Institutional Inequality Research Articles

Unequal Higher Education in the United States: Growing Participation and Shrinking Opportunities

This paper argues that rising institutional inequality is a component of individual-level inequality in the United States because U.S. higher education provides a diverse group of students with unequal access to different kinds of institutions. Using latent profile analysis, we classified all public and private nonprofit higher education institutions in the U.S. from 2005 to 2013 into seven categories. We held these categories stable over time and allowed institutions to move between them. “Good value” institutions were scarce and tended to limit access through selective admission. Only Subsidy Reliant institutions that were directly supported by government appropriations regularly provided good value seats to a racially diverse group of students. Yet the number of institutions in the Subsidy Reliant category declined markedly over time. The resulting system offered access to many students but provided limited opportunity to secure a good value seat.

The Arrival of New Women

The Arrival of New Women

Advancing Indigenous primary health care policy in Alberta, Canada

For Indigenous people worldwide, accessing Primary Health Care (PHC) services responsive to socio-cultural realities is challenging, with institutional inequities in healthcare and jurisdictional barriers encumbering patients, providers, and decision-makers. In the Canadian province of Alberta, appropriate Indigenous health promotion, disease prevention, and primary care health services are needed, though policy reform is hindered by complex networks and competing interests between: federal/provincial funders; reserve/urban contexts; medical/allied health professional priorities; and three Treaty territories each structuring fiduciary responsibilities of the Canadian government.In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released a final report from over six years spent considering impacts of the country's history of Indian residential schools, which for more than a century forcibly removed thousands of children from their families and communities. The TRC directed 94 calls to action to all levels of society, including health systems, to address an historical legacy of cultural assimilationism against Indigenous peoples. To address TRC calls that Indigenous health disparities be recognized as resulting from previous government policies, and to integrate Indigenous leadership and perspectives into health systems, PHC decision-makers, practitioners, and scholars in the province of Alberta brought together stakeholders from across Canada. The gathering detailed here explored Indigenous PHC models from other Canadian provinces to collaboratively build relationships for policy reform and identify opportunities for PHC innovations within Alberta.

Social Movements and Prefigurative Organizing: Confronting entrenched inequalities in Occupy London

Organizational scholars have examined how social movements generate institutional change through contentious politics. However, little attention has been given to the role of prefigurative politics. The latter collapses expressive and strategic politics so as to enact the desired future society in the present and disrupt the reproduction of institutionalized structures that sustain deep-seated inequalities. The paper presents an ethnographic study of Occupy London and protesters’ encounter with people living homeless to examine how prefigurative politics is organized in the face of entrenched inequalities. Findings show how the macro-level inequalities that protesters set out to fight resurfaced in the day-to-day living in the camp itself. Initially, the creation of an exceptional space and communal space helped participants align expressive and strategic politics and imbued them with the emotional energy needed to confront challenges. But over time these deeply entrenched institutional inequalities frustrated participants’ attempts to maintain an exceptional and communal space, triggering a spiral of decline. The dilemma faced by Occupy invites us to reflect on how everyday constraints may be suspended so as to open up imagination for novel and more equal ways of organizing.

"Why Even Bother; They Are Not Going to Do It?" The Structural Roots of Racism and Discrimination in Lactation Care.

Through semi-structured interviews with 36 International Board Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLCs) who assist mothers with breastfeeding, this study takes a systematic look at breastfeeding disparities. Specifically, this study documents race-based discrimination against patients in the course of lactation care and links the implicit bias literature to breastfeeding disparities. IBCLCs report instances of race-based discrimination against patients such as unequal care provided to patients of color and overt racist remarks said in front of or behind patient's backs. This study connects patient discrimination in lactation to institutional inequality and offers suggestions to address these inequities.

IO public communication and discursive inclusion: how the UN reported the Arms Trade Treaty process to a global audience

International organisations (IOs) are increasingly going public by pursuing proactive public communication. How is this trend changing the terms under which global public debates on international issues take place? The article argues that IO public communication may have highly problematic repercussions for public discourse, because it tends to prioritise some voices, while marginalising others. I discuss a problematic prioritisation/marginalisation of voices in relation to three logics of public communication. First, as public information, public communication privileges organisational leaders by heralding their official narrative of goals, internal processes and outside action. Second, as governance, it strategically sides with norm entrepreneurs and orchestrates advocacy campaigns. Third, as self-legitimation, it seeks to construct symbolically procedural fairness and inclusiveness. Based on these logics, public communication may play a questionable role in marginalising critics of IO policies and procedures while facilitating public (mis)perceptions of its democratic credentials and the depoliticisation of institutional inequalities. My argument is illustrated by the results obtained from a combined reconstructive and quantitative text analysis of the United Nations’ communications in the Arms Trade Treaty process.

