in economic practices has been reduced by two interrelated phenomena: the dominance of a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, which emphasizes free (unregulated) markets and a ‘minimal’ welfare state, and the growth in regional and global free trade and investment agreements. There is mounting evidence that policies based on neoliberal economic theory, including free trade/investment agreements, may seriously undermine public health by increasing social inequalities, depleting natural resources and increasing environmental pollution. This evidence has sparked a call among many public interest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and policy ‘think tanks’ for appending strong ‘social clauses’ to global trade and investment agreements to ensure that such agreements are socially just and environmentally sustainable. This paper proposes creation of a strong public health lobby, both nationally and internationally, to join with other public interest NGOs in the social clause campaign. It begins by defining and critiquing some of the basic tenets of neoliberal economic orthodoxy which underpin the push towards global free trade and investment agreements. It then describes the current status of these agreements, and provides examples of how such agreements might imperil public health. The paper then discusses the social clause initiative, and concludes by advancing a proposal for a public health lobby presence at those fora where trade and investment agreements are negotiated and monitored.

Changing woman: a history of racial ethnic women in modern America

While great strides have been made in documenting the historical experiences and actions of middle-class white women in United States, scholarship on racial ethnic women has begun to appear only in recent years as women of color and other scholars have broadened the base of inquiry in women's history. Without a window into the lives of racial ethnic women our understanding of the meanings and dynamics of various forms of social inequality will be woefully inadequate. Now, in this illuminating volume, Karen Anderson offers the first book to examine the lives of women from three important ethnic groups in the United States - Native American, Mexican American, and African American women - revealing the specificities and commonalities of their experiences. Changing Woman provides the first comparative history of women from these racial ethnic groups, explaining changes in the sources and nature of the oppressions in their lives and tracing their progress over time.

Industrialisation and Social Inequality in 19th-Century Europe by Hartmut Kaelble

690 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of this major contribution to the held is welcome. (Cecil O. Smith, Jr., reviewed the French edition in Technology and Culture 22 [October 1981]: 771 —76.) Eda Kranakis has reorganized and extended the bibliography, and Alex Keller has revised the technical terminology for this edition. Thomas P. Hughes Dr. Hughes teaches in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Industrialisation and Social Inequality in 19th-Century Europe. By Hartmut Kaelble. Leamington Spa, Warwickshire: Berg, 1986. Distributed: New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pp. vii + 216; tables, notes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $23.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Hartmut Kaelble defines social inequality “as referring specifically to the distribution within a society of scarce material and non-material goods and services” (p. 3). The objectives of his book, Industrialisation and Social Inequality in 19th-Century Europe, are to review the existing scholarship that bears on social inequality and to indicate what kind of research social historians should do in the future for a complete understanding of the subject in 19th-century Western Europe. The book addresses three central questions: (1) Did social inequal­ ities increase, decrease, or stay the same during 19th-century indus­ trialization? (2) Did trends in social inequalities between and within classes strengthen or weaken class structures? (3) To what extent and in what ways did industrialization foster or diminish social inequali­ ties? Kaelble divides the book into separate chapters focusing on dif­ ferent types of social inequality, including income and wealth distribution, working conditions and relations, housing availability and conditions, health and mortality, and inter- and intraclass disparities. This research report, as Kaelble calls his book, summarizes and crit­ icizes a number of recent studies by primarily German, British, French, and U.S. scholars. However, none of the cited works does what Kaelble wishes social historians would do; namely, collect massive amounts of quantitative and qualitative data on a wide range of social inequality indicators for all of Western Europe during the 19th century. To be sure, Kaelble acknowledges the importance of more limited local and regional studies in tapping hitherto unused or underutilized archival and published sources and in establishing analytical frameworks for researching and understanding different forms of social inequality. And from these studies Kaelble draws preliminary conclusions about social inequality, class society, and industrialization. He asserts that, in general, social inequality increased during the Industrial Revolution but stabilized or even decreased in the late 19th TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 691 and early 20th centuries. His reading of the literature also suggests that social inequalities furthered class divisions between middle and working classes, but that evidence of disparities within the middle class undermines this conclusion, since it rests on an assumption of class homogeneity. Conclusions about the effect of industrialization itself on social inequality are ambiguous, because of great variation at different times and in different circumstances during the 19th century, and because of the influence of other factors, like nationality, region, sex, attitudes, and politics. This inconclusiveness regarding the relationship between indus­ trialization and social inequality derives from Kaelble’s focus on gen­ eral trends in, rather than specific causes and consequences of, social inequality. It also explains why technology is so peripheral in a study that might well have given it more prominence. In the chapters on inequalities in the workplace and disparities between classes and within strata, Kaelble does mention that technology increased inequalities between skilled and unskilled workers during early industrialization. But consistent with his objectives, he does not develop this causal relationship with any specificity or depth. Kaelble’s argument that social historians need to compile more data on social inequality in 19th-century Europe is indisputable. His book is rife with meaty dissertation topics for graduate students and valu­ able research projects for teams of scholars. But I am still not per­ suaded that the proposed research on general conditions and broad trends of social inequality should replace the case studies of trades, cities, or regions—as Kaelble implies and occasionally states. For the case studies usually include the complex chain of causation, and hu­ man action and response, that are essential to the establishment of social...

