The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Inequalities and the Life Course

Magda Nico, Gary Pollock, Magda Nico, Gary Pollock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429892578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing upon perspectives from across the globe and employing an interdisciplinary life course approach, this handbook explores the production and reproduction of different types of inequality across a variety of social contexts.

Inequalities are not static, easily measurable, and essentially quantifiable circumstances of life. They are processes which impact on individuals throughout the life course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing, or distorting themselves along the way. The chapters in this handbook examine various types of inequality, such as economic, gender, racial, and ethnic inequalities, and analyse how these inequalities manifest themselves within different aspects of society, including health, education, and the family, at multiple levels and dimensions. The handbook also tackles the global COVID-19 pandemic and its striking impact on the production and intensification of inequalities.

The interdisciplinary life course approach utilised in this handbook combines quantitative and qualitative methods to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer strategies and principles for identifying and tackling issues of inequality. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding and eradicating the processes of production, reproduction, and perpetuation of inequalities.

Section 1 Inequalities as process Doing inequalities over the life course

Magda Nico and Gary Pollock

DOI: 10.4324/9780429470059-1

Inequalities are processes, and not static measurable circumstances. They are in the making over the life course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing or spinning off along the way.

Inequalities are, in this sense, trajectories. They depart from certain origin or identity categories and positions and are produced within the interlocking of different lives and institutions, in the interstices of the agentic capabilities, and cultural and historical constraints and possibilities of the individual lives. Inequalities are inherently individual trajectories, but they are also class trajectories, family trajectories, gender trajectories, ethnic trajectories, cohort or generation trajectories. The process of production and reproduction of inequalities occurs at different yet intertwined life course levels and principles. At the individual level, where the “agency” of the individuals performs an important role in the awareness, positioning and “strategic adaptation” at the face of acknowledged inequalities. At various meso and interactional levels, namely the one of family and other significant networks, exemplar at displaying the importance of the interdependency of lives (captured by the life course principle of “linked lives”). And at macro-levels, where the “cultural and historical location” is at all times present not only to contextualize but to explain and provide meaning to the objective and subjective conditions of living and the inequalities, disparities and injustices that operate in its making, may they concern to global phenomena appropriated differently in each state or territory (take the pandemic for example) or to certain socially and culturally produced categories that imprint individuals with life time sentences to exclusion, discrimination and a burden of inequalities to begin with. The understanding of inequalities has, thus, much to gain from using this multi-level and dynamic approach to the course of inequalities across time. This involves the need to abandon the monopoly of sophisticated yet aggregated (and static at the individual level) inequalities indicators, measures and scales, and tackling inequalities as compositions of different social vulnerabilities, layers and categories moving through cultural and historical time.

In a reverse but corresponding approach, the life course is the window for doing inequalities. This means that a fixation with current cohorts, current data, current phenomena, on the one hand, and with fixed – non-rarely incomparable – social categories of understanding social reality, on the other, prevents the analysis of the very making of inequalities, rather than its outcome, consequences or aggregated oscillations. Inequalities end up not being captured longitudinally and become a hostage of the aggregated and time self-contained indicators this field created. Inequalities need to be tackled longitudinally, and at the individual level, because that is how they are produced and that is how they can be understood, and, in some cases, that is how they get publicly recognized, legitimized, repaired and dealt with politically – both ideologically and in practice through policy.

This is the argument made individually and collectively by the contributions to this section, but it is also one that is transversal to the whole book and that lies behind the need to bridge, theoretically, empirically and methodologically, life course and inequality research. The understanding of inequalities will gain insight that only the analysis through time can give to a process of making and remaking, and life course research will begin to set itself free from an exclusive relation with a generational approach that may exclude a classist or stratified approach to the study of life. Class and generation must be partners and not competitors in the study of inequalities, as they are in social mobility, poverty and other areas that have always been at the crossroads of inequalities and the life course. These bridges are not new. Life course research and inequality studies are not strangers to one another – health inequalities, educational, gender or ethnic studies, social mobility testify the interdisciplinary approach in this regard – but they have been estranged for too long. This book, finished during a pandemic that put inequalities over the life course and the importance of the interdependency of lives into the spotlight, intends to explicitly, convincingly and publicly reconcile these two perspectives. In this section, four chapters contribute to this endeavour.

In the first chapter, Dannefer, Han and Yu revisited and reviewed two often regarded as contrasting approaches towards the increase in economic inequality over the last decade: the sociological cumulative dis/advantage (CDA) approach, and the use of the psychosocial accentuation – a psychological notion – to argue for the importance of talent and effort in the production of those inequalities over time. In this chapter, the authors thus implicitly acclaim the internal interdisciplinary debate of life course research. Departing from a complex cohort-based comparison (that takes into account intra-cohort heterogeneity), the authors openly analyse what each, both, these approaches have to bring to the table of the understanding of inequalities. In a discussion echoing old and always new discussions on “agency and structure”, “biography and society”, tackled here by the use of a multilevel approach, the authors also conclude that the cumulation of inequalities “is in some cases overridden by deliberate social interventions designed to produce such an effect, and can be ameliorated by policies designed to do so”. If this is an optimist conclusion, only the future of policy-making and political-ideological drive can tell.