Educational inequality and achievement disparity: An empirical study of migrant children in China

The study examined academic disparity between migrant and local urban children and its associations with family socioeconomic status, parental involvement, and school settings using the survey data conducted in 2014 from a sample of children and their families in Beijing, China. The analytic sample (N = 687) included 431 migrant children and 256 local urban children. Structural Equations Models (SEM) were used to test research questions. Results suggest that migrant children, in particular, those in private migrant schools, have much poorer academic performance than their urban counterparts. This performance gap is mainly explained by different schools that migrant and local urban children attend (public vs. private migrant schools). Family socioeconomic status and parental involvement, while are positively associated with academic performance, do not remove the disparity between migrant children in private migrant schools and local urban children. When school satisfaction is included in analyses as a proxy of school quality, the difference in academic performance between two groups becomes insignificant. The study sheds light on the potential pathway that institutional inequality in education affects migrant students' educational achievement through the quality of educational services and financial, human, and social investment. Findings suggest that, to address academic disparity between migrant and local urban children in China, it is important to change the institutional inequality faced by migrant children.

Denying systemic inequality in segregated Chilean schools: race-neutral discourses among administrative and teaching staff

This article addresses the educational context in which ethnically segregated high poverty schools operate in Chile, and the ways that inequalities within these establishments are understood by members of their administrative and teaching staff. In particular we draw attention to the unwillingness of the majority of these employees to name or recognize specific forms of institutional inequality. Following critical pedagogy literature we argue that the Chilean education system reproduces a fear of talk among teachers working in areas with high density indigenous populations, which obscures unequal social structures and opportunities for specific (class, gender, ethnic) groups in school contexts. Based on data from 12 interviews with school staff and observations from four schools in southern Chile, we analyze how intersecting inequality is discursively reduced by predominantly white teachers to individual deficit, de-politicized geographical problems of access to schooling, and the normalizing of low achievement across schools with students from similar backgrounds.

Valuing Our Communities: Ethical Considerations for Economic Evaluation of Community-Based Prevention.

Restricted public budgets and increasing efforts to link the impact of community interventions to public savings have increased the use of economic evaluation. While this type of evaluation can be important for program planning, it also raises important ethical issues about how we value the time of local stakeholders who support community interventions. In particular, researchers navigate issues of scientific accuracy, institutional inequality, and research utility in their pursuit of even basic cost estimates. We provide an example of how we confronted these issues when estimating the costs of a large-scale community-based intervention. Principles for valuing community members' time and conducting economic evaluations of community programs are discussed.

All Equal in Death? Fighting inequality in the contemporary funeral industry

This paper examines how alternative economic organizations can fight inequality without help from traditional partners such as social movement organizations. We focus on co-operatives’ successful battle against corporate dominance in the Québec funeral industry. We analyse their actions through the lens of Nancy Fraser’s tridimensional theory of justice, which utilizes the cultural dimension of recognition, political dimension of representation, and economic dimension of distribution. We demonstrate how funeral co-ops empowered their federation to influence institutional inequality while maintaining a co-op identity by embodying the potentially contradictory flexibility of social movements along with co-op principles. This paper contributes to scholarship on collective social action by exploring the dual role of model and movement played by secondary co-ops such as the federation of Québec funeral co-ops, which draws on local institutional and organizational resources to disrupt unfair structures. We also extend Fraser’s theory, using it as a framework for understanding the dynamic relationships between inequality and its potential remedies at different levels of analysis.

College Readiness Versus College Worthiness: Examining the Role of Principal Beliefs on College Readiness Initiatives in an Urban U.S. High School

In light of increasing emphasis on the importance of post-secondary education to personal economic security, there is growing interest to promote college readiness initiatives in high schools, particularly for low-income and minority students for whom the harmful effects of institutional inequities on college readiness is well-documented. Relatively unexplored is whether and how deficit beliefs about these students influence college readiness initiatives. Extant literature establishes that principals play an important role in mediating organizational change and culture. However, there is scant research evaluating how principals’ beliefs may influence their leadership towards reforming college readiness, particularly in regard to creating a college-going culture. This case study provides a critical examination of one principal who engaged in school-wide organizational change to create a college-going culture at an urban U.S. high school serving a high number of low-income and minority students. Discourse analysis revealed that although this principal’s reform efforts were exemplary in many ways, he expressed deficit views of underrepresented students. Findings suggest that reductionist views of minority and low-income students conflict with initiatives to promote equitable college readiness. This case study uncovers a discursive dichotomy significant to examining the intersectionality of principals’ beliefs and college readiness initiatives.