“The Unequal Society”: Descriptive Evaluation of a Community Education Project

Poverty, unemployment, and other forms of social inequality are strongly associated with increased mortality and morbidity rates. Public health interventions into socioeconomic or structural causes of illness must be multidimensional, involving health promotion, health education, health advocacy and community development strategies. A specific health education project designed to increase professional and community awareness of social inequality as a public health risk factor is described as a model for similar undertakings by other health departments.

Social inequality and healthy public policy.

For decades, health education programmes have been based on the assumption that individual behaviours (for example smoking, drug use, eating patterns) are the major risk-factors in contemporary illness. This assumption often led to interventions that subtly "blamed the victim" for his or her ill-health. In recent years the broader social conceptualization of health and illness has directed many health educators' attention towards socio-economic and environmental factors which condition and constrain lifestyle choices, and which may be directly associated with increased disease risks. While it is becoming common for government health departments and agencies to acknowledge poverty, unemployment and other forms of social inequality as potent health hazards, programmes to ameliorate such conditions are rare. Since 1983, the Toronto health department has developed programmes based upon a socio-environmental model of disease which specifically targets social systems rather than individual behaviour for change. Elements of this approach include extensive media reports on the health implications of such issues as welfare benefits, poverty, unemployment and housing; health education programmes to stimulate a critical understanding of the causes and structure of social inequality; health advocacy initiatives to influence political and legislative reforms; and a community development orientation which involves the department in broad-based coalitions working towards healthy social change. Most recently, the department has become a resource to groups attempting to create employment and service community needs through cooperative forms of economic development. Several examples of the department's programmes in each of these areas are provided. To meet the challenge of the World Health Organization's Alma Ata Declaration, health educators must examine their own potential to act as social-change agents, and must become more sophisticated in the political analysis of their practice.

Masters of tradition: customary land tenure and new forms of social inequality in a Vanuatu peasantry

The persistence of customary land tenure in a cash‐cropping context is giving rise to new forms of social inequality that masquerade as perquisites of traditional preeminence in Longana, Vanuatu. This paper examines the processes through which a few customary landholders were able to create relatively large coconut plantations in the 1930s, and the ways in which some of their heirs have maintained these holdings, emerging as wealthy individuals who are beginning to follow copra production and investment strategies that increasingly differentiate them from smaller landholders. A flexible system of customary land tenure has both legitimized the actions of such individuals and obscured the new consequences of following tradition. [land tenure, social inequality, differentiation in peasantries, copra, Melanesia]