Social class in Europe Rose, David; Harrison, Eric; Pevalin, David ...
2009, 2010, 20140404, 2009-10-22, 2014-04-04, 20090101, Letnik:
10
eBook, Book
This timely volume introduces a new social class schema, the European Socio-economic Classification (ESeC), which has been specifically developed and tested for use in EU comparative research. Social ...Class in Europe aims to introduce researchers to the new classification and its research potential. Since socio-economic classifications are so widely used in official and academic research, this collection is essential reading for all users of both government and academic social classifications. While primarily aimed at researchers who will be using the ESeC, the book's contents will also have a wider appeal as it is suitable for students taking substantive courses in European studies or as a supplementary text for undergraduates studying the EU, Sociology and Economics. Because of its inherent methodological interest, the book should prove a valuable tool for undergraduate and graduate courses that discuss how social scientists construct and validate basic measures. It will also be required reading for policy makers and analysts concerned with social inequality and social exclusion across Europe.
While we hear much about the "culture of poverty" that keeps poor black men poor, we know little about how such men understand their social position and relationship to the American dream. Moving ...beyond stereotypes, this book examines how twenty-six poverty-stricken African American men from Chicago view their prospects for getting ahead. It documents their definitions of good jobs and the good life--and their beliefs about whether and how these can be attained. In its pages, we meet men who think seriously about work, family, and community and whose differing experiences shape their views of their social world.
Based on intensive interviews, the book reveals how these men have experienced varying degrees of exposure to more-privileged Americans--differences that ground their understandings of how racism and socioeconomic inequality determine their life chances. The poorest and most socially isolated are, perhaps surprisingly, most likely to believe that individuals can improve their own lot. By contrast, men who regularly leave their neighborhood tend to have a wider range of opportunities but also have met with more racism, hostility, and institutional obstacles--making them less likely to believe in the American Dream.
Demonstrating how these men interpret their social world, this book seeks to de-pathologize them without ignoring their experiences with chronic unemployment, prison, and substance abuse. It shows how the men draw upon such experiences as they make meaning of the complex circumstances in which they strive to succeed.
Inequality of income and wealth has skyrocketed since the 1970s. As
the super-rich have grasped the vast majority of the gains from
economic growth, labor's share of income has declined. The middle
...class has stagnated, and those at the bottom have become even worse
off. Persistent structural discrimination on the basis of race and
gender exacerbates these economic disparities. The Great
Polarization brings together scholars from disparate fields to
examine the causes and consequences of this dramatic rise in
inequality. Contributors demonstrate that institutions, norms,
policy, and political power-not the "natural" operation of the
market-determine the distribution of wealth and income. The book
underscores the role of ideas and ideologies, showing how
neoclassical economics and related beliefs have functioned in
public debates to justify inequality. Together, these essays bear
out an inescapable conclusion: inequality is a choice. The rules of
the economy have been rewritten to favor those at the top,
entrenching the imbalances of power that widen the gap between the
very rich and everyone else. Contributors reconsider the data on
inequality, examine the policies that have led to this predicament,
and outline potential ways forward. Using both theoretical and
empirical analysis and drawing on the knowledge of experts in
policy, political economy, economics, and other disciplines,
The Great Polarization offers a kaleidoscopic view of the
processes that have shaped today's stark hierarchies.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination by race and provided an important tool for dismantling legal segregation. But almost fifty years later, residential segregation remains ...virtually unchanged in many metropolitan areas, particularly where large groups of racial and ethnic minorities live. Why does segregation persist at such high rates and what makes it so difficult to combat? InCycle of Segregation, sociologists Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder examine how everyday social processes shape residential stratification. Past neighborhood experiences, social networks, and daily activities all affect the mobility patterns of different racial groups in ways that have cemented segregation as a self-perpetuating cycle in the twenty-first century.Through original analyses of national-level surveys and in-depth interviews with residents of Chicago, Krysan and Crowder find that residential stratification is reinforced through the biases and blind spots that individuals exhibit in their searches for housing. People rely heavily on information from friends, family, and coworkers when choosing where to live. Because these social networks tend to be racially homogenous, people are likely to receive information primarily from members of their own racial group and move to neighborhoods that are also dominated by their group. Similarly, home-seekers who report wanting to stay close to family members can end up in segregated destinations because their relatives live in those neighborhoods. The authors suggest that even absent of family ties, people gravitate toward neighborhoods that are familiar to them through their past experiences, including where they have previously lived, and where they work, shop, and spend time. Because historical segregation has shaped so many of these experiences, even these seemingly race-neutral decisions help reinforce the cycle of residential stratification. As a result, segregation has declined much more slowly than many social scientists have expected.To overcome this cycle, Krysan and Crowder advocate multi-level policy solutions that pair inclusionary zoning and affordable housing with education and public relations campaigns that emphasize neighborhood diversity and high-opportunity areas. They argue that together, such programs can expand the number of destinations available to low-income residents and help offset the negative images many people hold about certain neighborhoods or help introduce them to places they had never considered.Cycle of Segregationdemonstrates why a nuanced understanding of everyday social processes is critical for interrupting entrenched patterns of residential segregation.
