Grounds for Difference

Rogers Brubaker

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674975453, 9780674743960
• eBook ISBN: 9780674425316
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering fresh perspectives on perennial questions of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and religion, Rogers Brubaker makes manifest the forces that shape the politics of diversity and multiculturalism today. In a lucid and wide-ranging analysis, he contends that three recent developments have altered the stakes and the contours of the politics of difference: the return of inequality as a central public concern, the return of biology as an asserted basis of racial and ethnic difference, and the return of religion as a key terrain of public contestation.

"Grounds for Difference is a subtle, original, and comprehensive book. All the hallmarks of Brubaker's earlier work, such as the conceptual clarity, the theoretical rigor—grounded in a well-researched and well-informed analysis—the crisp writing style, and the impeccable sociological reasoning are displayed here. There is a wealth of original ideas developed in this book that requires much careful reading and unpacking."
—Sinisa Maleševi?, H-Net Reviews

"This is an imposing collection that will be another milestone in the literature of ethnicity and nationalism."
—Christian Joppke, University of Bern

CHAPTER ONE

Difference and Inequality

WHAT IS THE RELATION between difference and inequality? I want to approach this deceptively simple yet formidably abstract question by way of a thought experiment. Consider a world characterized—like our own—by both horizontal and vertical social divisions (Blau 1977: 8–9). On a horizontal plane, people categorize themselves and others according to a logic of significant similarity and difference. They identify with others whom they see as similar in some meaningful way, and they distinguish themselves from others whom they see as significantly different—in ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, language, religion, gender, sexuality, taste, temperament, or the like. On a vertical plane, people can be ranked according to whether they have more or less of some generally desired good: more or less wealth, income, education, respect, health, occupational prestige, legal rights, basic existential security, or the like.

Now imagine—and here’s where the thought experiment comes in—that horizontal categories and vertical rankings were entirely independent of one another. The horizontal categories into which people sort themselves and others—groupings based on ethnicity, religion, or musical taste, for example—would not differ systematically by income, wealth, education, and so on. Differences of income, wealth, and education would be differences within social categories, not between them. Members of different categories would have the same chances of being ranked high or low on any vertical dimension.

In this hypothetical world, difference would have no bearing on inequality. People would be different, and they would be unequal; but the mechanisms that generate inequalities would be unconnected with the processes through which people sort themselves and others into categories based on similarity and difference. The mechanisms that generate inequalities would be difference-blind: who is what would be independent of who gets what.

This is evidently not the world we inhabit. In our world, differences of race, ethnicity, language, religion, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and so on do have a systematic bearing on inequality. But how? This is the question I address in this chapter, focusing on the ways categorical differences—differences that are organized, experienced, and represented in terms of discrete, bounded, and relatively stable categories (such as black and white, Sunni and Shiite, male and female, citizen and foreigner)—are implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality.

These and other ascribed categorical differences are not intrinsically linked to inequality; different does not necessarily imply unequal. The relation between difference and inequality is contingent, not necessary; it is empirical, not conceptual. And the degree to which and manner in which inequality is structured along categorical lines vary widely over time and context. Certain categorical differences that were once pervasively implicated in regimes of inequality—such as distinctions among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews and among certain ethnic categories in the United States—are no longer so implicated today. And a wide range of legally mandated forms of categorically unequal treatment has been delegitimized throughout the developed world in a remarkably short span of time. To study the relation between difference and inequality is to study historically situated social processes; it is not to identify timeless truths.

I begin by critically engaging Charles Tilly’s influential account of how categories of difference are implicated in the generation and maintenance of inequality. Taking issue with Tilly’s claim that major categories of difference work in fundamentally similar ways, I consider in subsequent sections how citizenship, gender, and ethnicity—broadly understood as including race as well as ethnicity-like forms of religion—contribute to the production and reproduction of inequality in quite differing ways. I return in the penultimate section to a more general level of analysis and outline three general processes through which categories of difference work to produce and sustain position-mediated inequalities: the allocation of persons to reward-bearing positions; the social production of unequally equipped categories of persons; and the social definition of positions and their rewards. In the final section, I discuss ways in which inequalities not only are mediated by reward-bearing positions but also—notably in the case of the social distribution of honor—attach directly to categories of persons, independently of the positions they occupy. I suggest in closing that even as inequality has increased dramatically in certain respects in recent decades, it has assumed forms that are less strictly categorical.

