Production Of Social Inequalities Research Articles

Rethinking Regulation beyond the Normative Threshold: Mechanisms of Control and Access to the Central Market of Kinshasa

The article explores regulation practices governing access to the central market of Kinshasa. It argues that, contrary to conventional ideas, urban trading places do not escape state regulation, nor are they outside the realm of legitimacy. These places and the economic activities that take place in them are highly regulated. Yet, their regulations do not always conform to official standards. The dominant binary divide of formal/informal obscures different processes and scales of effective regulation. Hence, to better understand how these places and activities are regulated, it is necessary to go beyond the binary divide. Drawing on practical norms’ literature, the article shows the multiplicity of overlapping norms, their corresponding logics, and how different actors navigate regulation. Regulations can have diverse effects on people. Some deviations from official laws have reassuring effects, leading to forms of organisation that serve traders’ needs or provide them with space for resistance against exclusion. However, certain other deviations serve to extract more resources from vendors and can lead to the (re)production of social inequalities.

Transformations of transnational care in times of the pandemic: spotlights and future prospects

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities in care between mobile and immobile populations. It has highlighted the precarious situation of many migranticized individuals and their families worldwide, but it has also brought their situation into the public eye, providing opportunities for advances in social science understanding and policy reform. This Special Issue explores the interplay between transnational care arrangements, cross-border movement and mobility, and the production of social inequality in the post-COVID-19 world. The collected articles provide a comprehensive picture from different countries and fields, revealing three interrelated processes that reflect the complex dynamics during the pandemic: (1) the interruption of transnational care arrangements; (2) the reorganization of these arrangements; and (3) coping strategies to adapt to (post)pandemic immobilizations, restrictions, and modified patterns of care. In sum, this issue aims to contribute to the advancement of social science understanding and to benefit vulnerable populations.

Unveiling Power and Ideologies in the Age of Algorithms: Exploring the Intersection of Critical Discourse Analysis and Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, the intersection of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as an area of growing interest in the fields of linguistics, communication, and technology. Critical Discourse Analysis examines how language, power, and ideologies intersect in various social and cultural contexts, with a focus on the ways in which discursive practices contribute to the (re) production of social inequalities. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence has been increasingly integrated into our daily lives, including language processing, decision-making algorithms, and virtual assistants. This article aims to explore the potential applications and implications of combining CDA and AI, such as examining biases in AI-generated language, unpacking the ideologies embedded within AI systems, and investigating the ways in which AI-mediated communication shapes power dynamics in various contexts. By examining the interplay between CDA and AI, we can better understand how technology and language use both reflect and shape our social world, ultimately contributing to more equitable and inclusive technological developments.

The global rise of private art museums a literature review

In this state-of-the-art article, we review studies of the highly controversial, global rise of private art museums as a new organizational form within art fields. Given that current studies are scattered across different disciplines like sociology, museum studies, economics and anthropology, a systematic engagement with theoretical and methodological issues is difficult. This paper compiles and discusses these studies, identifying key themes, controversies as well as areas of consensus. We organize our review according to eight key themes: 1. (non)-existent definitions of private museums; 2. their historical roots; 3. geographical dimensions; 4. the life course of private museums; 5. their relation to public museums; 6. the involvement of the government; 7. private museums as actors in the art field, and 8. the implications for the (re)production of social inequalities. We conclude by reflecting on the most significant gaps in the literature and formulate a research agenda that can guide us to a more systematic inquiry of the private museum phenomenon.

A study of pandemic and stigma effects in removal proceedings

AbstractThis study examines how a rapid change in social perceptions of a national‐origin group triggered by the COVID‐19 pandemic influenced immigration judges' decision‐making in US removal proceedings. Using originally compiled court data on removal proceedings decided between 2019 and 2020, we applied a difference‐in‐differences framework to produce three key findings. First, consistent with theory of event stigma, Chinese respondents experienced a significantly higher removal rate during the early pandemic period. Second, consistent with theory of associative stigma, East and Southeast (E/SE) Asian respondents also experienced a significantly higher removal rate during the early pandemic period. Third, the removal rate declined for both Chinese and E/SE respondents during the later pandemic period, but this decline was more gradual and lagged for E/SE Asian than for Chinese respondents. Finally, increases in the number of cases involving Chinese respondents increased the removal rate for E/SE Asian respondents during the early months of the pandemic. The last two findings suggest that associative or indirect stigmatization may be harder to combat than direct stigmatization owing to the implicit nature of bias underlying associative stigma. This study highlights the socially constructed nature of national origin groups, and the importance of both direct and indirect stigmatization in the production of social inequality.

