Institutional Inequality Research Articles

The Ideal Delegation: How Institutional Privilege Silences “Developing” Nations in the UN Climate Negotiations

Abstract In the UN climate negotiations, national delegations cannot contribute equally. Scholars have shown that “developed” countries exert greater influence than “developing” nations. This study examines how these inequalities between delegations materialize under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Drawing on 30 interviews and over 200 hours of observation at five UNFCCC meetings, I ask (1) how are institutional structures in the UNFCCC aligned with normative ideals of national development; (2) how do these ideals impact the experiences of national delegations and their negotiators; and (3) what does this reveal about institutional inequality and privilege in this context? Building on institutional and organizational studies of work and literature on Developmental Ideals, I identify four characteristics of an ideal delegation to the UNFCCC that are based in norms of national development and privileged by the structures of the institution: they are large, English-speaking, equipped with Western scientific and legal expertise, and have the ability to send the same negotiators year after year. I demonstrate how non-normative countries that cannot send an ideal delegation find that the institutional structures prohibit them from engaging effectively. Ultimately, they must develop coping mechanisms to creatively compensate for their systemic disadvantages.

The Segmentation of the Academic Labour Market and Gender, Field, and Institutional Inequalities

Using data from a 2017 survey of Czech academics this article examines the casualisation of working conditions in the Czech academic labour market (ALM) and explores gender, sectoral, and institutional inequalities through the lens of the theory of labour market segmentation. A hierarchical cluster analysis reveals three segments in the Czech ALM: core (40%), periphery (28%), and semi‐periphery (32%), which roughly align with work positions in the early, middle, and senior stages of an academic career. In the semi‐periphery gender is found to be a key factor in in determining working conditions, while in the periphery working conditions are most affected by the type of institution. In the core, gender differences are mainly reflected in the gender wage gap. The effects of casualisation on working conditions are found to be more pronounced in STEM fields than in the social sciences and humanities across the ALM, but wages are generally higher in STEM fields.

Pandemic catch-22: The role of mobility restrictions and institutional inequalities in halting the spread of COVID-19.

Countries across the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with what might well be the set of biggest state-led mobility and activity restrictions in the history of humankind. But how effective were these measures across countries? Compared to multiple recent studies that document an association between such restrictions and the control of the contagion, we use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the causal effect of these restrictions on mobility, and the growth rate of confirmed cases and deaths during the first wave of the pandemic. Using the level of stringency in the rest of the world to predict the level of stringency of the restriction measures in a country, we show while stricter contemporaneous measures affected mobility, stringency in seven to fourteen days mattered most for containing the contagion. Heterogeneity analysis, by various institutional inequalities, reveals that even though the restrictions reduced mobility more in relatively less-developed countries, the causal effect of a reduction in mobility was higher in more developed countries. We propose several explanations. Our results highlight the need to complement mobility and activity restrictions with other health and information measures, especially in less-developed countries, to combat the COVID-19 pandemic effectively.

Asking Big: Creating a Culture of Support for Academic Mothers’ Advocating in Times of Crisis

This essay brings into focus institutional inequities faced by academic parents that stem from the systematic socialization of women to remain silent about their professional and personal needs under ideal circumstances and even more so in times of crisis. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s changing higher education policies daily, we argue there has never been a better time for us to ask for more when academic women, especially those identifying as mothers, are suffering professionally and personally. We trace key cultural insights and recent research regarding how the global pandemic has increased the strain that academic mothers feel, particularly BIPOC mothers, before calling on readers to reclaim their right to advocate on behalf of their and their families’ needs. We conclude by defining the culture of asking we seek to foster at our own institution and make recommendations for how readers might “ask big” at their home institutions.

Rationale for the Design and Implementation of Interventions Addressing Institutional Racism at a Local Public Health Department

The Bureau of Communicable Disease (BCD) at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene developed and implemented a multi-level intervention to: 1) establish bureau-wide race consciousness; 2) provide opportunities to examine the contemporary manifestations of racism impacting institutions and communities; 3) develop praxis applying a racial equity and social justice lens to communicable disease surveillance; and 4) center the experiences of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) staff. A staff committee designed and implemented a multipronged initiative grounded in Public Health Critical Race (PHCR) praxis. The findings from a qualitative report focused on the experiences of POC staff formed the basis of the initiative. Three major themes were identified in the report (Microaggressions Report) as factors that resulted in institutional inequities within the workplace: race-based biases in promotion of staff; lack of opportunity sharing for professional growth; and dominant power relations silencing the voices of POC staff. Based on findings from the Microaggressions Report, BCD designed and implemented seven interventions including: 1) Racial Identity Caucusing; 2) Multimedia Learning; 3) All-staff Workshops; 4) Social Breakout Committee; 5) Surveillance and Data Equity; 6) Core Values Development; and 7) Committee for Hiring, Retention and Promotion. We describe the rationale, design, and implementation of a multipronged intervention at a local health department as a strategy to address institutional racism. The creation of a Microaggressions Report and the PHCR methodology framed our ongoing effort to improve workplace culture and promote equitable opportunities for POC staff.

