Social Inequality:

Why It Exists and How it is Maintained

1) variety of bases of inequality: e.g. wealth, tasks, talent, honors, political power, valor, virtue, education, etc.

1a) different types of resources for securing status: economic vs social vs cultural capital

2) ‘cause’ of inequality – Gaetano Mosca on the size and org’n of groups

there is an inherent tendancy towards stratification, based on:

a) functional need for direction

--Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, as discussed in Stark

--Herbert Gans on the functionality of poverty

--Durkheim on the functionality of crime

--Is this a plausible argument??

b) stratification driven not by functional need, but by self-interest of rulers

c) easy capacity for organization among the elite

--robert michels' IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY

2a) techniques for maintaining rule:

--special rules/competitions for entry

--special languages

--special manners

--rules of formal equality

3) horizontal mobility across stratification systems: expending one kind of capital to obtain another

--in modern, complex societies, there are multiple ways in which we are unequal

--wealth vs power vs intellect or other cultural resources

4) identity consequences – subcultures, tensions (status inconsistency), graphs of the space of tastes (Pierre Bourdieu)

--status inconsistency (having more of one status-securing resource than another) can be a source of frustration, and spurs us to convert one form of 'capital' into another

--markers of distinction for smaller groups, and the 'market' for markers of distinction

--counterelites and subcultures: tastes in music, fashion, and art

--fashion cycles: why? The elite distinguishing themselves from the masses? Or the masses seeking identities that valorize their lives?

--contemporary eclecticism: are we increasingly 'consumers' of markers of distinction or identity?

5) next time: long-term changes in inequality

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STRATIFICATION OVER TIME

5) stages in the development of stratification:

a) hunter-gatherers: little strat.

b) agrarian society: considerable strat.

c) industrial society: --marx: more strat

--smith: less strat

d) postindustrial society: more or less?

6) postindustrial society's key features:

a) growing importance of services

b) increasing computer-based automation

c) decline of male dominance

7) what are the consequences in terms of social inequality, and will we see more structural or more exchange mobility?

--high vs low-end services

--Value of human capital and problem-solving ability

--Skill-breadth vs skill depth

--Need for programming, monitoring, repairing types of jobs

--women in the workforce, rise of the two-income householdà child-management issues, perhaps more women taking jobs from men(?)