Tilly on Categorical Inequality

The theory of categorical inequality Tilly developed in Durable Inequality (1998) focuses on organizations—firms, hospitals, universities, and states, for example—as key sites of inequality. Organizations are key because inequalities of wealth, income, prestige, and even health and basic physical security are increasingly mediated by positions in formal organizations. Jobs are the obvious example of such positions. Income inequality in the United States depends primarily on unequal rewards from jobs rather than unequal holdings of capital assets. Today’s rich are not rentiers; they are the “working rich” (Saez 2013; Godechot 2007): highly paid employees and entrepreneurs.¹ Tilly’s account focuses primarily on how inequality is generated through linked and bounded clusters of jobs to which sharply differing rewards are attached. But positions in organizations structure inequality in other ways as well. Citizenship, for example, is a position in an organization (the modern state); as I show below, it profoundly shapes life chances on a global scale, structuring access to vastly different rewards and opportunities.

Durable inequality, on this account, turns on the matching or pairing of internal organizational categories with pervasively available external categories. Internal categories designate unequal positions (or clusters of positions) within an organization, differentiated by some combination of remuneration, authority, working conditions, and mobility opportunities. Examples include enlisted soldier and officer, doctor and nurse, executive and secretary, and the like. External categories are those that serve as major axes of distinction and inequality in the wider social environment, around which cluster scripts and stories that explain and justify the inequalities. Examples include gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, and education.²

Tilly shows how external categories are “imported” into organizations along with scripts and local knowledge—shared understandings (or stereotypes) about the incumbents of those categories. He gives particular attention to the “matching” of internal and external categories: the processes through which positions in organizations are allocated such that major internal categorical divisions (between executive and secretary, for example) coincide with major external categorical divisions (between men and women, for example).

This is an original and fertile way of thinking about the organizational dimension of durable inequality. But while Tilly’s account of the mechanisms that sustain durable inequality is richly suggestive, it is also elusive. Probing the ambiguities in Tilly’s account can bring into sharper focus the social processes through which categorical differences are implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality.

Categorical inequality, for Tilly, is generated in the first instance by two mechanisms: exploitation and opportunity hoarding.³ Exploitation “operates when powerful, connected people command resources from which they draw significantly increased returns by coordinating the effort of outsiders whom they exclude from the full value added by that effort” (1998: 10). As the last clause of the definition suggests, this notion of exploitation—like the Marxist notion—would seem to depend on a theory of value. But Tilly neither endorses the notoriously problematic Marxian labor theory of value nor proposes an alternative. His notion of exploitation remains informal, resting on a commonsense understanding of powerful people coordinating the labor of outsiders and reaping the benefits of that labor.

The reference to “outsiders” suggests that categories of difference are implicated in processes of exploitation. Tilly illustrates this by analyzing the exploitation of Africans in South Africa under apartheid and of women in capitalist labor markets. While duly noting the evidently sharp differences, he argues that exploitation works through analogous causal processes in the two cases (1998: 136). The key in both cases is matching between major organizational divisions and external categorical pairs (White/African and male/female).⁴ Such matching is said to facilitate exploitation. The reasons for this are not fully spelled out, but the argument seems to be that matching stabilizes regimes of inequality and lowers the cost of maintaining them.

The matching processes that implicate race in South Africa under apartheid and gender in capitalist labor markets may be analogous at a certain level of abstraction. But they differ sharply in both degree and kind. Racial categories in South Africa under apartheid were constructed from above, legally defined, formally administered, and coercively enforced. They are not easily subsumed under Tilly’s notion of “external categories”—categories that are pervasively available in the wider environment and “imported” into organizations along with scripts and stories. Racial categories were of course pervasively available in South Africa prior to the construction of the system of apartheid. But the available categories were radically reconstructed, codified, and formalized by the state in a gigantic top-down exercise in authoritative categorization. The processes through which racial categories were matched with economic position were directly political, legal, administrative, coercive, and formalized. The processes through which gender is matched with positions in capitalist firms, by contrast, are loose, informal, probabilistic, decentralized, and mediated through individual-level self-understandings, occupational aspirations, and human capital endowments; and the degree of matching is also much lower.

Tilly identifies “categorical exclusion” as a key element of his general analytical model of exploitation (1998: 128–132). This might seem to imply exclusion on the basis of categories of difference like race, gender, or citizenship, as in the examples he discusses at length. But there is an equivocation here. Categorical exclusion involves “boundaries between unequal and paired categories in which members of one category benefit from control of sequestered resources and receive returns from the other’s output” (1998: 131). But what are the “unequal and paired categories”? They may simply be internal categories, defining unequally rewarded clusters of positions within an organization (manager and worker, doctor and nurse, or officer and enlisted soldier). Or they may be external categories (such as race, gender, or citizenship) that are matched (to differing degrees and through differing processes) to the internal categories. Tilly highlights the latter configuration in his theoretical argument, but exploitation requires only the former. And his most powerful and compelling empirical analyses of “unequal and paired categories” that generate clearly categorical forms of exclusion in contemporary liberal democratic capitalist contexts concern internal organizational categories, not external categories.