COVID-19 Feminist Framework to Address Public Health Impact of Violence, Abuse, and Trauma in Children, Women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ Community: A Preliminary Observation.

This article explores the development and implementation of inclusive COVID-19 (corona disease 2019) Feminist Framework (CFF) on the equitability of response for researchers, health care advocates, and public health policymakers at international platforms. Mechanism of CFF entails the process to address and mitigate the institutional inequities, violation of human rights, public health, and race/sex/gender-based violence amid COVID-19. This framework is about institutional building, raising consciousness, ensuring freedom, collective liberation, bodily autonomy, equality, and giving women, children, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and racial- and gender-diverse people the freedom to make choices to promote a sense of greater control over their own lives.

Book Review: Data Feminism

This book review critiques Lauren F. Klein and Catherine D'lgnazio's Data Feminism (2020). Klein and D'lgnazio take a visual approach to provide a synopsis—underpinned by social and political commentary—that explores the avenues through which data science and data ethics shape how contemporary technologies exploit injustices related to race and gender. Klein and D'lgnazio offer examples of this exploitation, such as the discriminatory surveillance apparatus that relies on racial profiling tactics. These examples are emboldened by the use of contemporary data strategies that—on the surface—strive to achieve a more equitable and ‘neutral’ hierarchal society. This review examines the text’s visual approach to demonstrating institutional inequities and the authors’ acknowledgement of their own privilege, specifically the role they play in upholding the oppressive systems they seek to dismantle through collaboration and intersectional analysis.

Introduction: Striving for social justice and equity in higher education

Through the introduction of our special issue, Striving for Social Justice and Equity in Higher Education, we aim to add to a continued and much-needed discussion on deeply seated institutional inequities that remain to shape the ways by which education occurs across the higher education landscape. As we present manuscripts included in this issue, our goal is to capture the vast and many layers within higher education encompassing research and discussions on policy and systems that impact administration, leadership, faculty, and student experiences. In our concluding remarks, we stress that even though deeply seated institutional inequities remain, the work of this type must continue as it is part of a broader fight waged for social and racial justice. It is our hope that institutional leaders and policymakers will use the wealth of knowledge shared in this special issue to cultivate nurturing learning environments that include and value the talent and perspectives of those who have been systematically undervalued and marginalized.

Queering intelligence studies

ABSTRACT This essay proposes ‘queering’ Intelligence Studies through a critical analysis of recent U.S. Intelligence Community diversity initiatives that aim to create workplaces more inclusive of LGBTQ members. In doing so, the essay advances queer theory as a resource that can improve intelligence organizing through critique of dominant approaches to diversity management. Shifting from a focus on identity categories to normativity can reveal entrenched institutional assumptions and inequities that undermine diversity initiatives. The essay also describes how queer theory complicates the uncritical celebration of LGBTQ inclusivity within the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Challenges of second language teachers’ professional identity construction: Voices from Afghanistan

Afghanistan has recently witnessed the redefinition of its educational policies, particularly those related to language teaching. However, little is known about Afghan second language (L2) teachers and the challenges they might face in their professional identity construction. This study investigated the challenges of professional identity construction of Afghan L2 teachers. Scenario prompts and semistructured interviews were used to explore how the teachers responded to challenging situations and narrated their professional challenges. Data analyses indicated that the teachers responded to the scenario prompts in accordance with perspectives mirroring criticality in educational functioning by promoting learners’ awareness of sociocultural anomalies, resisting institutional inequalities, and gearing instruction to learners’ needs. Additionally, analysis of the teachers’ semistructured interviews revealed sociocultural, institutional, and pedagogical challenges, particularly the dominance of institutional barriers in sanctioning the teachers’ identity construction. The authors argue that Afghan L2 teachers need more assistance from policymakers and teacher educators to facilitate their professionalism and professional practice.

