Fractured Identities

Changing Patterns of Inequality

Harriet Bradley

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745644080, 9780745644073
• eBook ISBN: 9781509503285
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

The gap between rich and poor, included and excluded, advantaged and disadvantaged is steadily growing as inequality becomes one of the most pressing issues of our times. The new edition of this popular text explores current patterns of inequality in the context of increasing globalization, world recession and neoliberal policies of austerity. Within a framework of intersectionality, Bradley discusses various theories and concepts for understanding inequalities of class, gender, ethnicity and age, while an entirely new chapter touches on the social divisions arising from disabilities, non-heterosexual orientations and religious affiliation.

Bradley argues that processes of fracturing, which complicate the way we as individuals identify and locate ourselves in relation to the rest of society, exist alongside a tendency to social polarization: at one end of the social hierarchy are the super-rich; at the other end, long-term unemployment and job insecurity are the fate of many, especially the young. In the reordering of the social hierarchy, members of certain ethnic minority groups, disabled people and particular segments of the working class suffer disproportionately, while prevailing economic conditions threaten to offset the gains made by women in past decades. Fractured Identities shows how only by understanding and challenging these developments can we hope to build a fairer and more socially inclusive society.

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Introductory: Inequality and Identity

Thinking about Inequality

Inequality has long been a central concern within sociology. Unequal distribution of wealth, privilege and power has been a major focus of analysis and research. Although at times some sociologists have suggested that resources are being distributed more equally as societies develop, data continue to show that this is not the case. Although the total wealth of Western societies has increased, the way that wealth is shared out continues to be deeply skewed. The development of a global capitalist economy has brought even sharper disparities between those at the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy. Even in the wealthiest and most powerful of the world's nations, inequality remains a problem. In the United States of America, almost one in four children lived in poverty in 2012 according to UNICEF (2012). In 2014, we have surpassed that in Britain with 27 per cent of children in poverty: 3.5 million of them (Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) 2014). Moreover, it is predicted that this will increase in the next five years. Old people, young people, ethnic minority members, the unemployed, the disabled and low-paid women workers are among those who are losing out as a result of current processes of social and economic change in Britain and other European countries, especially the adoption by governments of economic policies of austerity. The losers are increasingly marginalized and excluded from the prosperous lifestyle enjoyed by the elite groups. To give a small – but, to many citizens, significant – example: a ticket to watch a match at Manchester United football club in 2015 costs at least £31, and one has to pay for travel to get to the ground. An unemployed single person on Job Seeker's Allowance (JSA) gets £72.40 per week.

This book is concerned with the different dimensions of equality and the ways in which they have been conceptualized and studied within sociology. We focus on four aspects of inequality which have for many decades been major topics of sociological analysis: class, gender, ethnicity and age. We also take a briefer look at three further types of inequality which have emerged more recently as major causes of sociological concern: disability, sexual orientation and religion. We shall explore how sociologists have theorized these different aspects of social differentiation and in what ways these types of inequalities are generated and continue to persist.

I also wish to explore how these forms of inequality impact on individuals. We shall be exploring this through the concept of social identity, which emerged as a central concern within sociology in the 1980s. The title of this book, Fractured Identities, reflects a common argument that, as societies and patterns of interaction within them have become more complex, older forms of identification have become shattered. Do people still identify as members of the working class? What does it mean to be British in the twenty-first century? Do women from different ethnic backgrounds feel they have anything in common with each other? Are we living in a secularized world or is religion still a key influence in people's lives? Such questions continue to preoccupy social scientists, but also have important effects on the social and political conflicts which shape all our lives.

These issues are introduced in more detail in chapter 2. This introductory chapter sets them in context by means of a brief overview of how sociological approaches to social inequalities have changed over the years, and then outlines the key principles that underlie the arguments set out in this book.

