The Politics of Regional Inequality in Ghana: State Elites,Donors and PRSPs

Through an analysis of Ghana's HIPC Fund which was established as part of the PRSP process, this article shows how aid‐financed efforts to reduce regional inequality in Ghana have failed. Dominant political elites agreed to policies reducing regional inequality in order to have access to aid funding but, once approved, these funds were allocated on quite different criteria in ways that marginalised the poorest. This analysis reinforces the growing recognition that developmental outcomes in most poor countries are shaped not so much by the design of ‘good’ policies per se, but more importantly by the power relationships within which policy‐implementing institutions are embedded. Aid donors seem unable to grasp this important lesson fully, and so their capacity to contribute to reducing regional inequality remains limited.     

When class is colorblind: A race‐conscious model for cultural capital research in education

Sociologists of education frequently draw on the cultural capital framework to explore the ways in which educational institutions perpetuate inequality in schools and the larger society. However, these studies adhere to a white centered “class‐based master‐narrative,” to legitimize and perpetuate the assumption that racial differences are secondary manifestations of class‐based structures. The class‐based master‐narrative elevates a one‐dimensional view of inequality as rooted primarily in class‐based stratification and downplays the fact that the economic elites who inhabit these dominant social positions are predominantly white. In this essay, I propose a race‐conscious framework to challenge the colorblind assumptions and deficit perspectives inherent to the cultural capital framework. The race‐conscious model (a) focuses on how racial stratification impacts the cultivation, transmission, and activation of cultural capital on the individual and institutional levels and (b) highlights the harmful impact of the lack of racial literacy that is inherent to the white habitus.     

The white native speaker and inequality regimes in the private English language school

Private English language schools market the language as a tool that helps one connect with others from different cultures. Despite their promotion of English aiding in intercultural communication, these institutions may believe that only the white native speaker is the ideal teacher of the language. This valuing of the white native speaker can consequently act as an organisational inequality regime that marginalises nonwhite teachers. Using qualitative interviews with 10 nonwhite instructors working in schools in Toronto, Canada, this article investigates the ways in which these teachers experience the inequality regime of the white native speaker at work. The findings indicate that the teachers experience this inequality regime as a series of microaggressions that involve space, competence and customer desire. The article concludes with suggestions to dismantle inequality regimes in private institutions.     

Transition and Foreign Aid Policies in the Visegrád Countries: A Path Dependant Approach

The paper argues that the current emerging international development policies of the Visegrád (V4) countries are heavily influenced by the certain aspects of the Communist past and the transition process. Due to these influences, the V4 countries have difficulties in adapting the foreign aid practices of Western donors and this leads to the emergence of a unique Central and Eastern European development cooperation model. As an analytical background, the paper builds on the path dependency theory of transition. A certain degree of path dependence is clearly visible in V4 foreign aid policies, and the paper analyses some aspects of this phenomenon: how these new emerging foreign aid donors select their partner countries, how much they spend on aid, how they formulate their aid delivery policies and institutions and what role the non-state actors play. The main conclusions of the paper are that the legacies of the Communist past have a clear influence and the V4 countries still have a long way to go in adapting their aid policies to international requirements.

Does Greater Labour Market Flexibility Induce Greater Levels of Inequality within Europe?

Economic and social inequality is often thought to be contingent on varying degrees of labour market flexibility. This paper investigates this causal nexus and tests the correlation between flexibility and inequality for the European labour market by using evidence from European labour market institutions and data from several sources of inequality measures. We find that, on a pan-European level, there is overwhelming evidence that inequality levels do not fluctuate with varying degrees of labour market flexibility. On a country-specific level, we find several labour market characteristics that promote flexibility and equality. They include decentralized labour market institutions, low utilization of temporary work, and redundancy systems that unite low employment protection with high economic and social protection. Taken together, these factors enable the European labour market to buck the stylized perception that high labour market flexibility is coupled with high inequality.     

Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Lenski's Power and Privilege in the Study of Inequalities

Gerhard Lenski's classical work on stratification Power and Privilege , was an effort to reconcile and to synthesize different approaches to inequality incorporated into the grand theories of the day. It anticipated a variety of developments in the theoretical and empirical understanding of inequalities. These include recognition of the multiplicity of inequalities; emphasis on race, class, gender, and other sources and systems of domination and subordination; and the intersection of these factors in complex patterns to create different standpoints and life consequences. The result was groundbreaking work that underscored the multidimensionality of stratification systems, the variability of their influences, and the notion that their intersection in itself has implications beyond the sum of component parts. In these ways his work foreshadowed the possibilities of finding common ground between modern and postmodern perspectives, to make Lenski the last grand theorist of modernity and a forerunner of postmodern theories of inequality.     

Stratification and Prestige Hierarchies in Graduate and Professional Education*

Earlier research indicates that the “academic hierarchy” encourages and reflects both meritocratic standards and long-standing status distinctions. Using a nationwide survey of graduate and professional students, this study considers the relative and independent influence of students' social class, sex, race, undergraduate achievement, and rank of undergraduate institution attended on rank of graduate or professional school they attend. Students in the total group, universities and colleges, as well as public and private institutions are examined. Analysis of covariance results suggest that undergraduate rank is the strongest predictor of rank of institution attended. Attendance at highly ranked undergraduate institutions predicts appropriate location at prestigious graduate and professional schools. Level of undergraduate achievement also has independent effects. Higher achievement predicts attendance at both highly ranked and slightly lower ranked institutions. Social class influences location in the academic hierarchy, but in an unexpected direction. Working class students often attend higher ranked schools than their upper middle and middle class counterparts. Findings show that men and women attend similarly ranked institutions, and female students attend higher ranked schools than males. The independent effects of race also indicate that racial groups attend different as well as similarly ranked institutions. Finally, limited interactions of three independent variables show that expected merit, social class, and sex advantages do not persist for all students.     

The Market Model and the Growth and Decline of Academic Fields in U.S. Four‐Year Colleges and Universities, 1980–20001

Conventional sociological accounts of the rise and fall of academic fields have been challenged by accounts based on the idea of market‐responsive change. In this article, we focus on the period 1980–2000, the period during which, according to its proponents, the market model of change became dominant in academe. We find changes in the student market to be strongly associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. We also find the preferences of donors to be associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. By contrast, we find relatively little support for labor market signals or changes in federal funding priorities as important influences on the institutionalization of academic fields. We find that higher‐status institutions are more market responsive than lower‐status institutions.     

CLASS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES

This article addresses a key issue within radical social science scholarship—the importance of class in modern capitalist society. Two different perspectives on the issue are discussed: the neo-Marxist, which continues to view class as the central structural variable; and the post-Marxist, which contends that other variables such as race, sex, and authority are potentially either additional or alternative structural influences. After developing a model linking structural locations to attitudinal consequences for position incumbents, two hypotheses comparing the perspectives are tested using a national sample of respondents: (1) that structural locations influence the attitudes of position incumbents toward societal inequalities; and (2) that the impact of a particular structural variable depends, at least to some extent, upon the nature of the societal inequality in question. The results provide qualified support for both hypotheses. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Impact of Gender Characteristics on Mentoring in Graduate Departments of Sociology

There has been much research on gender inequality in graduate education and the benefits of mentoring. However, most of this research focuses on how mentoring addresses female graduate students’ experiences of gender inequality instead of how the gender characteristics of departments impact the level of mentoring they offer. In particular, I examine how the gender composition of departments in terms of faculty and administration as well as faculty awareness of gender inequality or feminist issues influences the types of mentoring structures found in graduate departments of sociology. Bivariate correlations indicated that these characteristics (gender characteristics in particular) had significant relationships with mentoring structures in departments. This study concludes with a discussion of these relationships, an overview of policy implications, and suggestions for future research.     

