Reproduction Of Inequality Research Articles

Can participatory democracy become “inclusive”? Class, mobilization and voice in participatory institutions

Abstract This article discusses reproductionist perspectives that assume there is little local participatory institutions can do to address the underrepresentation and the domination of some social groups. While there is also empirical basis to be skeptical, the evidence suggests that, occasionally, the reproduction of class inequalities can be counteracted. This encourages us to consider the conditions that favor greater participation of working-class, economically and culturally disadvantaged people. Comparing evidence from various studies in a range of countries, the article argues that certain contextual factors and inclusion tools produce higher rates of mobilization and more egalitarian deliberations. Specifically, the article focuses on the effects of three conditions: a) special mobilization efforts; b) design choices and inclusion tools; and c) the broadening of the political subject through cultural mobilization. As well as reflecting on the shortcomings of these factors, a new research agenda for social equality in participation is also proposed.

Finding a Home during the Affordable Housing Crisis: How Social Ties Shape Renters’ Housing-Search Outcomes

Housing searches play a central role in the reproduction of racial inequality in U.S. cities. Past research finds that movers’ social ties influence residential segregation, as renters receive information about homes located near friends and family. Fewer studies examine how renters’ social ties also provide instrumental assistance during moves, or how this aid unequally shapes moving outcomes. In the present study, I show how 69 low-income, Latina/o and non-Hispanic white renters rely on their friends, family, and acquaintances to navigate moves in Los Angeles, a highly unaffordable rental market. Both groups mobilize their ties for instrumental assistance, but the resources available through renters’ ties contribute to diverging search outcomes. Low-income Latina/o renters’ ties, who also struggled to make ends meet, provided what I call constrained support—referrals to open units, loans to cover moving costs, and informal rental opportunities. This assistance channeled movers to specific apartments and left them negotiating informal, doubled-up homes and new debt. In contrast, low-income white renters leveraged comparatively affluent ties to cosign leases, provide financial gifts, and strengthen applications across buildings—what I refer to as flexible assistance. This aid helped low-income white movers secure housing advantages, while avoiding short-term reciprocal obligations to friends and family. These findings advance research on residential mobility and social support, and they show how network resource inequalities contribute to racial stratification in rental markets.

The problem of educational choice in senior secondary education: the ACT as a case study

AbstractHow students select subjects and pathways in senior secondary education and beyond has long been regarded as a significant social justice issue as a result of contention regarding the value of more or less academic and vocational options. This paper examines these issues through a discussion of the notion of educational choice and the history of senior secondary reform in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), an educational system established in the 1970s with the express purpose of enhancing educational equity through supporting student choice and flexibility through school-based curriculum and assessment. The paper highlights the complexity of questions subsumed under the umbrella of educational choice, which encompass not only the reproduction of inequality but also student agency and self-making and intersect with debates about equity and curriculum form. It shows how the intent of the ACT system to ensure equally valued subject choices in schooling has since its inception existed in constant tension with a parallel emphasis on university pathways and that the system has over time evolved from one dedicated to the idea of curriculum diversity and responding to individual and community needs to one in which centralisation and standardisation are beginning to take precedence. This history raises important questions about the equity implications of centralising and decentralising curriculum forms and what they enable and constrain in shaping young people’s futures.

Gendered experience of military service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine (on the example of a military unit X 0000)