On Trade, Distributional Conflict, and Endogenous Regime Change

Can we expect shocks in trade openness to affect the quality of the domestic political process, and in what way? Isolating cross-country heterogeneity in the distributional effects of trade shocks for different relative factor endowments as a critical element for theory development, the paper tackles the puzzle by formally developing and solving a new probabilistic model to link the distributional effects of shocks to endogenous institutional change via induced conflict between a capital-intensive and a labour-intensive coalition. The model of distributional conflict combines a political selection stage to select the rate of income redistribution by majority voting and a constitutional conflict stage among factor-intensive coalitions whose steady state outcome determines the level of institutional inequality assigning the “rules“ of political selection. The former is modelled via a canonical weighted median voter setup with the (infinitely many) weights-distributions induced by the value of the steady state outcome of the constitutional conflict stage, while the latter is modelled as a Tullock contest with an endogenous contest success function and the heterogeneous coalition prizes equalling the expected value of the contest to each coalition as a function of the coalitions' efforts. Closed form solutions are derived for (i) the expected outcome of distributional conflict in terms of institutional quality and (ii) the intensity of conflict. Via comparative static analysis based on the Stolper Samuelson theorem in Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory, it is formally shown that positive shocks in trade openness always induce higher institutional inequality irrespective of heterogeneity in the underlying distributional effects, but that the expected mechanisms driving the drop in quality differ across capital-abundant and labour-abundant countries.

MW v AN: An Analysis of Judicial Redress of Institutional Inequalities Within the Family Set-Up in Kenya

MW v AN: An Analysis of Judicial Redress of Institutional Inequalities Within the Family Set-Up in Kenya

Invisibility as Modern Racism: Redressing the Experience of Indigenous Learners in Higher Education

Indigenous Peoples represent the smallest group of ethnic minorities in the United States, and they are significantly underrepresented in the academy. The tumultuous relationship between institutions of higher learning and First Nation Peoples can be explained in part by the use of education to colonize and force the assimilation of Native Peoples. The end result of centuries of dehumanization and marginalization is invisibility, “the modern form of racism used against Native Americans” (the American Indian College Fund, 2019, p. 5). Educators are challenged to identify institutional inequities and redress barriers to promote social justice through informed and genuine practice, indigenization, and curriculum development that reflects intercultural communication competence.

Gifted Parents: The impact of giftedness on parenting cultures in the United States, 1920 – 1960

This paper explores how discourses of giftedness informed attitudes towards parenting in the United States from 1920 to 1960. Using psychologists’ studies of giftedness, media coverage of the topic, and guidebooks for parents of gifted children, I argue that giftedness emerged in the 1910s, and by the 1920s addressed a newly limited definition of intelligence and problems in urban public education, coinciding with the popularity of the culture and personality school. Scholarly debates about giftedness traveled from the academy to the wider public through the media and guidebooks for parents. Media coverage brought awareness of the problem of the neglected gifted student, and guidebooks offered parents practical suggestions about how to raise gifted children. I show that the discourse contributed to racial segregation in American schools and classrooms by using merit to determine access to educa- tional opportunity. Experts’ advice about giftedness also altered expectations about childrearing and encouraged parents to become more involved in their child’s educational development. This argument puts the history of psychology in conversation with histories of parenting, and it evidences how the discourse on giftedness impacted institutional inequality both through merit-based gifted and talented programs and by impacting ideologies of parenting. Thus, I provide a more comprehensive account of how and why giftedness profoundly shaped both the school and the home. This article considers the cultural work the discourse accomplished; it gave the public the impression that disparities in educational achievement between individuals and groups could be explained by the parenting a child received, putting significant pressure on all parents to make educational achievement a top priority for their child.

Socio-political representation at the level of territorial communities: reflection in the modern political discourse

The article considers the political evolution of territorial communities in democratic countries as a problem that reflects the local regional political authenticity and becomes the basis for applied research. The interrelation of the criteria of professionalization of managerial staff at the territorial level with local educational and scientific traditions is substantiated.The purpose of this article is to establish the level of reflection in the modern discourse of political science of socio-political representation of territorial communities.Research methods. The structural-functional method is used to analyze the criteria for staff promotion and their inclusion in certain management teams; the method of comparison used to relate to democratic procedures and practices of representation determines the quality of community development at the territorial level; a method of retrospective reconstruction to establish a high level of compliance with certain conditions of functioning in a controlled power environment, clear implementation of procedures, ensuring stability and implementation of a certain authoritarian course.Results. The assessment of the phenomenon of institutional inequality of communities determines the incomplete correspondence of elites of different levels in the former post-communist states. It is proved that the electoral variability of socio-political representation at the territorial level is manifested in the moderate position of the elites, their party and ideological mimicry in the conditions of insufficiently predictable and clear electoral result. Emphasis is placed on the factors of elite professionalism, which are not focused on managerial qualities, but are determined by archaic principles of situational loyalty and political expediency. The properties of population participation in the electoral process as a decisive factor in the qualitative political transformation of territorial communities are revealed. The specifics of the mechanisms of political representation and the processes of reforming territorial communities in the old European democracies and post-communist countries are noted. The substantiation of the tendency to preserve the internal elite patron clientelism and to ensure one's own position regardless of the political situation is proposed.

Why Employment During and After COVID-19 Is a Critical Women's Health Issue.

