Gender equality is one of the necessary social foundations of well-being in society, yet inequality persists in social and organisational structures worldwide. Although many indicators exist to measure gender inequality on an organisational level, it is questionable whether these indicators are actually meaningful. This paper reports on a project in which an accounting model was developed and implemented to capture the complex realities of gender inequalities embedded in organisational structures. The project employed an interventionist approach, which allowed the researchers to apply a theoretically grounded model in a real-life context. The present paper highlights the shortfalls of current organisational practices and provides an interpretation of the findings. The identified need for gender-related information to be integrated into decision-making processes underlines the transformative role that accounting can play. This study contributes to the literature on the transformative potential of accounting in the area of gender (in)equality by capturing the disconnect between current organisational practices and experiences on the ground.

The role of graduate education in the intergenerational reproduction of inequality in Chile

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese traders operating in Kinshasa's urban economy, this article examines how differentiated family ties and wealth transmission shape social mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of inequality. We show that family support is neither uniform nor equally productive: its effects depend on both class position and the specific relationships mobilised. While assistance among siblings and extended kin is widespread, it tends to remain modest and short-lived, supporting entry into trade or crisis management rather than sustained accumulation. By contrast, marital and intergenerational ties more often enable threshold-crossing mobility by providing access to larger volumes of capital, protective connections, and resources for children's education, business developments, and migration trajectories. We argue that these unequal forms of intra-family wealth transmission contribute to the durability of class positions across generations.

The educational rights of the Muslim minority of Thrace, the only officially recognised minority in Greece, are safeguarded by Article 41 of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Within this framework, minority education has developed into a distinct subsystem of the Greek educational landscape, historically shaped by the dynamics of Greek–Turkish relations. Since the late 1990s, state policy has prioritised the qualitative improvement of educational provision, leading to targeted initiatives, such as the creation of new textbooks for minority classrooms. The present study investigates, within the field of geography education, the extent to which these textbooks cultivate cartographic skills through the use of maps, comparing the specialised minority school textbooks with those employed in mainstream public education. Situated within the field of geography education and textbook research, the study applies content analysis to the full corpus of maps contained in both textbook categories, classifying them according to a tripartite typology and the type of learning task involved. The results of the analysis demonstrate that minority school text-books display notable deficiencies relative to their general education counterparts, particularly regarding the systematic integration of map-based learning activities. These findings suggest that the limited presence and pedagogical use of maps in minority school textbooks may contribute to the reproduction of educational inequalities, underscoring the need for policy measures to strengthen spatial and cartographic literacy in minority education.

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the dynamics of power and (in)equality within Swedish higher education institutions (HEI), by looking at how discrimination is described and monitored in governing policy documents. By critically analysing HEI official documents from four Swedish universities in relation to increasing diversity and internationalization-oriented strategies, the study scrutinizes the promotion of equal opportunities and guidelines related to discrimination. It engages with and troubles concepts like diversity, the political drive for widening participation, and increasing internationalization. Notably, the study draws attention to the conspicuous absence of terms like race and racism in the governing policies that are ostensibly tasked with monitoring discrimination in HEIs. The reasons for these omissions are engaged with through an alignment with a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framework. The findings raise important questions about the efficacy of current anti-discrimination policies within HEI spaces, inviting reflections on the nature of monitoring of discrimination and the (re)production of inequities and racism. Our analysis highlights the need for unpacking issues related to whose gaze is privileged and who is (in)visibilized when discrimination is monitored. Additionally, the study raises questions regarding how discourses of equity within HEI become framed in relation to marginalization processes.