Over the past 10 years, the Ukrainian state has provided opportunities for women to serve in the army on an equal basis with men at the legislative level. Meanwhile, the army may still be identified as a maledominated institution, as Ukrainian servicewomen still face challenges during their service because of their sex.The empirical frame of the study was a case study (containing qualitative and quantitative components) of the experience of military service in the military unit X 0000. Based on the analysis of secondary sources and our own empirical research, we managed to identify gendered challenges specific to the experience of servicewomen in the Armed Forces, including during the Russian-Ukrainian war.The key gendered challenges of serving in the military unit X 0000 for women were vertical and horizontal gender segregation; the need to correspond with masculine standards and to combine the status of a military with the status of a woman, wife, and mother that sometimes have opposite role expectations, which can lead to role conflict; the need to combine childcare and household duties with work; stereotypes about servicewomen that exist within and outside the army; sexism and violence (psychological abuse and sexual harassment). The case study results allowed us to confirm empirically, illustrate with examples, and clarify the range of gendered challenges in the army, outlined in the analysis of secondary sources.The study highlights the special challenges for military women that arise during the period of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For example, women, unlike men, may be protected and prevented from working in ‘male’ positions. The article also shows that servicewomen may themselves uphold traditional gender roles, try to conform to patriarchal norms, and oppose gender equality. All this leads to the reproduction of gender inequality in the army.

Organised Violence, Inequality and Work: Violence Specialists as a Classed Occupation

Scholars have long debated what is the role of inequalities in organised violence, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. I argue that mainstream approaches (e.g. deviance, subcultures, grievances, rational choice and Marxism) fall short because they overlook that organised violence is an intensive form of work. These perspectives often exoticise individuals involved in violence for profit or political purposes. Violence is not a deviant feature of social life but an integral part of collective action. By applying occupational lenses, I position those engaged in violence as a specialised class of manual workers recruited in the protection labour market. Scholars can acknowledge the occupational stratification observed before in research about organised violence by understanding violence specialists as workers. This essay explores how the sociology of work can enhance our understanding of inequality reproduction within criminal organisations, guerrillas, armies, police forces, mercenaries and private military companies.

Blackness, linguistic nationalism, and postcolonial class inequality in Haiti

AbstractThis ethnographic examination of a binary linguistic hierarchy in Haiti shares the critical terrain of Viranjini Munasinghe's unpacking of Caribbean creolization theory. It is a grounded inquiry into a problematic of ontology that inheres in techniques of making non‐white identities deployed by Caribbean privileged people of color at arm's length from a European colonial heritage that underpins their privileged class positions. Borrowing Munasinghe's analytic concept of theory made schizophrenic by ideology, the investigation reveals Haiti's francophone minority ideologically utilizing Haitian Creole as a black‐nationalist symbol in its domination of the monolingual Creole‐speaking majority. The ideological move devalues Creole while elevating French in the reproduction of class inequality. The linguistic schizophrenia undermines the theoretical nation‐building logic of Creole as national language. Failing practical validation of Creole in all spheres of Haitian life, I conclude, claims on the state and civil society by Haiti's vast monolingual Creole‐speaking majority cannot logically be validated.

Colonial continuities under scrutiny: an institutional ethnography of intercultural education in Chile

ABSTRACT Chile is a well-known country for its socio-economic and racial inequalities, especially in education. Despite it being prolific, research on educational inequalities has neglected the question about the persistence of colonial dynamics in the educational sphere and how the experience of colonisation has shaped contemporary social relations. Informed by the field of Decolonial Studies and by using institutional ethnography, this research sheds light onto the social (ruling) relations that sustain colonial continuities in the current Chilean school system. By starting from experiential accounts of Mapuche Indigenous educators who teach their ancestral language in the school system, this research provides evidence of an institutional apparatus sustaining forms of domination and reproduction of material and subjective inequalities.

Untangling the Role of Assortative Mating in Educational Reproduction in Twelve European Countries

In this study, we explore how educational differences in demographic behavior – in particular, mating patterns and fertility – mediate the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality in twelve European countries. Although this research interest itself is not new, we contribute to this debate by adopting a prospective approach and scaling it to include multiple countries and cohorts. To this end, we leverage a series of complementary datasets and the inferential method developed by Song and Mare (2015) and advanced by Skopek and Leopold (2020) to estimate the components of a stylized educational reproduction model. We then employ a simple decomposition analysis to quantify the contributions of different pathways to prospective educational reproduction rates across educational backgrounds and explore the differences across cohorts and countries. We report several findings. Most notably, (1) the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality persists in all twelve countries and is barely offset by small (and declining) negative educational gradients in fertility, (2) educational differences in selection into partnership are small and do not account for much inequality, and (3) the role of assortative mating, where present, is ambiguous because it both reinforces inequality via its effects on resources within the family and offsets it via its effects on fertility. * This article belongs to a special issue on “Changes in Educational Homogamy and Its Consequences”.