Comparative Perspectives on South Africa’s and Brazil’s Institutional Inequalities under Progressive Social Policies

South Africa and Brazil are burdened with persistent inequality and poverty two decades after democratisation. Both countries have developed ambitious social policies aimed at addressing these challenges. In this article, I seek to answer the following question: to what extent are the social policies pursued in South Africa and Brazil leading to the realisation of a new social contract? The article will compare the two countries’ social policy architectures in their evolution under the governance of the African National Congress and the Partido dos Trabalhadores. This analysis should be read in a dynamic global context where cash transfers have shaped their social policies, the Social Grant in South Africa and the Bolsa Família in Brazil, culminating in a re-invigorated discussion and debate within the global social policy architecture. The article departs from the mainstream approach of social protection as an instrumental tool for reducing poverty and inequality, which, I argue, is a narrow vision of social policy. I advocate an institutional analysis to social policy, where mechanisms of production, protection and redistribution are pivotal in addressing the socio-economic challenges that face both countries.

Institutionalizing Inequality: Calculative Practices and Regimes of Inequality in International Development

This paper focuses on the institutionalization of inequality in relations between donors and NGOs in the international development sector. We argue that these relations operate within a neoliberal and competitive marketplace, which are necessarily unequal. Specifically, we focus on the apparently mundane practice of impact assessment, and consider how this is fundamental to understanding the performative enactment of institutional inequality. For our analysis we draw upon Miller and Rose’s work on governmentality and calculative practices. We develop our argument with reference to a case study of a donor driven impact assessment initiative being conducted in India. Specifically, we consider an impact assessment initiative that the donor has piloted with one of the NGOs they fund that seeks to improve the livelihoods of Indian farmers. We will argue that institutional inequality can be understood in the way the market as a social institution becomes enacted into mundane calculative practices. Calculative practices produce different kinds of knowledge and in so doing becomes a way in which subjects position themselves, or become positioned, as unequal.

Dancing Up the Glass Escalator: Institutional Advantages for Men in Ballet Choreography

A dearth of women exists in the upper echelons of ballet choreography. Both academia and the popular press have noted and documented this phenomenon. For instance, in “Breaking the Glass Slipper,” New York Times journalist Michael Cooper recently noted, “When it comes to choreography, at least at most major companies, ballet remains overwhelmingly a man’s world” [1]. Similarly, critic Luke Jennings has noted, “In professional ballet companies, faced with heavier workloads and greater competitive stress than their male colleagues (not to mention the exigencies of pointe work), few women have the time, energy or inclination to consider choreography” [2]. And yet many arguments (such as Jennings’) as to why women do not become choreographers reflect back on women in ballet – claiming a lack of interest, ambition, or even ability – and fail to acknowledge the structural and systemic inequities that promote men in ballet at the expense of their female peers. Even women choreographers themselves tend to claim that women do not become choreographers because of their own choices, constraints, etc., instead of citing systemic structures of unequal opportunity [3]. Failing to acknowledge institutional inequality places the fault of discrimination upon its victims, and ignores the gendered hierarchy within ballet institutions. As an alternative, situating ballet choreography in the context of sociological theory can shed light on how institutions promote token men in ballet to artistic leadership positions, and may help disprove the notion that women do not become choreographers simply because of cultural reasons that relate back to the women themselves.

Social Harmony and Diversity: The Affordances and Constraints of Harmony as an Educational Goal

Background/Context There is a pressing need to consider how citizens should live together, especially in societies that are increasingly ethnically and politically diverse. Even though multicultural education is constructed very differently and serves very different purposes in different national contexts, relatively little attention has been paid to how education systems of countries such as China, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates give greater emphasis to the concepts of harmony and social cohesion. Purpose/Objective This study explores some of the ways in which multicultural education is defined and conceptualized in East Asian countries. This paper draws on the case study of Singapore to interrogate the concept of harmony, investigate the implications of the state incorporating this concept as an educational goal for the public education system, and examine teachers’ understandings of multicultural education. Research Design The study adhered to the qualitative case study design. The data consisted primarily of semistructured individual interviews with 24 Singapore secondary social studies teachers, as well as relevant curricular and political documents such as the national Social Studies curriculum, political speeches, and official government publications. Guided by the literature, the interviewers asked questions to surface the participants’ understandings of the definition, purposes, and practices of multicultural education. Subsequently, the interviewers used follow-up questions to probe further and elicit additional description of how the teachers arrived at these understandings. The data analysis, shaped largely by the constant comparative method, was data-driven and inductive. Conclusions/Recommendations By illustrating some of the affordances and constraints of incorporating harmony as an educational goal, this study offers multicultural education scholars and teacher educators an opportunity to better understand some of the ways in which multicultural education is conceptualized in East Asian countries with strong Confucian traditions. The findings from this study suggest that a focus on harmony as an educational goal may help facilitate a move away from programs that emphasize the development of individual students’ social and political competencies towards programs and policies designed to promote communal trust and social cohesion. Finally, this study illustrates some of the challenges teachers face when balancing the goals of building trust and harmony within society and interrogating entrenched interests, institutional inequality, and unequal power relations.