Education and the production of inequalities across the Global South and North

Education is an essential aspect of any society in the world. As such, it has been a topic studied by many sociologists since the origins of the discipline. Today it is one of the most common subjects in sociology, in part because it has been recognised as a crucial environment for the (re)production of inequalities. This article explores the role of education in the (re)production of social inequalities and its potential to challenge such inequalities. In addition, the article presents some of the distinctions between research in the Global South and North, both in geographical and metaphorical terms. Since this article is the introduction to the special issue Education and the Production of Inequalities: Dialogues from the Global South and North, a synopsis of the published articles is presented at the end.

Tracking, knowledge, and the organisation of secondary schooling: teachers’ representations and explanations

ABSTRACT Most European secondary-school systems are articulated by different forms of an academic-vocational divide that are critical in understanding the (re)production of social inequality. By providing distinct curricular and pedagogical codes and a markedly different distribution of knowledge between tracks, tracking leads to profound and distinct learning opportunities for students. The objective of this article is twofold: first, we wish to enquire into the relationship between tracking and knowledge distribution as explained and represented by teachers; second, we aim to identify the mechanisms explaining this relationship as acknowledged in these actors’ discourses and experiences. The analysis draws on 72 in-depth interviews with principals, coordination teams and tutors from lower-secondary education, the Baccalaureate and VET in eight schools in Barcelona. The results provide, on the one hand, a thick description of the dichotomised attributes that teachers assign to academic and vocational knowledge. On the other, we identify three principal mechanisms that, according to the school actors who were interviewed, explain the segmented distribution of knowledge between the Baccalaureate and VET: the stratification of the school system, the grammar of secondary schooling and the learning cultures of both tracks.

How Can Migrants’ Language Proficiency Be Measured? A Discussion of Opportunities and Challenges When Studying the Impact of Language Skills on Social Position

Language proficiency is crucial for migrants’ social position in the labour market and therefore plays a key role in the (re-)production of social inequalities in modern societies. There are different ways of capturing language skills in quantitative studies. However, it is important to question the extent to which existing language measures mirror migrants’ realities and relevant linguistic everyday life practices. In our paper, we contribute to this question by disentangling various measures of language proficiency. We use a large sample of migrants in Germany (GSOEP) that contains numerous language measures. We conduct detailed quantitative analyses on how various language variables influence migrants’ social position, by which we mean migrants’ socioeconomic status (as measured by ISEI). The ISEI is mainly based on occupation, but also on education and income. Our findings indicate that especially the self-assessed German speaking proficiency is an important and parsimonious predictor for migrants’ social position in Germany.

Decentering technology in discourse on discrimination

ABSTRACTAlgorithmic discrimination has become one of the critical points in the discussion about the consequences of an intensively datafied world. While many scholars address this problem from a purely techno-centric perspective, others try to raise broader social justice concerns. In this article, we join those voices and examine norms, values, and practices among European civil society organizations in relation to the topic of data and discrimination. Our goal is to decenter technology and bring nuance into the debate about its role and place in the production of social inequalities. To accomplish this, we rely on Nancy Fraser’s theory of abnormal justice which highlights interconnections between maldistribution of economic benefits, misrecognition of marginalized communities, and their misrepresentation in political processes. Fraser’s theory helps situate technologically mediated discrimination alongside other more conventional kinds of discrimination and injustice and privileges attention to economic, social, and political conditions of marginality. Using a thematic analysis of 30 interviews with civil society representatives across Europe’s human rights sector, we bring clarity to this idea of decentering. We show how many groups prioritize the specific experiences of marginalized groups and ‘see through’ technology, acknowledging its connection to larger systems of institutionalized oppression. This decentered approach contrasts the process-oriented perspective of tech-savvy civil society groups that shy from an analysis of systematic forms of injustice.

Unequal bodies: corporeality and social inequality in mathematics classrooms

This paper addresses teachers’ corporeality and its influence on the structuring of mathematics classroom interaction. The present contribution explores the way a teacher’s bodily activity is implicated in the (re)production of social inequality, and challenges the assumption that the teaching and learning of mathematics is primarily a linguistic and semiotic accomplishment. I argue that the teacher’s body is an active force in the formation of mathematically ‘able’ and ‘less able’ students. Drawing on the work of Bernstein (Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique (Revised Edition), Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2000) and his sociological theory of pedagogy, and expanding his tools to address corporeal factors, I show how students are positioned as high-performing within structures of classroom interaction. Video data from classroom interaction is used to track differences in how teachers reveal and conceal structural peculiarities of school mathematics. Comparing the interaction of different teachers illustrates the role that corporeality plays in establishing distinctive orientations to meaning-making in the mathematics classroom.