Slight Expectations: Making Sense of the “Me Me Me” Generation

Current scholarship on the transition to adulthood focuses on the declining importance of role transitions, such as school completion or marriage, in subjective definitions of adulthood. Recent research finds that in place of traditional markers, young adults emphasize individualistic or psychological attributes as indicators of achieving adulthood. Some scholars and popular writers have interpreted this shift toward personal markers of growth as a sign of narcissism, self‐absorption, and lack of a collective sense of responsibility. Drawing on 100 interviews with working‐class young men and women, I argue that these characterizations of young adults fail to take into account the larger cultural and social context of declining job security, rising inequality, and falling institutional trust. By situating young adults' individualistic, self‐focused accounts of adulthood within the framework of declining loyalty in work, distrust in institutions, and diminishing social support, I demonstrate that working‐class Millennials' use of individualistic criteria of adulthood can be better understood as a strategy for coming to terms with the impossibility of traditional sources of meaning and self‐worth such as work or family.     

Unions and wage inequality

Summary and Conclusions The impact of unions on the structure of wages has recently attracted renewed interest as analysts have struggled to explain the rise in earnings inequality in several industrialized countries. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States provide a potentially valuable set of countries for examining this question. All three countries now collect comparable data on wages and union status in their regular labor force surveys. Several features of the collective bargaining institutions of these countries make them suitable for studying the relationship between unions and wage inequality. Bargaining is highly decentralized; there are no general mechanisms for extending collective bargaining provisions beyond the “organized” sector; and the fraction of the work force covered by collective bargaining is relatively modest. Thus it is possible to compare the structure of wages for workers covered by union contracts to those who are not covered, and potentially infer the effect of unions on overall wage inequality.     

DISAGGREGATING THE EFFECTS OF RACIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ON EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EXECUTION RATES

This article examines how class inequality may have influenced the historical use of executions in the United States, both within the South and outside of the South. Specifically, this article asks whether executions acted as a mechanism to maintain an exploitative class system in the entire United States, just as lynching maintained a racial caste system in the South. Much of the literature on the historical determinants of macrolevel execution rates has examined these disparities in terms of racial inequality. This study demonstrates that racial inequality alone cannot account for the high number of executions that typified the early twentieth century United States and contends that it is important to expand our understanding of the effects of class inequality on both historical and contemporary trends in executions.     

Stand Reconstructed: Contingent Closure and Institutional Change

The process is traced whereby crucially important, multiple denotations of classical sociology's key notion referring to social position—the Weberian German concept of Stand —have been stripped to create a simplified and inaccurate representation of social inequalities. Some historical material from central Europe is surveyed, with a brief look at Japan, to demonstrate validity problems created by blanket application of the culturally specific, streamlined notions of status/class. As an alternative, a notion of contingent social closure argues that relaxing the modernizationist assumptions of a single transition from estate to status/class increases the comparative-historical sensitivity of research on social structure, inequality, and stratification. A dynamic reading of Polányi suggests a reconceptualization of institutions as the "raw material" of social change. This might help to avoid the outdated contrast of the "West" vs. its "Others."     

Class and comparison: subjective social location and lay experiences of constraint and mobility

Lay perceptions and experiences of social location have been commonly framed with reference to social class. However, complex responses to, and ambivalence over, class categories have raised interesting analytic questions relating to how sociological concepts are operationalized in empirical research. For example, prior researchers have argued that processes of class dis‐identification signify moral unease with the nature of classed inequalities, yet dis‐identification may also in part reflect a poor fit between ‘social class’ as a category and the ways in which people accord meaning to, and evaluate, their related experiences of socio‐economic inequality. Differently framed questions about social comparison, aligned more closely with people's own terms of reference, offer an interesting alternative avenue for exploring subjective experiences of inequality. This paper explores some of these questions through an analysis of new empirical data, generated in the context of recession. In the analysis reported here, class identification was common. Nevertheless, whether or not people self identified in class terms, class relevant issues were perceived and described in highly diverse ways, and lay views on class revealed it to be a very aggregated as well as multifaceted construct. It is argued that it enables a particular, not general, perspective on social comparison. The paper therefore goes on to examine how study participants compared themselves with familiar others, identified by themselves. The evidence illuminates social positioning in terms of constraint, agency and (for some) movement, and offers insight into very diverse experiences of inequality, through the comparisons that people made. Their comparisons are situated, and pragmatic, accounts of the material contexts in which people live their lives. Linked evaluations are circumscribed and strongly tied to these proximate material contexts.The paper draws out implications for theorizing lay perspectives on class, and subjective experiences of inequality.     

