Reproduction Of Inequality Research Articles

Vulnerabilidad y Exigibilidad de Derechos: la Perspectiva de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes

A multiple-case study is presented, comprising typical cases of rights violations where each of the 16 child and adolescent participants constituted a case. Adopting a social community psychology approach, the authors analyzed the meanings that children and adolescents living in territories marked by psychosocial vulnerability construct with respect to their everyday life and their access to rights. A descriptive-exploratory study of a qualitative nature was conducted. Life stories, focus groups, and naturalistic observation were implemented. A biographical strategy was adopted to analyze the information collected. Results were organized according to three dimensions of biographical narratives: sociohistorical reality, linked to socioeconomic education; psychic reality, focused on the participants’ being and doing dimensions; and discursive reality, as an instance of retrospective and prospective analysis of the connection with others. The cases presented called into question the effectiveness of social policies aimed at restoring people’s rights. The participants’ life trajectories revealed micro- and macro-political obstacles to accessing rights, a situation that supports the social reproduction of inequalities and has de-subjectivizing effects. Situations that guarantee identity grounding and rights enforceability promote individual and collective subjectivizing processes in the actors involved and pose new challenges in the construction of one’s life project.

Generational change and intergenerational relationships in the context of the asset economy

ABSTRACT The study of youth is central to efforts to understanding continuity and change and the reproduction of inequality. There are longstanding debates about how to account for class in shaping young people’s lives in the context of social change, including recent calls for a greater focus on political economy in the sociological study of youth. This article considers these debates in the context of the rise of the asset economy, developing a generational framework for conceptualizing young adulthood and shifting intergenerational relations in the context of the growing importance of assets to economic stratification. I propose that the shifting interaction of income, assets and family transfers reshapes young lives but not in a way that creates youth as a precarious class position. Instead, access to family assets in young adulthood is of increasing importance for navigating contemporary insecurities and accessing opportunities. The conditions faced by many young people are conditions in which the relative rewards for types of speculation on the future are heightened for some young people. The rise of the asset economy is central to the changing life chances between generations at a societal level (and potentially encourages generational conflict at this level) but simultaneously enhances the importance of intergenerational solidarities and transfers within the family.

The corporate power of the British monarchy: Capital(ism), wealth and power in contemporary Britain

This article offers a critical analysis of the British monarchy within wider political economies of wealth and power. While sociology has renewed its interest in ‘the elites’, the British monarchy is often positioned as an archaic institution, an anachronism in relation to corporate forms of wealth and power, and therefore irrelevant. This article counters this framing by revealing the mechanics, technologies and actors ‘behind the scenes’, in order to expose and demystify the relationship between the symbolic and political-economic functions of the monarchy. To do this, I (re)conceptualise the monarchy as a corporation, ‘The Firm’, oriented towards, and historically entrenched in, processes of capital accumulation, profit extraction and other forms of exploitation. The article maps out The Firm’s labour relations, financial arrangements, inter/national relationships and networks, and the legal status of The Crown and its components in order to demonstrate how ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of wealth intersect and converge in contemporary Britain. This article is intended as a provocation to sociological studies of elites to suggest that, in overlooking monarchy, we are overlooking a key component of contemporary capitalism, and a key component in the reproduction of inequalities today.

Identity Negotiation in Multilingual Contexts: A Narrative Inquiry into Experiences of an African Immigrant High School Student

Background/Context Inclusion of African immigrant youth voices in educational and research discourses remains rare despite the steady growth of this population in the United States over the past four decades. Consequently, the multilingual abilities of these youth remain typically unnoticed or ignored in the classroom, and little is specifically known about their histories, cultures, expectations, and achievements. Purpose Using the narrative inquiry approach and the Natural, Institutional, Discursive, Affinity, Learner, and Solidarity (NIDALS) theoretical lens, we explore the lived experiences of one African immigrant high school student in the midwestern United States. Research Design Using narrative inquiry, we qualitatively explored the lived cultural, racial, and ethnic identities and self-images experienced by a Ghanaian-born female high school student, Akosua (pseudonym), as she navigated and resisted identities ascribed to her in the midwestern U.S. Findings The student's narratives speak to issues of culture, identity, and self-image, as well as her literate life in multiple languages and literacy contexts in and out of school. The findings reveal narratives of ascribed identities, racialization, and perceived language hierarchies in the participant's daily life and indicate a need to challenge such narratives about African immigrant students and disrupt the reproduction of linguistic and racial inequality in the school system. Recommendations While school systems do follow state-sanctioned linguistic norms and ideologies, when educators draw on students’ experiences and funds of knowledge as resources already in the room in order to find ways of negotiating and disrupting language hierarchies and the ascribed identities they support, it allows all students, including multilinguals, to have their identity affirmed, even in school systems that have historically marginalized them. This, in turn, supports educational achievement, broadly realized, not only psychologically for all students but also economically and nationally for the country—a critical accomplishment in an era when educational quality in the U.S. is losing ground to foreign achievements.