Inequalities and Modernity

Study of inequality is still, then, a key sociological task. However, the focus in the study of inequality has shifted as the discipline has evolved and continues to do so. Many of the original ideas about inequality were derived from the work of those who are considered to have produced the classics of early sociological thinking: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, whose arguments are reviewed briefly in chapter 2. The notion of class was central to the work of Marx, whose vision of societies divided by class is still influential today. Weber and Durkheim were both critical of his work, but themselves continued to explore the issue of divisions and inequalities, why they existed and what their social consequences were. Many of the sociologists of the early twentieth century, such as Talcott Parsons, Herbert Marcuse and Karl Mannheim, in differing ways continued a dialogue, often very critical, with ideas derived from Marx.

In the immediate period after the Second World War, which saw the expansion and development of the modern university system and its array of disciplines, class analysis lay at the core of the British sociological agenda. There were vigorous debates between followers of Weber – such as Anthony Giddens, John Goldthorpe and Frank Parkin – and neo-Marxists, such as Nicos Poulantzas, Eric Ohlin Wright and Bob Jessup. These debates focused on such issues as the definition and social functions of different classes, the boundaries between them, and their political role, especially in terms of the revolutionary potential of the working class as predicted by Marx. However, by the 1980s, the primacy of class was being challenged. One critic, Peter Calvert, even suggested that the concept of class was so problematic that it should be discarded (1982, p. 216). Andre Gorz, himself a Marxist, nevertheless argued that the working class was shrinking away because of the automation of industrial production (1982). Pakulski and Waters (1996) were among a number of sociologists who wrote about the ‘death’ of class.

These challenges to class theory came from many quarters, but we can discern three major strands among them:

1. It was argued that, since the post-war period, the class structure had changed so rapidly and radically that the old frameworks for thinking about class were now no longer applicable.
2. A second and more fundamental critique came from theorists of gender and of race and ethnicity who questioned the idea that traditional class theory can be adapted to explain gender and ethnic differences. For example, a leading sociologist of race relations, Paul Gilroy, highlighted the theoretical challenges to class-based analysis posed by ‘writers and thinkers from radical traditions struggling against forms of subordination which are not obviously or directly related to class. These may be based on gender, race, ethnicity or age and are often found in political locations removed from the workplace’ (1987, p. 18). Although there is still considerable debate about the relationship between class, ‘race’ and gender, it has emerged as a new orthodoxy that other forms of social inequality are not reducible to those of class. Each needs to be considered in its own right, while an awareness and understanding of their interaction is retained. Increasingly, there has been concern to explore how that interaction occurs. Currently, the concept of intersectionality is being employed in such explorations. This is the approach espoused in this book.
3. An even more fundamental challenge came from the intellectual movement known as postmodernism, which predominated in the 1980s and 1990s in many areas of social science and humanities. This is a bundle of new approaches (discussed further in chapter 3) that reject traditional forms of general theory, predominantly that of Marx, as invalid. Such ‘grand narratives’ are seen to embody unacceptable views of historical development in terms of progress to a stated goal – in the case of Marxism, that of a class-free socialist Utopia. Such theories must be replaced with accounts which focus only on specific limited local contexts. This approach is also known as ‘relativism’; there are no absolute certainties, truths or rules. Postmodernism has thus focused attention on the diversity of social experience in a way that, at the least, endorses new forms of pluralism through its focus on the specific positions of different groups, and, at its most extreme, can undermine all notions of collectivities, such as classes, and promote a view of society as made up of atomized individuals.
   Postmodernist thinking has also been accompanied by an interest in ‘deconstructing’ linguistic categories such as ‘class’ or ‘women’. For deconstructionists, such collective terms are socially constructed concepts which have no necessarily ‘real’ basis beyond our use of them. The use of such concepts only serves to put limits on people, who are forced to accept polarized identities, such as those of ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Classes and genders are denied existence outside of the way we choose to apply such labels. This contention is accompanied by an interest in how such terms are used in various verbal and written linguistic and conceptual frameworks or ‘discourses’. Such approaches, which draw particularly on the work of French social theorists Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, are often described as ‘post-structuralist’. Indeed, the postmodern approach within sociology moved away from the analysis of social structures to a study of social meanings and the way they are embodied in cultures and discourses. This movement has also been described as ‘the cultural turn’.
   Such an approach does not necessarily imply an abandonment of the study of class, gender and ethnicity, since at the very least they can be studied as examples of discourses or of social constructs. But postmodern approaches sit uneasily with study of material factors such as inequality and deprivation, and those influenced by the ideas of postmodernism have tended to avoid these topics. Indeed, it is not quite clear whether such study can legitimately be carried out, certainly within existing frameworks, since postmodernism opposes itself to ‘foundationalist’ accounts of society (that is, accounts that seek to identify the bases or underlying structures upon which society is founded and which generate specific patterns of social behaviour) and to ‘totalizing’ narratives about society. Marx's analysis, which sees economic relations as the ‘base’ on which the whole superstructure of society depends, is a classic example of a foundationalist and totalizing theory. Postmodernist theorists would identify the theories of capitalism and of patriarchy as examples of unacceptable foundationalist thinking, and consequently their position seriously undermines classic approaches to class and gender.