Understandings and enactments of social justice pedagogies in Swedish physical education and health practice

Research continues to show that school physical education and health (PEH) is complicit in the reproduction of inequities related to, for instance, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and social class. In this paper, we present findings from a participatory action research (PAR) project with 11 PEH teachers at two upper-secondary schools in Sweden, aimed at enhancing understandings and enactments of social justice pedagogies. Data generated through observations, interviews, focus groups, workshops and teacher reflections were analysed through a thematic analysis ( Braun and Clarke, 2022 ) and informed by the concept of teaching for equity and social justice ( Freire, 1970 ). The findings highlight how the teachers associated social justice pedagogies in PEH with an emphasis on: (1) ‘inclusion’; (2) ‘equity/equality’; (3) ‘adaptations to teaching and assessment’; and (4) ‘relationships’. The findings also demonstrate how, based on the importance they placed on relationships, the teachers developed pedagogies that aimed to create: (1) ‘conditions for building relationships’; (2) ‘continuous engagement from teachers and students’; (3) ‘student involvement and reflection’; and (4) ‘connections with and within the subject’. Although the findings draw attention to productive understandings and enactments of social justice pedagogies, we also argue that the teachers, to some extent, conflated equality of opportunity with equity of outcome and continued to focus on managing inequities within the framework of taken-for-granted practices and knowledge within the subject. We conclude that more work is needed to support teachers in not only addressing the inequities students bring to the classroom, but also in challenging the norms that make these inequities matter.

Face-to-face fundraising and the dialectics of appearance

ABSTRACT Face-to-face fundraising (F2F) emerged in the 1990s as an innovative mode of charity fundraising, whereby paid fundraisers – often employed through for-profit agencies – solicit members of the public to sign-up for monthly direct-debit payments. Despite its everyday visibility – and public critical reception – this instance of the ubiquitous intersection of humanitarianism and commodification, integral to contemporary capitalism, remains unexplored. This paper fills this gap but, in the process, draws some theoretical lessons germane to this literature and to materialist critique more generally. I argue that the peculiar dialectics of appearance operative in the political economy of F2F resists interpretation in terms of extant conceptual appreciations of other modalities of ‘commodified compassion’ and in materialist conceptual vocabularies in political economy scholarship more broadly. Far from ‘mere appearance’, F2F’s abstract form of ‘shared humanity’ is not simply an ethical veneer to be bypassed in unveiling the concrete (re)production of inequalities in humanity, as is the general tendency in materialist critique. Rather, this appearance is essential for its functioning and those concrete inequalities are written into this form, rather than existing behind/beyond it. This, I suggest, is captured effectively by a ‘dialectical materialist’ take on the Marxian theory of the commodity form.

:The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health

:<i>The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health</i>

Neoliberal urban segregation and property tax: A critical view of Santiago, Chile

Urban property taxes are primordial land value capture mechanisms that can potentially redistribute public income to underprivileged areas in a city. However, in Santiago, Chile, a city with considerable socio-spatial segregation correlated with significant disparities in municipal budgets, social welfare, and intergenerational reproduction of wealth, the property tax system is weak to address this issue effectively. This study analyses the potential redistributive capacity of property taxes in Greater Santiago, comparing the evolution of real estate surplus values with municipal budgets. These results show that a 2% increase in property taxes would suffice to equalize per capita municipal budgets, essential to redistribute social welfare. In Chiles’s neoliberal planning framework, we argue that weak property taxes are critical for the intergenerational reproduction of wealth and poverty in different municipalities. Property as capital is efficient for capturing unearned value in the long term and obtaining rental income, two mechanisms of inequality reproduction, as property accumulation is only feasible if it is not progressively taxed. In sum, this analysis of property taxes in Santiago contributes to the theoretical understanding of passive mechanisms of inequality reproduction in a neoliberal system and empirical support for a progressive increase of property taxes.