Organising Global Stratification: How International Organisations (Re)Produce Inequalities in International Society

ABSTRACT The article makes the case for scrutinising international organisations (IOs) as key sites and agents of inequality reproduction and transformation in international society. Drawing on sociological inequality research and institutionalist approaches to International Relations, we argue that IOs reproduce and transform broader stratification patterns in their global social environment through intertwined processes of categorisation and distribution. We propose to capture these twin processes from three observation points, which highlight different material and symbolic practices operating within IOs and at the interface between IOs and their environment.

An exploration of perceptions of gender equity among SAGE Athena SWAN self-assessment team members in a regional Australian university

ABSTRACT Gender inequality in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) is well documented internationally. The Athena SWAN (AS) Charter was launched in the UK in 2005 to provide an impetus for positive cultural and structural changes to advance gender equality in UK universities. The Australian pilot of the AS Charter began in 2015 and is overseen by the Australian Academy of Sciences. Despite extensive engagement with AS over the last 15 years in the UK and more recently in Australia, qualitative research on the awards application process and its impact on AS Self-Assessment Team (SAT) members is limited. To fill this knowledge gap, we undertook a qualitative interview study examining how gender and gender equity are operationalised and understood by SAT members in the first year of an AS pilot at a regional Australian university. Findings indicate key gender differences in SAT members’ motivations for AS participation which, we argue, potentially translates into unequal gendered workload distributions on the SAT. Although AS is positioned as a key mechanism for addressing inequality in STEMM broadly, this study suggests that the initiative’s impacts in Australia risk being undermined by its unintentional reproduction of gender inequality in the academic workforce.

Emerging Powers in the World Trading System: Contestation of the Developing Country Status and the Reproduction of Inequalities

ABSTRACT This article investigates discursive struggles over the boundaries of the categorisation of developing countries in the world trade regime. A key principle of the World Trade Organization (WTO) grants special rights to the group of developing countries. Recently, it has become highly contested whether emerging economies such as China can legitimately claim to belong to the group of developing countries. This article uncovers how old and new economic powers have tried to strategically (re)frame the boundaries of the developing country categorisation in the WTO. I argue that ongoing contestation reproduces inequalities because many developing countries are unwittingly negatively affected by the lack of formal criteria for classifying emerging economies—even if emerging economies themselves may benefit. In doing so, I illustrate how informal practices of classification may undermine the original intention of categorisation in International Organizations that aims to address inequality among its members.

Reproduction Versus Transformation: The Case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

ABSTRACT This article offers a constructive critique of Fehl and Freistein's argument that international organisations (IOs) significantly affect international stratification, either producing, reproducing or transforming inequality. It suggests that without reference to the specific purposes which individual IOs pursue and the forces driving global change, it is impossible to predict either when the goals of IOs and states might diverge, or when a particular IO might promote the reproduction of inequality on the one hand, or its transformation on the other. In particular, divergence between states on the one hand and IOs charged with the management of the global economy on the other is explained by the fact that the IOs concerned are committed to the reproduction of capital on a global scale, and therefore to the continuous transformation of global hierarchies. The argument is supported by a case study of IO support for China's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Institutional Reforms and the Politics of Inequality Reproduction: The Case of the League of Nations’ Council Crisis in 1926

ABSTRACT This contribution to the special issue explores how institutional reforms are shaped by and feed back into the politics of inequality reproduction. IR has recently begun to more closely study how hierarchies intersect. This article uses the analytical concept of “interlinkages” to grasp how international organisations couple intra-organisational patterns of unequal representation to extra-organisational social hierarchies. It empirically investigates the forms and effects of such interlinkages through a case study of the League of Nations’ Council crisis and reform in 1926. The reform reaffirmed the most prominent interlinkage: the restriction of permanent membership to states recognised as “great powers”. In addition, the reform created two new types of non-permanent seats which changed the pattern of representation of small states. Overall, the case study shows that the interlinkages and their effects were generated by an interplay of formal design and informal understandings both at the level of permanent and non-permanent seats.

Differentiation as Affirmative Action: Transforming or Reinforcing Structural Inequality at the UNFCCC?