In this book, I explore the way the analysis of inequality and identity is now evolving in response to these challenges. Throughout the book, I try to integrate some empirical evidence of inequalities in society with discussion of the range of theories developed to explain them. A key objective is to pull together classical or modernist approaches to understanding inequalities with the newer perspectives which were inspired by postmodernism and post-structuralism, and those which have developed in more recent years.

Rethinking the Problem: New Approaches to Inequality and Difference

Over the past decade, many writers on inequality have grappled with the first two sets of challenges outlined above. Within class theory, there has been a focus on the way old class alignments are breaking up and discussion of new class groupings such as the ‘underclass’ or more recently the ‘precariat’. While the classic framework of Karl Marx had posited the idea of class polarization, newer approaches stress the multiplication of class groupings and the evolution of new types of class cleavages – for instance, those based on different patterns of consumption. Classes are seen as ‘fragmenting’, rather than polarizing.

In fact, we are currently seeing something of a return to analysing class, but approaching it in new ways. Particularly influential has been the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who attempted to integrate analysis of structure, meanings and cultures through the notion of ‘habitus’.

This concept is a complex and contested one. Jenkins (1992) describes it as being usefully imprecise, so it can be adapted for use by many theorists. Atkinson defines it as ‘the dispositions formed out of practical engagement with the materially shaped environment shared by those close in social space’ (2010, p. 11). Put more simply, we can see it as a set of acquired patterns of dispositions – that is, of thoughts, behaviours and tastes – which shapes the way we perform as social actors. Individuals are born into a specific habitus which has a major impact on their future life chances. For example, the habitus into which a working-class child is born may be at odds with the ‘institutional habitus’ of school, so that the child adapts less well to school demands than a middle-class child whose habitus is more compatible. Bourdieu explores how the habitus shapes our development and determines the resources we have to make our way in society, in terms of different forms of capital (economic, social, cultural and symbolic). This is a way of analysing class which builds on from the cultural turn.

Moreover, the demands from postmodernists and post-structuralists to avoid ‘grand narratives’ of inequality have led sociologists to explore class, gender and so forth within specific and differentiated contexts, rather than to make unqualified generalizations. This, too, has led to an interest in how the various dimensions of inequality interact upon one another to produce distinct specific social positions. The work of Kimberle Crenshaw on ‘intersectionality’ (1991) has been particularly influential. Crenshaw showed how ethnicity and gender came together in the USA to produce forms of disadvantage for Black women which are different from those of Black men or white women. Thus an intersectional approach explores how different forms of inequality combine to create very specific patterns of difference and disadvantage, which are characteristically intense. This general framework is one in which inequalities are viewed as complex, multiple and interrelated, something I have described as ‘multiple positioning’ (Bradley 1999a).

Ideas of fragmentation have been employed in other s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Second Edition
• 1: Introductory: Inequality and Identity
• 2: Inequality, Fragmentation and Identity
• 3: Capitalism, Modernity and Global Change
• 4: The Death and Rebirth of Class
• 5: Gender: Rethinking Patriarchy
• 6: ‘Race’ and Ethnicity: ‘Travelling in the West’
• 7: Age: Generations and Gaps
• 8: Emergent Identities and Inequalities: Disability, Sexual Orientation and Religious Affiliation
• 9: Conclusion
• Bibliography and Sources
• Index
• End User License Agreement