Pollock, Ozan and Goswami then highlight the inherently philanthropic character of the study of inequalities and its potential relation to policy. The authors argue that the “analysis of inequalities in itself is of greatest value when it is able to contribute to societal improvement”, but that is a closer, more sustainable, longitudinal engagement between social policy – and the process of making of such policy and scientific evidence is required. The authors argue this engagement is not undirected, with both policy and political needs feeding the scientific agenda. This relationship should be durable and committed – longitudinal. It should work in tides, with policy being designed according to evidenced inequalities and, in this chapter’s case, the impact on the well-being of growing children, followed by the potential of data analysis to provide an assessment of the impacts of such policy. The long-term, lagged, repetitive, continuous or sustainable impacts must be understood. This can only be performed with longitudinal research.

Ruspini’s chapter departs from the study of inequality, as a complex, interdisciplinary, everlasting and moving concept and research field that is far from being truly tackled. This is so due to the rise of inequality both between and within countries, the failure of political and policy response to such humanitarian and social quests from individuals and families, and the persistence of gender inequalities and growing inequalities between generations. Looking at inequality as a multidimensional, relative and dynamic issue, Ruspini provides in her chapter a critical and complete overview on the analysed inequalities in respect to its dynamic nature, its implicit generational approach and its processual dimension. In the last section, Ruspini advocates the idea of a consequential analysis of inequalities, with Ruspini arguing that

anyone hoping to design appropriate and effective policies to promote equity should have a clear understanding of past and present inequality dynamics and on how old and new, local and global, micro and macro determinants of inequality connect and interact.

But that is not the only reason why the study of inequalities should be longitudinal, with a micro-dynamics focus of doing inequalities (our expression). So does the very process of individually enduring, reacting against, and responding to, inequalities.

Vandecasteele, Spini, Sommet and Bühlmann use poverty, a proxy of inequalities, to tackle and highlight the potential of a life course approach in the improvement of the needed understanding of the dynamic patterns. Complementing the perspectives on macro-level results and policies, the authors implicitly highlight the importance of “linked lives”, an important life course principle. These links are not solely between individuals but are also between spheres of life, with what authors elaborate with the “spill-over effects” of poverty, where other life domains are deeply affected by the economic deprivation and insecurity, and its durable nature; and with the multidimensional, potentially interdisciplinary, nature of such phenomena, tackling how “objective poverty definitions and subjective perceptions of scarcity influence people’s vulnerability”.

Together, the chapters in this section advocate that the bridge between life course research and inequalities has the potential to be one extremely efficacious way to provide sustainable and truly consequential understandings of the production and cumulation of inequalities and of where, in that process, policy interventions are badly needed – in real time.

1 Inequality across time Social change, biography, and the life course

Dale Dannefer, Chengming Han, and Jiao Yu

DOI: 10.4324/9780429470059-2

Introduction

Over recent decades, social inequality and its consequences have become difficult for both social science and the general public to ignore as substantial increases in overall economic inequality have been observed in numerous advanced industrial societies.

A prime example is the USA, where incomes of the top 1% have more than tripled over the past half century, while those of the bottom 50% have remained stagnant. One result of these diverging trendlines is that the total share of national income garnered by the bottom half of the US population declined sharply – from just over 20% to about 12% – while that of the top 1% grew from 12% to 20% (Piketty, Saez, & Zucman, 2016) – meaning that these two groups essentially traded places in the proportion of national income received. Other nations reporting increases in inequality include Canada (Beach, 2016), Japan (Lise et al., 2014), Korea (Hwang, 2016), and European societies including Sweden (Mosquera et al., 2016). While in some cases these increases may reflect compositional effects and other complex interactions, the overriding reality of increasing inequality and concentrated wealth accumulation have become widely recognized realities and concer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Section 1 Inequalities as process: Doing inequalities over the life course
• Section 2 Assessing inequalities: complementary methods: Imagining the understanding of inequalities
• Section 3 The social stratification of health: The inherent longitudinality of health inequalities
• Section 4 Economic and wealth inequalities: The challenge of complexity in the analysis of economic inequalities
• Section 5 Youth, education and transition to adulthood: Half way down the stairs – somewhere else instead
• Section 6 Family and linked lives: Families at the heart of linked (lives and) inequalities
• Section 7 Gender inequalities: Gender inequalities: time varying and trajectories
• Section 8 Racial and ethnic inequalities: The weight of structure on the skin
• Index