ABSTRACT Structural inequality is at the heart of the struggle to prevent dangerous climate change. This makes the global climate regime a particularly interesting case, when it comes to conceptualising and assessing the role of international institutions as sites for the reproduction and transformation of macro-level inequalities that structure the international system. This article uses these interlinkages to, first, assess, in how far the debates, conflicts and doubts regarding effectiveness and justifications of affirmative action at the domestic level, introduced as a reaction to domestic structural inequality, can teach us something about the actual potential of and the obstacles to the transformation of structural inequalities through differentiation internationally. Second, it assesses whether and how institutional mechanisms of categorisation and (re-)distribution within the UNFCCC have led and are likely to lead in the future to a reinforcement or a transformation of global structural inequalities.

Global Health Education and Mediatization of Care in Costa Rica

ABSTRACT Costa Rica has become a destination for global health education courses, while funding for global health has increased dramatically over the past thirty years. An examination of one Costa Rican group’s efforts to market humanitarian discourses, focusing on website design, provides a window into the workings of global health education and details the sometimes-uncomfortable position of non-US health professionals in educational programming. This contributes to theorizations of the intersection of mediatization and care, and suggests links between the legitimation of global health as a discipline, on the one hand, and the reproduction of inequities, on the other.

Support of students in primary schools: a comparative case study in a selective education system

ABSTRACT Previous research has demonstrated that school processes can be significantly associated with (in)equality in schools. However, it is unclear what these practices in schools look like. This study aims to understand support practices for students in primary schools in a highly selective education system. The findings are based on a contrastive case comparison of five primary schools in Switzerland with a large percentage of children with a migration background. Quantitative surveys with students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 (n = 372) and qualitative analyses of group discussions with teachers were conducted. The results of the qualitative study, and in part also of the quantitative study, show that schools differ systematically in providing support for students. None of the schools was found to have a support milieu that could be described as non-discriminatory. In the majority of the schools, the support milieu is oriented towards high performing students with a higher socio-cultural family background or high educational aspirations; this may lead to the reproduction of inequalities. Only two schools seem to have implemented compensatory support strategies, at least partially. Further, the schools can be differentiated regarding the teachers’ perceived degree of their active participation in supporting students.

A contribution to the critique of worthless education: between critical pedagogy and welfare sociology

ABSTRACT The article deals with changes in the area of education, especially at the higher level, after the so-called neoliberal turn of the 1980s. In order to explore the transformation of the sphere of education, the Marxian concept of commodification was used, as well as the four-level approach to the mechanisms of social reproduction of inequalities of Göran Theborn. This allows the introduction of the concept of worthless education, which, in turn, takes into account the role of not only the phenomena of education in the contemporary capitalist society, but also – similarly to the proposal of Max Weber – phenomena that are conditioned by and important in terms of education. Thus outlined research area was confronted with the approach of critical pedagogy and welfare sociology, in order to articulate the social consequences of the process of spoiling education. The main aim of the article is, therefore, to critically analyse the changes in the area of education after the neoliberal turn, which through the concept of ‘worthless education’ allows to see the overt and covert consequences of the ongoing transformations on many levels of society (although attention and examples have been focused mainly on the issue of labour).

White Women Who Lead: God, Girlfriends, and Diversity Projects in a National Evangelical Ministry

A robust body of literature has used feminist analysis to study white evangelical women in the United States, but few of these studies have addressed the reproduction of racial inequality. Beginning with the assumption that women-led evangelical ministries are racialized organizations, the authors examine the relationship between racial and gender ideologies and the messages of white evangelical women leaders at the IF:Gathering, a popular annual Christian women’s conference in the United States. On the surface, the women who lead IF embody a contradiction: they support the conservative gender ideology of evangelicalism while challenging this religious tradition by encouraging all Christian women, regardless of race, to act as leaders within their communities. However, the authors’ in-depth content analysis of live-streamed and video-recorded conference sessions reveals that the mostly white speakers at IF use race to credential their leadership. Speakers draw from a mixture of racial and gender ideologies to stress the importance of telling diverse “girlfriends” about Jesus and rescuing women of color “in the trenches” (those who are from the global South or living in U.S. cities) from poverty or sexual exploitation. The findings reveal how potentially progressive and empowering messages at a women-led evangelical organization limit the definition and scope of women’s leadership and reinforce the white patriarchal status quo.