Damages Done: The Longitudinal Impacts of Natural Hazards on Wealth Inequality in the United States

AbstractThis study investigates a largely ignored contributor to wealth inequality in the United States: damages from natural hazards, which are expected to increase substantially in coming years. Instead of targeting a specific large-scale disaster and assessing how different subpopulations recover, we begin with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the restricted, geocoded Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We follow them through time (1999–2013) as hazard damages of varying scales accrue in the counties where they live. This design synthesizes the longitudinal, population-centered approach common in stratification research with a broad hazard-centered focus that extends beyond disasters to integrate ongoing environmental dynamics more centrally into the production of social inequality. Results indicate that as local hazard damages increase, so does wealth inequality, especially along lines of race, education, and homeownership. At any given level of local damage, the more aid an area receives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the more this inequality grows. These findings suggest that two defining social problems of our day – wealth inequality and rising natural hazard damages – are dynamically linked, requiring new lines of research and policy making in the future.

The bottom line: capital’s production of social inequalities and environmental degradation

Sustainability is a contested concept that has been at the center of discussions of natural and social scientists for decades. Mainstream conceptualizations, predicated upon the “three-legged stool” and “triple bottom line model,” argue that questions of economic, social, and environmental sustainability are of equal importance. However, in actuality, the “economic” leg of the stool is given primacy in these analyses. These mainstream conceptions take for granted that economic means the capitalist system, failing to assess how its growth dynamics undermine sustainability. Capitalism, as a historically distinct political-economic system, depends on expropriation and exploitation, creating social inequalities and environmental degradation increasingly on a global scale. Critical sustainability confronts the logic of capital, directly challenging this very system in an effort to create substantive equality, meet human needs, and protect the conditions of life.

Keeping abreast of gendering practices in health and physical education and physical culture: breastwork, breastism and breast pedagogies for (de)gender justice

ABSTRACTAt an embodied and personal level this paper plays with what Evans, J., & Davies, B. (2011. New directions, new questions? Social theory, education and embodiment. Sport, Education & Society, 16(3), 263–278) suggests are ‘the complexity and nuances of biology in culture and the influence of body pedagogies in the production of social inequalities and hierarchies.’ (p. 263). Despite extensive attention to gender order, sexualization, sexual subjectification, sexual and gender representation in physical culture (sport, active lifestyles and health and physical education), research/scholarship has paid little attention to the positioning of and constitution of practices by body parts, such as breasts specifically. Given that gendered cultural pedagogies teach humans how to understand their selves, physical culture has potentially extensive affordances for learning the self. Drawing on narrative inquiry and content analysis, six diverse participants’ breastories are examined for breast pedagogies and how the materiality of breasts constructs and position humans and their gendered representations in physical culture. This paper suggests the recognition of breastism and employment of breastwork to work towards gender justice and dismantling some of the oppressions of gender. While others argue that productions of the gendered body lead to discipline and control of body parts, actions, and gender presentation, I consider instead the material and symbolic role of body parts, their actions and the gendered construction of those parts and how these gendered constructions act to discipline and control body pedagogies and engagement for more equitable futures in physical cultures.

Doing Age in a Digitized World—A Material Praxeology of Aging With Technology

Digital technologies have gained vast relevance in postmodern societies and digital infrastructures are substantially integrated into the everyday lives of older people. This digitization is reframing the norms and practices of later life as well as the social construct of age itself. Despite the increasing amount of studies in the field of aging and technologies, it still lacks theorizing. This paper addresses this deficit, suggesting that the study of aging and technologies could profit from a comprehensive integration of theories from the sociology of aging, critical gerontology and science-and-technology studies. We aim to make a theoretical contribution to this issue, asking: How is age being done in a digitized world? Applying a praxeological approach to aging and technologies, we firstly examine how theoretical and empirical work has constructed aging with technologies so far and identify its shortcomings. Some of this work so far lacks a proper consideration of social inequalities within these processes, whereas other studies lack a thorough consideration of materialities. Secondly, in an attempt to equally ‘praxeologize’ and ‘materialize’ the study of aging and technologies we develop a theoretical model that aims to overcome these shortcomings. In what we frame as a material praxeology of aging with technology, we are concerned with how age is being done through discursive formations, set into practice through social and material practices and involved in the (re)production of social inequalities. Enriching a Bordieuan terminology of social fields with notions of non-human agency, this praxeology is founded on three assumptions: 1) Social fields constitute the contexts in which age as a social phenomenon is being done with and through technologies 2) Human and non-human agents are equally involved in this process 3) The actions of the involved agents emerge from an agency distributed among them, and are structured through the power relations between them. Thirdly, we exemplify the application of this model by reference to a research project in the field of Active and Assistive Living.