This article analyzes the impacts of digital technologies, with emphasis on artificial intelligence, on teaching and learning processes in the contemporary educational context. The research adopts a qualitative approach of bibliographic and documentary nature, based on the analysis of scientific articles indexed in rigorous academic databases and official normative documents. The study examines the trajectory of digital technologies in education, the potentialities and limitations of artificial intelligence as a pedagogical tool, and the ethical challenges arising from its incorporation into the school environment. The investigation reveals that artificial intelligence offers significant possibilities for learning personalization, task automation, and expansion of didactic resources, but also presents risks related to algorithmic biases, reproduction of inequalities, and weakening of the teaching role. The results show that the lack of adequate teacher training for the critical use of these technologies constitutes one of the main obstacles to their effective integration into pedagogical practices. The article contributes to the academic debate by systematizing evidence that reaffirms the need for a balanced, ethical, and human-centered approach to the incorporation of artificial intelligence in education, offering subsidies for the formulation of public policies and teacher training programs that address the demands of digital culture.

With the advent of the knowledge society, the expansion of higher education has become a goal of governments to drive both economic growth and social development. In recent decades, as in other countries, Brazil has expanded the system and became the fourth largest in the world in terms of participation, significantly increasing the enrolment of students of lower socioeconomic status (SES). However, besides access, achievement is an important challenge to the equity of higher education, as underprivileged students tend to show poorer academic performance. Considering the microdata of a large-scale national exam (ENADE), one of the largest higher education databases in the world, with more than one million students every 3 years, we statistically analyse the achievement of disadvantaged students in socially diversified cohorts (with lower and higher concentration of higher SES students). Findings support the argument that there is a contagion or positive peer effect of high SES cohorts on the achievement of disadvantaged students. Social diversification may therefore contribute to reducing the reproduction of social inequities in higher education in one of the most unequal nations in the world.

The relevance is due to the need for a comprehensive analysis of the spatial and economic differentiation of the digital development of the federal districts of Russia in the context of increasing regional imbalances and the formation of a new paradigm of technological modernization. In the context of global digital transformation, there is an increase in the complexity of the structure of the economic space, where technological, institutional and socioeconomic factors determine the emergence of stable asymmetries between the leading regions and peripheral territories. Of particular importance is the study of the mechanisms of reproduction of digital inequality, which affect the competitiveness of regional economic systems and the effectiveness of national digital policies. The purpose of the study is to identify the institutional and technological determinants of the digital development of the federal districts of Russia and the development of scientifically based recommendations to reduce regional disparities based on the concept of "smart decentralization." Objectives: analysis of spatial differentiation of digitalization indicators; identification of key factors that determine the technological inequality of the regions; assessment of the effects of resource-technological symbiosis in regions with raw materials specialization; development of a typology of regions according to the level of digital maturity; formulation of strategic directions for harmonization of the digital space. Methodology. The methodological basis of the study is based on the synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, including modified methods for calculating digitalization indices, spatial-econometric modeling and cluster analysis. The conceptual apparatus integrates the provisions of theories of technological structures, institutional economics and endogenous growth, which allows for a comprehensive assessment of regional imbalances in the multidimensional analytical space. The results of the study revealed a stable three-level hierarchy of digital development of federal districts, characterized by pronounced polarization of technological potential. A synergistic effect of techno-institutional complementarity has been established in the leading regions, accompanied by dysfunctional phenomena of the "Dutch disease." The paradox of resource-technological symbiosis in industrially oriented regions and the phenomenon of a "double digital economy" in districts with pronounced intraregional inequality were revealed. The conclusions findings justify the need for a differentiated regional policy that combines the promotion of endogenous innovation processes, the creation of digital special economic zones, and the formation of interregional technological chains.