The role of everyday mobility in adaptation to air pollution hazard: A mixed-method approach combining big and traditional data

The empirical study aims to examine how residents perceive and respond to air pollution in their daily lives, whether they use mobility as an adaptation strategy to avoid or mitigate their exposure, and how socioeconomic and demographic factors modify such responses in mobility. To this end, this study conducts an analysis in the city of Chengdu using a mixed-method approach combining surveys and large-scale mobile phone data. It is found that most at-risk individuals take protective measures, and some choose to change mobility patterns to protect themselves from exposure to air pollution. Regression results suggest that engagement with air quality information and the perceived effectiveness of protective measures are the most important predictors of human mobility changes in response to air pollution. The use of mobility as an adaptation strategy occurs despite the availability of in-situ strategies in general, while low-cost and effective in-situ adaptation choices and high-cost mobility strategies are considered as substitutes. Using changes in origin–destination trips in Sichuan generated from 5,393,739 cellphone users in Chengdu, this study reveals that an increase in the difference of the air quality index at origin versus at destination is associated with more trips from the origin to the destination, and travelers are more sensitive to air quality at origin that drives them to escape from the polluted areas. The findings suggest the (re)production of inequality and marginalization of some population groups in hazard adaptation.

A Promise Not (Yet) Fulfilled: Entrepreneurship, Opportunity Underexploitation, and the Reproduction of Inequality via Consumer Markets

A Promise Not (Yet) Fulfilled: Entrepreneurship, Opportunity Underexploitation, and the Reproduction of Inequality via Consumer Markets

Empty chairs at the dinner table: Black-white disparities in exposure to household member deaths

As a result of Black–White inequities in life expectancy, recent research has indicated that Black individuals are disproportionately exposed to the deaths of multiple family members compared to White individuals. Black individuals are also more likely to live in coresident households—that is, households that extend beyond the nuclear family. However, it is unclear the degree to which this population may be disproportionately exposed to the loss of deaths marked by the geographic closeness of the household. In this study, I use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide the first nationally representative estimates of Black-White disparities in exposure to household member deaths. I find that Black people are significantly more likely than White individuals to have experienced the death of a household member. Based on these findings, I argue the dual inequities of racial disparities in life expectancy and racial disparities in coresidence are an overlooked, salient source of racial disparities in exposure to death. By illuminating a broader range of network sources that contribute to racial inequities in exposure to death, this study sets forth a new conceptual unit of analysis—that of the household—to investigate the intergenerational reproduction of inequality in health and socioeconomic status due to exposure to death.

Terra infirma: On the base map in urban cartography and GIS

This article investigates the ways in which base maps are a fundamental, but under-recognised, starting point for planners, architects, cartographers and geographic information scientists in urban spatial planning and decision-making contexts. Focusing on the case study of a collaborative mapping project with the Wood Street Commons, an unhoused community in West Oakland, it contends that base maps create a cartographic terra infirma, fundamentally shaping the process of negotiations over urban space in ways that reinforce possessive logics and normalize property as central to the function of the city. Base maps do so by paradoxically absenting all people – with the effect of absenting the occupation of land by unhoused people, while shielding property owners from view while enacting their possession through infrastructure, parcel boundaries and land features. We argue this privileging inherent in the urban base map ultimately fuels a process of “unbecoming” ( Fraser, 2018 ) – a simultaneous invisibilizing and reproduction of spatial inequality – and in response, call for attention towards the politics of base maps from urban cartographers, planners, architects and spatial scientists alike.