Power geometries of encampment. The reproduction of domination and marginality among Somali refugees in Kakuma

My article is concerned with the reproduction of power differentials among Somali refugees in Kakuma refugee camp, in Northern Kenya’s Turkana County. By examining how the spatial organisation of the camp mirrors, and amplifies, pre-existing inequalities, it discusses the importance of refugees’ social relations crossing, and blurring, the boundaries of the camp. Based on interviews and focus group discussions with refugees and humanitarian personnel in the camp and in Nairobi, this paper builds upon Adam Ramadan's spatialising approach to the refugee camp and Doreen Massey’s notion of ‘power geometry’ to empirically contribute to the debate on space, biopolitics and the reproduction of inequality. In doing so, it describes how, in Kakuma, Somali entrepreneurs, mostly from Darood and Hawiye clans, leveraged their social networks to gain better access to the connectivity infrastructure of the camp, thus consolidating their position of economic dominance while entrenching the dependency and marginality of Somali Bantu, a community with a history of socio-economic exclusion within the Somali society. This article argues that relations of power are entwined to the materiality of the camp, showing that the plan of Kakuma has been shaped by the rush of resourceful Somali entrepreneurs to secure privileged access to the connectivity infrastructures of the camp, such as the main road and the telecommunication network. The control of these infrastructures through which goods, money and information circulate has thus contributed to reproducing pre-existing power relations.

Inequality and access to elite universities in China: reexamining the interacting multiple capitals model

ABSTRACT Using the first wave data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey, this study provides an alternative explanation of the effect of social status on access to elite universities in China. We modify and extend the interacting multiple capitals model to identify the interactive effects of cultural, social, and economic capital and the educational transition from high school on access to elite universities. The results of mediation analysis show that social capital and studying in quality high schools function as important mechanisms for elite university entry. These findings underline the important role of social capital and the cumulative advantages of high school in the reproduction of inequality.

Civic Intimacies: Black Queer Improvisations on Citizenship

This ethnographic book focuses on how Black queer people in Baltimore build support structures in the face of ongoing violence and insecurity in their lives. The author advances the concept of “civic intimacies” to account for a range of practices that enable Black queer Baltimoreans to not only survive but also thrive, as they employ strategies of care and belonging to navigate through civic institutions. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, van Doorn provides an excellent sense of the vibrancy of Black queer political work in a variety of contexts. His research asks a lot of important questions while providing fair and nuanced analysis, and the text is theoretically deep and astute. While I had an occasional qualm with aspects of the book, I recommend it without hesitation, especially for sociologists interested in queer theory, neoliberalism, or Black queer studies. The text focuses primarily on three institutions: Baltimore’s HIV-prevention system; the Black Church; and the city’s majority-white BDSM community. All three of these sites are explored in depth, and I especially enjoyed reading these ethnographic chapters. The third chapter and parts of the second are particularly strong, where van Doorn examines Baltimore’s HIV-prevention system. He speaks very directly in these chapters, tying a lot of these efforts to the city’s racist legacies and to the continual reproduction of racial inequality. Sociologists interested in public health and race, along with the increasing role of neoliberalism in medical fields, are likely to find much to admire in these chapters. Scholars interested in Baltimore’s ballroom communities, both historically and currently, will also want to obtain this text, as such communities play a significant role in the book.

Review: Gender, Class and Food

Alexandra Rodney reviews “Gender, Class and Food: Families, Bodies and Health,” in which Julia M. Parsons draws from 75 interviews to examine everyday foodways and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in the United Kingdom.

Inequality, continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies

ABSTRACTThis article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to build. His work provided a powerful example of how to engage with these questions with a strong sense of social justice but the answers he gave, as with all such answers in sociology, are necessarily provisional. The articles collected in this issue bring empirical research and new concepts that build on this legacy, suggesting new ways to capture the experiences of young people across the multiple spheres of their lives and how disadvantage and inequality are made in the context of processes across time.

The educational trajectory of Newly Arrived Migrant Students: Insights from a structural analysis of cultural capital

ABSTRACTBackground: The recent influx of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) in Western-European societies poses important educational questions about how best to support migrant students within the education system.Purpose: We sought to study how elements that are associated with cultural capital – namely a sense of entitlement and strategic knowledge – have relevance to NAMS’ educational trajectories. In studying the process of how cultural capital relates to educational careers, this study argues for a general shift from a resource-focused approach towards a strategy-focused approach to cultural capital.Sample: We collected data from 33 NAMS from six secondary schools in a city in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). A maximum difference approach was used: this allowed comparison of NAMS who followed the most academic track (general track) and the least academic track (vocational track) in secondary education in Flanders.Design and methods: We undertook 33 in-depth biographical interviews during which the NAMS reconstructed their educational trajectories. Data were analysed qualitatively. We used structural approach analysis to identify each narrative’s core structure. These structured fragments were then thematically coded.Results: Within the categories ‘a sense of entitlement’ and ‘strategic knowledge of the education system’, the analysis detected differences in strategies of action between pupils in the general track and in the vocational track.Conclusion: The findings offer insights that could support the development of better strategies to guide and support NAMS in education. As NAMS’ integration in the educational system appears to be a stretched and slow process of orientation, studying their trajectory has the potential to deepen our understanding of known mechanisms of the reproduction of inequalities in education.