In taxi services, social rating is a sociotechnical phenomenon that transforms the nature of social interactions in the digital environment. The authors integrated the concepts of platform economics, algorithmic management, and digital trust to reveal the mechanisms of rating systems and their adaptation to local cultural contexts. The article describes the structural features, social consequences and cultural specifics of algorithmic rating systems using taxi services as an example. The comparative analysis involved seven major taxi service platforms (Yandex Go, Citymobil, Maxim, Uber, Bolt, DiDi, Gett), their document analysis, and 32 in-depth interviews with experts. The algorithmic ratings are more than a service assessment tool: they are a mechanism of social control that shapes new behavior patterns. They possess a certain paradoxical duality: sharing a universal technological basis, they nevertheless exhibit significant cultural plasticity, reproducing regional norms of social interaction. The social effects of taxi service ratings range from the transformation of labor relations to the reproduction of digital inequality. While improving the algorithmic management of social processes, the study offers a conceptual framework for analyzing the balance between the effectiveness of platform solutions and the protection of user’s rights. Apart from being quality control tools, the rating algorithms of taxi services are complex socio-technical systems that reproduce and transform cultural norms. Their development will depend on how well technological efficiency can be combined with cultural diversity. The platforms are likely to shape the new models of social interaction that go far beyond the service sector.

This study analyzes the nature of migrant labor as “silent capital” within the global economy and examines the structural role of invisible forms of work in capitalist production relations. Through a qualitative analysis based on user discourses collected from the Reddit platform, the research reveals how migrant workers, engaged in low-wage, precarious and flexible employment, contribute invisibly to capital accumulation. Employing a phenomenological design, the study applies the traditional content analysis method to interpret the data. The findings demonstrate that migrant labor functions as a “silent wealth transfer mechanism” within the neoliberal economy, sustaining the cycle of cheap production and cheap consumption at the expense of labor devaluation. Moreover, the care work performed by women migrants transforms into an invisible form of emotional capital within global care chains, highlighting the reproduction of gender-based inequalities within economic systems. In this respect, the study contributes to the literature on feminist economics and migration economics by emphasizing that migrant labor should be conceptualized not merely as a micro-level labor input but as a macroeconomic variable essential to the sustainability of global capital accumulation. By discussing the implications of invisible labor for international production networks, income distribution and welfare policies, the study offers a critical perspective and makes a significant contribution to the field of economics.

ABSTRACT This paper reviews a decade of critical scholarship on the development of the “Green City” in the Global North, examining how these critiques address socio-environmental justice, spatial scales, and colonial entanglements. Drawing on a scoping review of 206 peer-reviewed articles, it analyses key strands of the literature, including green gentrification, climate adaptation, green financialisation, urban degrowth, urban metabolism, and planetary urbanisation. Our findings show that critiques of the Green City consistently expose fundamental contradictions between sustainability objectives and the reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities. While green urban initiatives in cities of the Global North are often promoted as responses to environmental crises, they frequently generate exclusion, displacement, and new forms of financialisation. These contradictions unfold across multiple spatial scales, from building – and neighbourhood-level interventions to urban governance arrangements and global economic and ecological processes. Although parts of the literature increasingly move beyond micro-scale analyses to engage with meso – and macro-level dynamics, only a limited number of studies explicitly adopt decolonial perspectives that connect green city development in the Global North to processes of extraction, exploitation, and historical continuities in the Global South. The paper argues that future research would benefit from moving beyond scalar framings alone and more systematically engaging with the colonial foundations and contemporary dependencies shaping green city transitions. A decolonial lens can offer critical insights into how green agendas in the Global North reproduce global inequalities and help reframe socio-environmental justice within a genuinely planetary perspective.

ABSTRACT Small‐scale fisheries and aquaculture constitute critical pillars of food security, livelihoods, and rural economies across East Africa, yet persistent gendered inequalities continue to constrain both equity and sectoral performance. This study provides a synthesis of empirical evidence from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to examine how structural, institutional, and socio‐cultural processes reproduce gender disparities across fisheries and aquaculture value chains. Drawing on a narrative review of peer reviewed and grey literature published between 2015 and 2025, the analysis applies the Harvard Analytical Framework (HAF) to interrogate four interrelated dimensions: Division of labour, access to and control over productive resources, influencing institutional and normative factors, and gender integration within project cycles. The findings indicate that gender inequalities are most pronounced in asset ownership, decision making authority, and benefit distribution rather than participation alone. Women remain concentrated in labour intensive and lower value post‐harvest activities, while men dominate harvesting, aquaculture production, licensing systems, and leadership positions within co management institutions. Across the three countries, men retain control over the majority of productive assets, including boats, fishing gear, land, and aquaculture infrastructure, while women's access to credit, extension services, and modern technologies remains constrained. These disparities are reinforced by inheritance regimes, gender norms, and male dominated governance structures that shape access to resources and control over income. Development interventions frequently expand women's participation without addressing underlying structural constraints, thereby contributing to the reproduction of institutional inequalities. By linking structural analysis to policy relevant pathways, the study argues that inclusive blue economy development requires tenure reform, gender responsive financing mechanisms, institutional restructuring, and sustained normative change. The review positions gender equity as a governance and productivity imperative and provides an evidence based foundation for advancing resilient and inclusive fisheries and aquaculture systems in East Africa.