Amongst the disciplines: Anthropology, sociology, intersection and intersectionality

The history of relations between anthropology and sociology in the UK might at best be described as ‘studied indifference’. And yet, they have shared disciplinary interests in many respects, including the concepts of belonging and identity. This article resists disciplinary boundaries and ‘thinks together’ sociological interpretations of intersectionality and anthropological notions of intersection. The authors argue that whilst intersectionality offers a frame to think about the co-constitution of ethnic, racial, class, sexual and gendered identities and the production of social inequalities, anthropological approaches to intersection draw on a cultural form and social logic encountered during ethnographic fieldwork that emphasise ideas about interrelatedness, belonging, place, temporality, connection and disconnection. In juxtaposing these two approaches, the authors seek firmer traction to better articulate the shape and scope of the ways in which scholars in both fields might develop new ways of explaining the lives and the concerns of the people they work with.

Labov in anthropology

Early sociolinguistics was determinedly multidisciplinary and Labov's work was eagerly read by anthropologists. Nevertheless, the ethnographic and interpretivist commitments of anthropology contrasted with Labov's correlational method and positivist philosophical assumptions. This paper discusses three debates between those two broad methodological/philosophical traditions and traces their outcomes: on the nature of linguistic heterogeneity; the (re)production of social inequality; and the significance of linguistic style. I argue that the debates were productive. Although anthropologists often forcefully critiqued Labov's methods and conceptual proposals, dialogue with Labov's research has had positive effects: current work bears the marks of these engagements.

Marriage of matching doors: Marital sorting on parental background in China

Background: Who marries whom has important implications for the (re-)production of social inequalities. Whereas previous studies on marital sorting have mainly focused on the husband’s and the wife’s traits, in this research I assess the importance of parental background in marital sorting in contemporary China in light of the tradition of marriage of matching doors. Methods: Drawing on data from the 2006 China General Social Survey, I use log-linear models to explore the extent to which couples sort based on their parents' occupational status and hukou (household registration), and the interaction between the two. Results: The results show a significant association between the occupational status of an individual’s father and of his or her spouse, net of the intergenerational mobility between parents and children and the assortative mating between the husband and the wife. Furthermore, there is a significant net association between the occupational status of an individual’s father and father-in-law. Parents’ hukou status also plays a pivotal role in marital sorting, in that an individual’s father and father-in-law tend to have the same rural or urban hukou. Nevertheless, the interaction between the father’s occupational status and hukou is not found to play a significant role in shaping the pattern of marital sorting. Conclusions: Given the persistence of the tradition of marriage of matching doors, it is important to conceptualize marriage in contemporary China as a family affair, rather than a de-institutionalized, privatized, or individualized practice.

Wenig gebildet, viel sanktioniert? Zur Selektivität von Sanktionen in der Grundsicherung des SGB II

Abstract Welfare benefit recipients who are subject to benefit sanctions live below the subsistence level for a fixed period of time. Individuals with low education bear an increased risk of being sanctioned. Quantitative analyses of linked administrative and survey data indicate that this increased risk cannot be attributed to a lower motivation to work or a lower willingness to make concessions regarding job offers. Our analyses of qualitative interviews and individual case files reveal complex processes: Low cultural capital when dealing with administrative matters, a habitual distance vis-à-vis job center employees as well as previous negative attributions in case files can advance the sanctioning of low-skilled welfare recipients. In this way, sanctions contribute to the (re)production of social inequality.

DA DESIGUALDADE SOCIAL NOS ESPAÇOS PÚBLICOS CENTRAIS BRASILEIROS

Resumo As ciências sociais dedicadas à desigualdade social nas cidades brasileiras ressaltam o papel que a distribuição residencial dos grupos sociais no espaço urbano tem exercido na produção e/ou reprodução das assimetrias de posicionamento social, com a aceleração da globalização econômica desde a década de 1990. Mas o que ocorre em espaços receptivos à diversidade social como a Praça da Sé, em São Paulo, nos dias úteis da semana? Submeto dados etnográficos registrados em 39 tardes de segundas e sextas-feiras úteis em 2013 ao prisma metodológico dialético e fenomenológico lefebvriano e goffmaniano. Busco responder como e por que o uso que os pedestres fizeram corporalmente desse logradouro então pode interferir na (re)produção da desigualdade social na São Paulo desta segunda década de século XXI. Virão à tona, assim, seculares desigualdades comportamental-corporais e morais.

Brokerage in Cross-Border Mobility: Social Mechanisms and the (Re)Production of Social Inequalities

Brokerage is an essential yet understudied function in social life. In one of the classics in the field of sociology, Georg Simmel differentiated three types of the “third” which help to analyse brokerage: the disinterested mediator or arbitrator, <em>tertius gaudens</em> and <em>divide et impera</em>. Studies that conceptualise traffickers and smugglers as brokers are extremely rare. Scholars lack a typology which can serve as a basis for comparative research. To advance scholarship on brokerage this article seeks to develop a conceptual-typological matrix by setting out to explore three questions: Why does brokerage exist? What kind of social mechanism is brokerage? What are the implications of brokerage for social inequalities and equalities? The analysis concludes with the consequences of different types of brokerage for the (re)production of social inequalities.