In Marx’s account, from which Tilly claims to draw inspiration, exploitation requires only what Tilly would call internal categories: owners of the means of production, on the one hand, and workers who have been separated from the means of production, on the other. It does not require the matching of internal and external categories. And in Tilly’s own account, exploitation requires only that some—those who control valuable yet labor-demanding resources—enlist and coordinate the labor of others, while reaping for themselves (at least part of) the value added by that labor. These others need not differ by race, gender, citizenship, or the like; they may simply occupy subordinate organizationally defined positions (casual in relation to career employees; adjuncts in relation to tenured professors; or nurses in relation to physicians). These organizational distinctions may—and of course often do—map onto external categories (such that nurses are overwhelmingly women, and physicians, as was the case not so very long ago, overwhelmingly men); and Tilly calls attention to such cases. But the phenomenon of exploitation—and, more generally, the dynamics of capitalism—does not pivot or depend on this mapping.⁵ And while the matching of internal and external categories may stabilize regimes of categorical inequality (1998: 76, 78, 81), it may also have the opposite effect: in a world in which formal categorical inequality has been powerfully delegitimized, the tight matching of internal and external categories may destabilize regimes of inequality, while the loosening of connections between internal and external categories may help legitimize and stabilize massive inequalities in control over organizational resources.

By identifying the processes and mechanisms through which external categories of difference can be linked to internal organizational categories, Tilly shows how inequality can be categorical, but he does not show how categorical the generation of inequality really is: how centrally implicated are categories of difference like race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship in the processes that generate inequality. I shall argue in the conclusion to the chapter that even as “the intensity of capitalist inequality” (Tilly 1998: 38) has increased substantially in recent decades, categories of difference—with some exceptions—figure in the production and reproduction of inequality in an increasingly gradational and distributional manner rather than in the more strictly categorical manner suggested by Tilly’s notion of the matching of internal and external categories.

The second mechanism generating categorical inequality is what Tilly, building on Weber’s discussion of social closure, calls opportunity hoarding. This occurs when members of a “categorically bounded network” (1998: 91) reserve for themselves access to some valuable resource, such as job opportunities, clients, information, marriage partners, credit, patronage, or the right to practice a profession or trade. Like exploitation, opportunity hoarding depends on a boundary between insiders who control a valuable resource and outsiders who do not. But while exploitation requires insiders to mobilize the labor of outsiders, and then to exclude them from the full value added by that labor, opportunity hoarding is conceptually simpler: it does not require the coordination of the labor of outsiders, just their exclusion from access to the resource (1998: 91).⁶ Tilly gives many examples in passing but focuses on immigrant ethnic niches and, more briefly, licensed trades and professions.

“Categorically bounded networks” is a suggestive phrase, though an elusive one that Tilly does not seek to clarify. It usefully evokes three ways in which categories may enter into the workings of networks. First, networks may take root in categorically organized institutions (such as ethnic churches or associations). Second, network members may account for their connectedness in categorical terms (for example, through stories about common origins or common attributes). This self-understanding may lead them to exclude entire categories of outsiders from their networks and to limit new ties to categorical insiders. Recognized category membership may thus offer a point of entry into a network, even if it does not guarantee acceptance in the network; categorical outsiders, on the other hand, may have no chance of acceptance. A common language or religion, finally, may lower transaction costs, foster trust and accountability, promote the formation of social capital, and facilitate the development of networks of cooperative action (Landa 1981).

Its suggestiveness notwithstanding, the notion of “categorically bounded networks” conceals a tension, joining elements with quite different logics that may work separately in practice. Categories are defined by commonality, networks by connectedness. Categories are classes of equivalent elements; networks are sets of relationships. Category members are not necessarily connected to one another, and relationally connected people need not belong to the same category. Definitionally positing “categorically bounded networks” as the agents of opportunity hoarding elides the difference between network-based and category-based modes of social closure and forecloses the question of whether, when, and how categories of difference are involved in insiders’ efforts to monopolize goods and opportunities.⁷

Keeping in mind the distinct logics of networks and categories makes it clear that networks—of friends, kin, or collaborators, for example—can hoard opportunities, regardless of whether their members belong to the same category. Even when their members do belong to the same category, the boundary between insiders (who can benefit from the monopolized opportunities) and outsiders is often determined by relational connectedness, not mere categorical commonality: what matters is whom you know, not just who you are. All network members may belong to the same ethnic category, for example, but not all members of the ethnic category belong to the network. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Difference and Inequality
• 2. The Return of Biology
• 3. Language, Religion, and the Politics of Difference
• 4. Religion and Nationalism
• 5. The “Diaspora” Diaspora
• 6. Migration, Membership, and the Nation-State
• 7. Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity
• Notes
• References
• Index