As widely identified in international research, frontline professionals, those who represent the state in face-to-face encounters with citizens, play a significant role in the manner in which public policies are implemented and experienced by citizens. While much has been studied on the different coping mechanisms frontline professionals employ, or their tendency towards state-centered or client-centered practice, one concept that has received little attention thus far has been frontline professional resistance, specifically the resistance that emerges in weak state institutional contexts in the Global South. This paper seeks to address this research gap by exploring what we identify as productive resistance, strategies in which frontline professionals use their agency creatively to address the needs of vulnerable citizens effectively. These actions seek actively and openly to contest the dehumanization produced by social programs implemented in neoliberal states with weak state institutions characterized by tight resource constraints and precarious employment conditions. Drawing on qualitative research conducted on the implementation of social programs in Chile, we identify how frontline professionals deploy productive resistance strategies in order to achieve program objectives and improve citizens’ wellbeing. While these specific productive resistances lead to improving program functioning, we conclude our paper by problematizing the responsibility placed on frontline professionals in neoliberal states working within weak state institutions in the Global South and how this leads to the reproduction of inequalities.

The 2000s have witnessed a significant, worldwide boom in new art museums founded by private, wealthy collectors. While the arts have long been a key arena for the remaking of elite distinction and the reproduction of inequalities, this surge in private museums has sparked much controversy. In this paper, we demonstrate how wealthy elites deploy this form of cultural philanthropy for (self)legitimation. Based on topic modelling analysis, we examine the online mission statements and 'about us' sections of 399 private museums across 59 countries to understand what forms of legitimation discourses they construct. We find that, beyond discourses of intra-elite distinction, the mission statements additionally mobilize discursive legitimation strategies that highlight private museums and their founders as reliable, institutionalized agents in the artworld and valuable philanthropic actors in society more broadly. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how the arts function as a particularly versatile and powerful tool for symbolic elite legitimation struggles, allowing wealthy elites from different backgrounds to coalesce globally around private art museums. In light of escalating wealth concentration and widening economic disparities around the world, our paper adds to sociology's critical imperative to scrutinize the formation and reproduction of contemporary elites.

More than 600,000 people leave U.S. jails and prisons annually, a chronic policy concern for the penal state and welfare providers with many interventions recommending workforce development. However, job outlets are sparse, unstable, and often exploitative. But even as scholars document these conditions, their analyses are largely constrained to “classical” workfare programs rather than emergent job sectors. Indeed, security NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are hiring formerly incarcerated people, pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize and measure the (re)production of socio-economic inequality. Drawing from 35 interviews with employees of the California-based security NGO Urban Alchemy, this paper offers two findings. First, reentry workers’ employment experience in the security sector indicates a blurring of stigma and social capital where people are finding work because of their record and without a third-party service provider. This “carceral networking” challenges how we study reentry success vis-à-vis the labor market. Second, reentry workers come to occupy a position of “penal liminality” that puts them at greater risk of surveillance from both their employers and penal agents while simultaneously leveraging police interventions to accomplish organizational goals. This tense dichotomy highlights how security work blurs the roles of those who police and those that are policed.