Academic Undermatch: How General and Specific Cultural Capital Structure Inequality

Recent literature has added another dimension to the well‐documented patterns of social class inequality in education: academic undermatch. Undermatch (which occurs when students attend institutions of lower selectivity than they are academically qualified to attend) is both widespread and unequal, with students from less advantaged families more likely to undermatch. Although proliferating, the research on undermatch has focused primarily on documenting the extent of, and less on exploring the mechanisms underlying, undermatch. Moreover, this literature has developed largely independent of the sociological research on cultural capital. Therefore, when scholars consider underlying mechanisms, they often focus narrowly on college‐specific information, without considering the broader cultural context in which students are embedded. Drawing on the literature on undermatch, as well as the sociological research on cultural capital, I differentiate between general and specific cultural capital. Moreover, instead of simply estimating whether students undermatch or not, I consider different types of undermatch. Results from the Educational Longitudinal Survey reveal that the effects of cultural capital are indeed heterogeneous, both with respect to its relationship to undermatch and its contribution to social class inequality. Findings have important implications for understanding undermatch and the role of cultural capital in reducing and reproducing social inequality.     

Art for integration: political rationalities and technologies of governmentalisation in the city of Malmö

Cities increasingly use artistic and cultural activities to promote active citizenship and social cohesion. We suggest that city-sponsored cultural and artistic practices in Sweden are finding a new discursive context in migration. In this article, we look at two artistic and cultural institutions in Malmö, Sweden: Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. We develop a typology of governmentalisation based on the work of Nicholas Rose and Peter Miller, which allows us to describe the governing activity of Arena 305 and Drömmarnas hus. What becomes visible is the discrepancy between the moral form of the political rationalities and the technologies of government: even though institutions may harbour ideals and principles of inclusion, they are perfectly capable of sustaining activities that brighten the very boundaries they set out to challenge.     

An extended Gini approach to inequality measurement

It is well-known that, when the Lorenz curves do not cross, the ranking of distributions provided by the Gini index is identical to the one implied by the Lorenz criterion. This does not preclude inequality as measured by the Gini index to increase while the Lorenz curves cross. A suitable modification of the Gini coefficient allows the Lorenz quasi-ordering to coincide with the ranking generated by the application of unanimity over the class of extended Gini indices. Recently the Lorenz quasi-ordering and the underlying principle of transfers have come under attack, while new criteria – the differentials, deprivation and satisfaction quasi-orderings – have been proposed for providing unambiguous rankings of distributions. We suggest to weaken the principle of transfers by imposing additional restrictions on the progressive transfers, which take into account the positions on the income scale of the donors and beneficiaries. We identify the subclasses of extended Gini indices that satisfy these weaker versions of the principle of transfers and we show that the application of unanimity among these classes generate rankings of distributions that coincide with those implied by the differentials, deprivation and satisfaction quasi-orderings.      

Theorizing the relationship between inequality and economic growth

This article explores a promising theoretical approach for reassessing the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The article draws some insights from the influential inverted U-curve hypothesis originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, but drastically recasts the original arguments by shifting two fundamental premises. First, retaining Kuznets’s emphasis on the importance of economic growth in generating demographic transitions between existing and new distributional arrays, we argue that a “constant drive toward inequality” results after replacing a Schumpeterian notion of “creative destruction” for the dualistic assumptions in Kuznets’s model. Second, while Kuznets devoted considerable attention to the impact of institutions on distributional outcomes, we argue that institutions should be understood as relational and global mechanisms of regulation, operating within countries while simultaneously shaping interactions and flows between nations. The article argues that economic growth, unfolding through institutions embedded in time and space, produces a constant drive towards inequality that results in a multiple and overlapping matrix of distributional arrays, an overall income distribution (e.g., within and between countries) that is both systemic and historical.