Bridging Divides or Reinforcing Distance? The Interplay of Individual and Organizational Factors in Shaping Volunteers’ Relationships with Criminalized Women

Abstract As governments cut funding for social welfare programs and shift toward neoliberal, marketized alternatives, non-profits have taken on a large and growing role in the provision of services to marginalized people. This paper examines how volunteers approach their relationships with service users in non-profits, as well as the consequences of and explanations for variation in their approaches. This research explores these questions ethnographically within Canadian non-profits offering social services to criminalized women. This paper offers three interrelated contributions. The first is a typology of different volunteer approaches within the penal voluntary sector—constructing volunteers as bystanders, tourists, visitors, or apprentices in their relationships with criminalized women. The second highlights how some of these approaches entrench social distance and inequality, whereas others encourage greater proximity and equity between volunteers and criminalized women. The third demonstrates how variation in volunteers’ approaches is the product of a dynamic interplay of individual and organizational factors. Together, these findings provide new insights about the conditions under which volunteers can do “good” or “bad” within non-profits. These insights could enhance the quality of volunteer work, reduce the reproduction of inequalities, and support the operation of organizations delivering vital services to marginalized people.

Libros y mediatización en redes sociales: estrategias de comunicación editorial durante la pandemia en la Argentina

This article explores the modalities of circulation and dissemination implemented by publishers operating in Argentina, paying particular attention to how mediatisation in social networks gained new momentum after the pandemic. It is productive to observe this phenomenon in order to reflect on publishing in this context as a field of production and reproduction of old and new inequalities, not only in terms of publication but also in terms of book circulation, as well as communication and dissemination. The corpus to be analysed comprises the results of a survey and analysis of information developed from the dissemination that the publishing houses carried out during the first months, between mid-March 2020 and the partial opening of bookshops with the directives of the national government, consisting of productions that publishers of different types carried out, as well as collectives focused on events such as book fairs. The article is based on a socio-anthropological analysis linked to digital ethnography.

Moving from the Business Case Towards an Equity-Based Approach: Theorizing Diversity and Inclusion in Open Strategy

A growing number of organizations open their strategy processes by including a more diverse set of actors. This has drawn scholarly interest and led to a field of research known as open strategy. In this paper, we problematize how open strategy research deploys diversity and inclusion without engaging with the diversity and inclusion literature that offers a more differentiated understanding of these concepts. We build on this literature to elucidate how most open strategy studies follow a business case approach wherein inclusion, and implicitly also diversity, are theorized based on their impact on strategy outcomes. We show how engaging with the diversity and inclusion literature allows open strategy scholars to move from the business case towards an alternative, equity-based approach. Adopting an equity-based approach widens the themes addressed in open strategy research to the reproduction of power relations and sustained inequalities in strategy making and thus contributes to a more societally meaningful and relevant understanding of diversity and inclusion in the strategy field.

Globalization, Privatization and the Role of the State in Education Through Representative Terms of Government in Argentina

ABSTRACT We study the role of the State in education through the most significant government periods in Argentina in the last 50 years. We use a sociocultural approach, contemplating the historical development of educational policies in the country, exploring conceptual frameworks applicable in the investigation of the State, privatization and decentralization in education. We analyze how certain models of government establish the cultural reproduction of inequality in education, contextualizing the role of the State as a possible promoter of hegemonic educational projects of hybrid models of globalization. We discuss the multifaceted role of the State in education and society, as well as in the educational institutions themselves and their actors, considering education as a fundamental right, which must be guaranteed by the State. Through the analysis of political, economic and social contexts we expose negative impacts on education during the exercise of neoliberal practices, which resort to privatization and state decentralization. In contrast, the use of socio-educational policies has contributed greatly to the improvement of the country’s public education system. The results of this case study are then presented as a general notion regarding the global issue of inequality in education, in order to help rethink the future of education.