This paper examines the UK's 2025 Immigration White Paper as a critical site for understanding how immigration policy functions as an instrument of racial capitalism. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the theory of social reproduction, and intersectionality, it interrogates how the state's construction of the 'skilled migrant' operates as a racially coded category that privileges whiteness, anglocentric credentials, and neoliberal norms of value. Rather than treating the White Paper as a discrete policy episode, the analysis situates it within a longer genealogy of immigration governance that reproduces structural inequalities across higher education and graduate employment. By tracing how migrant 'worthiness' is encoded through racialised and classed proxies-such as language fluency, academic credentials, and salary thresholds-the paper contributes to wider sociological debates on bordering, credentialism, and state racial formation. It demonstrates that the British state's discourse of 'merit' and 'skill' is inseparable from exclusionary practices that undermine the promise of equal opportunity for racialised citizens and migrants alike. The paper concludes by advancing a forward-looking framework for understanding policy as both a site of intervention and a generator of symbolic and material hierarchies.

Medicalizing the social determinants of health and the inadvertent reproduction of inequities through social-care program implementation in the United States.

This qualitative study explores the construction of financial literacy in the context of retirement among young women in Israel, in light of available cultural schemas. The research challenges economic models that rely solely on assumptions of rationality and self-interest, offering a qualitative expansion of the behavioral foundations of financial literacy. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 46 young women, the findings reveal that their perceptions and choices in the financial domain are profoundly shaped by gendered “schemas of devotion”: devotion to work and devotion to family. These schemas give rise to two orientations: women who are more engaged in the financial sphere, characterized by initiative and reflexivity (resistance to the gendered schemas), and women who are more detached, displaying passivity and emotional distance (adoption of these schemas). The study demonstrates how these cultural models contribute to either the reproduction or transformation of gender inequality in retirement. Its main contribution lies in broadening the discipline of economics and positioning gender as a central analytical category—one that is vital for developing more sensitive policies capable of improving the functioning of the economic system and reducing gender gaps.

Social identities are not merely descriptive categories but discursive resources mobilised in electoral practices. The caste-based electoral appeals in Indian elections, exemplify how identities are performatively invoked and normalised in the democratic life. This article employs critical discourse analysis of 31 political speeches to investigate the rhetorical strategies and illocutionary force indicating devices through which leaders interpellate voters into caste-based collectivities. The study shows how affective resonance and persuasive tropes are deployed to cultivate electoral belonging and political solidarity. By conceptualising caste-appeals as a mode of identity performance and discursive hegemony, the article illuminates that electoral language both reproduces and legitimises social hierarchies under the guise of democratic inclusion. This analysis foregrounds the nexus of discourse, identity, and power, offering theoretical insights into political communication, the performativity of social categories, and the reproduction of inequality in democratic contexts.

This article analyzes how the mechanisms of moral disengagement, as described by Albert Bandura, sustain and propagate misogynistic discourses in virtual communities, taking as its object the ROBOT9001 board (/r9k/) of the 4chan forum. Over 24 hours, 226 fragments from 12 discursive chains were examined, revealing the systematic presence of these mechanisms and their articulation with ideologies of gender domination and the reproduction of historical inequalities. These mechanisms allow subjects to maintain and reinforce hate speech without moral conflict, legitimizing misogyny under the guise of rationality. It was observed that the feeling of injustice, stemming from affective and sexual exclusion, is interpreted as a violation of a "natural right," with moral disengagement being the device that justifies this view. From a Marxist perspective, individual frustration is converted into collective resentment, masking material contradictions through identity conflicts. Hate thus acts as an instrument of ideological cohesion for a group that seeks to symbolically restore the patriarchal order shaken by female autonomy. In light of psychoanalysis, these discourses configure symptomatic formations of the social unconscious, in which the loss of the phallic place and the narcissistic fragility of the male subject are projected onto the female body, transforming desire into hostility. Virtuality intensifies this process by offering a space for discursive enjoyment legitimized by a collective superego. It is concluded that these communities function as spaces of affective radicalization, where hate becomes practice and language an instrument of symbolic and social violence.