Recent research suggests that occupations and organizations intersect during the formation of wage inequality. Using administrative data from the Netherlands, I investigate whether workers who are ...employed in different occupations experience unequal wage growth when staying in an organization. Results reveal that workers in professional and managerial positions realize larger wage growth than workers who work initially in lower-status occupations. After six years of staying at the same organization, predicted wage growth rates vary between 5.44% for production workers and 10.18% for technical professionals. The findings indicate that occupations compound present and future wage advantages at the organizational level. I test whether occupational sorting across organizations with differing pay quality mediates part of the occupation-based heterogeneity in wage growth. The results show that occupational sorting is marked but that sorting explains only up to around 8% of inequality in firm-internal wage growth between different occupational classes in the Dutch labor market.
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution of any advanced industrialized nation. While other developed countries face similar challenges from ...globalization and technological change, none rivals America’s singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population. Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation’s history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women’s advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells. America’s unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society.
Classical and recent accounts of education posit that education legitimately, and authoritatively, classifies individuals to positions of lower or higher status. However, despite these general ...theoretical claims, empirical evidence that provides an in-depth picture of the relationship between educational attainment and social status remains scarce. In this paper, based on a dataset of 31 countries (International Social Survey Programme), we investigate the extent to which education is related to subjective social status, the degree to which this is seen as legitimate, and how this relationship varies between countries. We contextualize this relationship with the influence of the centrality of education in countries (operationalized as the share of higher educated). Results showed that education is an important source of subjective social status for individuals across all countries, and is seen as relatively legitimate and uncontroversial among all educational groups. Moreover, among those who perceive education to be more important for status, subjective status differences between educational groups are larger. Additionally, in countries with larger shares of higher educated, educational differences in subjective social status correlate more strongly with whether or not people obtained a degree of higher (tertiary) education. Lastly, the relationship between education and subjective social status in these countries is more independent from other sources of status, such as income and gender. It therefore seems to be that as higher education becomes more central and widely shared in a society, rather than leveling social differences, ironically it also becomes more distinctive and diagnostic in distinguishing people along group lines.
Job mobility offers opportunities for workers to obtain wage increases, but the returns on job changes differ considerably. We argue that part of this inequality results from a trade-off between ...occupational and regional mobility. Both mobility types offer alternative strategies for improving one's labor market position; however, each type also has unique restrictions. The high costs of regional mobility can thus induce occupational changes, even though the resulting human-capital devaluation leads to lower wage increases. We use linked retrospective life-course data for Germany (ALWA-ADIAB) and apply competing risks models to show that restrictions on one type of mobility drive individuals toward the other type of mobility. Using fixed-effects regressions, we then show that regional mobility yields higher wage improvements than occupational mobility does. We argue that restrictions on both types of mobility thus not only determine which type of mobility is chosen, thereby helping explain differential careers, but also contribute to inequality in wage trajectories due to differential returns on job mobility. The trade-off has explanatory power for the inequality between certain actors with different sets of mobility restrictions, such as parents and non-parents or employees in jobs with different skill demands, and it may also contribute to our better understanding of broader patterns of inequality—for instance, that caused by between-nation differences in job mobility.
Some previous studies of the relationship between women's labor force participation and household income inequality indicate that the promotion of the former has an equalizing effect on the latter; ...other studies insist that the promotion of women's labor force participation has a widening effect on household income inequality by way of the tendency toward assortative marriage. Hence, the relationship between women's labor force participation and household income inequality is unclear in the literature. This study aims to clarify the mechanism through which the interaction between household income and marriage produces social inequality by using mathematical and simulation-based approaches. The presented findings suggest that the promotion of women's labor force participation has a temporary widening effect on household income inequality, but an attenuating effect in the long run. They also state that assortative marriage itself has no widening effect on household income inequality, but rather an accelerating effect on widening inequality. Finally, by applying the model of that mechanism to Japan, I examine changes in household income inequality in that country.
PDF