Why Employment During and After COVID-19 Is a Critical Women's Health Issue.

Health and Institutional Risk Factors of COVID-19 Mortality in Mexico, 2020

IntroductionSeveral studies in developed and developing countries have analyzed the health risk factors associated with COVID-19 mortality. Comorbid diseases are a key explanatory factor behind COVID-19 mortality, but current studies treat comorbidities in isolation, at average-population values, and rarely assess how death risk varies for different health profiles across institutions. Estimating death risk variations for different interactions between comorbid diseases and across healthcare institutions is crucial to gaining a significant depth of understanding in relation to mortality during the pandemic.MethodsThis study relies on data from approximately half a million people in Mexico (of all recorded cases through August 15, 2020) and on Bayesian estimation to provide a more robust estimate of the combined effect of several comorbidities and institutional inequalities on COVID-19 mortality.ResultsThe findings of the study illustrate the additive effects of several comorbid diseases, with the presence of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease increasing the mortality risk of COVID-19. There are also variations in the risk of death across the heterogeneous Mexican health system.ConclusionsThis study shows that COVID-19 mortality risk sharply increases in patients with 2 or more comorbid diseases (obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases) in Mexico. However, death risk varied significantly across institutions for patients with the same comorbidity profile.

Technological inequalities and motivation of Soviet institutions in the scientific-technological cooperation of Comecon in Europe, 1950s–80s

ABSTRACT This article examines Comecon’s scientific-technological cooperation via the lens of the so-called ‘direct contacts’ of Soviet industrial and research institutions and specialists. It emphasizes two particular questions: the place of institutional and technological inequality in the attempt to integrate socialist Europe; and the motivations of Soviet research and industrial institutions. The paper studies from a local perspective the way in which regional integration was to provide modern technologies to help both the bloc and the Soviet technological system beat the West. It demonstrates that technological integration of the bloc was complicated by institutional inequalities on the local level that contradicted the design and bureaucracy of cooperation that had initially been based on the principle of equality. As a result, in many cases, cooperation was not an opportunity for mutually beneficial technological development, but a formalized necessity and a source of individual benefits. It gave Soviet specialists motivation to see better techniques and higher working and living standards, which sometimes became an important incentive for cooperation.

Bound to be grooms: the imbrication of economy, ecology, and bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

This article explores intersections among gender, violence and socio-economic insecurities through examining the practice of women’s abduction for forced marriage in rural Kyrgyzstan. In the post-Soviet period, bride-kidnapping has been discussed as an expression of reviving 'traditional' ethnic culture and as a system of social rules that constrain actors in a variety of ways. Understanding of this practice requires a more nuanced analysis of the links between various forms of vulnerabilities and gender violence it expresses. Previous work has overlooked men's roles within bride abduction process which are not simply men's exertion of authority but are intricate reflections of wider changes taking place in newly independent Kyrgyzstan. Through an analysis of interviews with forty-five men who have been involved in bride kidnappings we build a nuanced account of the broader system of structural and institutional inequalities that comprise ala kachuu and make social actors less agentic. The article links bride-kidnapping to ecological & economic transformations, and the social importance given to marriage - all in the context of neofamilial national state politics where gender violence takes shape as unsanctioned rituals cast as ‘tradition’.

A Man, Who Never Stopped Dreaming of Humane India: Swami Agnivesh

We share two observations based on what we have seen in India. First, that the hegemonic politics in India ushered in institutional and structural inequalities in their wake and second, that the political leadership continued to be aspirational irrespective of ideologies desiring to scale up in the hierarchy of global economic and political power. These two observations pertain to the contemporary history of five decades of development in India. As a result of the above two observations, we make a further two observations that for the Aām Aādmi (the common man), the political parties that sit in the government and their respective ideologies do not matter. And for the state and the political elites, the negative consequences such as marginalisation, exclusion and desperation of the common folks that emanate from the models chosen for development do not matter. It is in such contexts, social activists argue for a legitimate space for the vying intersects of poverty, caste, class, occupations, habitats amidst such motivated globalisation. They also continue to raise difficult conversations around patriarchy, religious hierarchy, bonded labour, and the girl child. One such social activist that was concerned about all the above issues was Swami Agnivesh. He was not antigovernment, anti-democracy, anti-institutional, anti-hierarchy, anti-religious. He sought to restore a new and deeper meaning of freedom (democracy), a new meaning of hierarchy, social care, and even a new definition of spirituality that is social. He was a man who never stopped dreaming of humanising India. In this article, we reminisce about our association with Swami Agnivesh and attempt to espouse his thought based on our hearing, reading, and reflection. Briefly, we present his life, achievements, and social activism, and more importantly, we attempt to interpret his conception of social spirituality and the ‘power of love’.