Toward Complete Inclusion: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Military Service Members after Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

The 2010 repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) is one example of how U.S. public policy has shifted toward greater inclusion of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. The repeal of DADT reversed the practice of discharging LGB service members on the basis of sexual identity. LGB service members may now serve their country without fear of direct repercussions stemming from sexual identity. Though it is a statutory step toward parity, DADT repeal does not address a number of cultural and institutional inequities that continue to hinder full inclusion of sexual minority service members. Notably, as discussed in this article, DADT largely ignores issues facing the transgender population. This study examines remaining inequities and their ramifications for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender service members and their families. The article concludes with practice and policy recommendations for culturally competent social work practice with military service members across the sexual identity spectrum.

Is gender inequality a barrier to realizing fertility intentions? Fertility aspirations and realizations in South Korea

ABSTRACTResearch highlights the emergence of national low fertility regimes and the importance of understanding how institutional gender inequity supports low fertility. In South Korea, where gender inequality is high and a national low fertility regime exists, many women express a desire for two children but bear one child. Does gender equity, particularly within the household, influence the realization of fertility desires within the context of institutional inequality? Using the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women & Families, in this paper, I test the effect of gender equity within the family on second births. Evaluating a subsample of married women with one child who desire a second child, I find that women’s gender role attitudes, husbands’ housework and women’s responsibility for children’s education influence the likelihood of realizing a second birth. Results highlight the importance of men’s household contributions and women’s educational responsibilities on the realization of fertility intentions within low fertility regimes.

Families are More Popular than Feminism: Exploring the Greater Judicial Success of Family and Medical Leave Laws

Workers do not exist in a vacuum; they have families and medical needs. Many employees struggle with caring for themselves and loved ones within the rigid confines of the work week. Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) in order to ameliorate this problem, but the statute has proven to be an incomplete solution. Recently, federal legislators have proposed laws to enhance the existing leave rights under the FMLA. Similarly, a number of states and municipalities have passed laws to expand employees' ability to take leave from work in order to care for family or medical issues. Given the momentum and interest in legal reform, it is appropriate to ask whether expanded leave laws will be effective in changing the lives of actual workers. More specifically, will the new leave laws survive the inevitable encounter with a judiciary that has a markedly poor history of enforcement in other employment law contexts. In the clearest example of this judicial resistance, claims brought under federal anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) have a distinctly low success rate in comparison to other civil actions. In contrast, claims brought under the FMLA fare significantly better, with nearly double the Title VII rate of successful outcomes for plaintiffs. This Article uses three theoretical frameworks, political, psychological, and institutional to evaluate and understand the greater success of leave laws. Political science theories suggest that the FMLA is more successful because the statute is less controversial and inspires a weaker ideological response in judges than anti-discrimination laws. The theory of cultural cognition suggests that the FMLA is more successful because it does not trigger the strong unconscious resistance associated with discrimination claims. Finally, theories of institutional inequality indicate that the FMLA is more successful because it can undermine the traditional norms of the ideal worker in ways that the anti-discrimination laws cannot. Overall, all three theories point to a consistent explanation for why FMLA claims have better outcomes. Namely, leave laws such as the FMLA have many of the characteristics of a neutral benefit statute, in contrast to anti-discrimination laws' focus on protected classes such as race or gender. Ultimately, understanding what differentiates the outcomes between these related statutes will shed light on judicial decision-making in employment law and will suggest avenues for advocates seeking to change women's work life for the better.

Editorial: Institutional Determinants of Social Inequalities.

Editorial: Institutional Determinants of Social Inequalities.

Transitional Justice as a Path to Distributive Justice: A Jurisprudential and Legal Case for Land Restitution in Kenya

Rawls’ theory of distributive justice may serve as a useful model in conceptualizing a model of the ideal political economy – one that seeks to keep inequalities that have come about as a result of natural accident to a minimum. Moreover, his principles of justice can be used correctively, to address institutional inequalities that have the effect of entrenching social dislocation. Kenya has, over the decades up until now, been riven by injustices relating to land. This has led to the development of a small cluster of landed elites while the majority of citizens are effectively denied land access rights. This is regardless of the fact that most of the land so acquired by the former was acquired irregularly and with disregard of bona fide title of the original occupants. The concept and process of transitional justice may be viewed as the vehicle toward attaining corrective justice and accountability for offences committed in times of national crisis as a restorative measure.