World Society and Inequalities
The Covid-19 virus pandemic, which evolved in early 2020 and had started in the city Wuhan in People’s Republic of China, demonstrates very well how fragile and interdependent the global word system is. The virus spread across the globe, ignoring national borders and reaching almost all countries, and infected a tremendous number of people, tens of thousands of whom died. The virus brought the whole world society and economy to a standstill, causing a lockdown of a scale that has never happened in before. No single country proved to be immune against the evolution of the disease, and no country was successfully prepared and armed against the upcoming developments. People became ill and were dying everywhere, and the whole system of previous reasonable forecasting proved to be full of scientific flaws. The task of modelling economic, social and environmental developments is always dependent upon the axiomatic input of model constructers.1 If applicants of those econometric models create their ideas in a sterile world of assumptions, it is a clean world of certainty where all external variables are known and calculable or where those external variables are just ignored, and surprising effects, non-intended consequences and interdisciplinary problems will not occur. Instead, we are living in a dynamic world which includes different dimensions of uncertainties which comprises different degrees of complexity leading permanently to effects which are not forecasted (Merton, 1936). However, the real world is not (always) clean but (sometimes) dirty when further phenomena and consequences exist which are not included in the initial assumptions. Opposed to a model world, in a real world many shades between black and white exist.
The same issue applies for our topic of globalization. Firstly, the sharp battle about the advantages and disadvantages of globalization processes, which we have been observing for a few decades at least, has seemingly become less controversial during the past few years because people started to think that there are no visible alternatives to an increased internationalization called globalization. Anthony Giddens has defined globalization as a social process of “intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens, 1990: 64). Of course, according to this definition, we are living in an increasingly globalized world where forms of economic, social, cultural and environmental exchange or interplay are more visible and influential than in earlier times. Apparently, the globe has turned into a “world society”, a term that was introduced, independently of each other, by Wallerstein (1983, 2011), N. Luhmann (1971) and John W. Meyer (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1981). The idea of world society claims that debate on social phenomena shall not only be referenced to individual nation states and their very limited framework but to a social universe of a global world society.
Numerous studies have found a close relationship between economic globalization and trade liberalization (Barrientos, 2019; Kurian, 2003; Staples, 2006). How global and universal trade do not automatically interact with an increase of wealth and sustainability, at least not for the Third World countries, has been shown in numerous studies. Especially in the case of the food industries, such as bananas and other well-known fruits, we know that these fruits travel from poor to rich countries and their consumers do not bring reasonable profit to those people living in producer countries, who do not always have enough food and water. Similarly, for the produce of tomato one can reconstruct working principles of global capitalism where individual products are crossing many borders (Barndt, 2008). Trade liberalization has been increasing the global lottery of world capitalism where winners and losers emerge newly and simultaneously. Long-term observations show that globalization processes have existed since a long time (Gills & Thomson, 2006).
Looking at the multiplication of entrepreneurial billionaires in the world (Bögenhold, 2019) shows that one reason for the enormous accumulation of such wealth is that globalization, understood as the increased economic, political, social and cultural interconnectedness of the world, has produced many more opportunities in different parts of the world, which have enabled some people to increase their wealth vastly (Giddens, 2009: 525), while on the other hand we find a lot of poverty all over the world, including people suffering from hunger, homeless people without even a roof over their heads and working migrants who are pushed around the world in order to raise income to try to feed their families (Case & Deaton, 2020). The bottom billion (Collier, 2007) often has no access to gas and electricity for cooking, drinking water and water in the toilets, education in schools and sufficient medical care; therefore, life expectancies are comparatively short (World Bank, 2002). Social stratification research deals with inequalities, and, vice versa, inequality is the indicator of the degree of social stratification, in individual countries and between countries.
Unheard Voices is mainly about the topic of social stratification in a global world economy. The evolution of the richest and the poorest people in contemporary societies is almost buffered by people being between those strata. It may make sharp contrasts less visible. These are the middle classes. The middle classes are of interest for multiple reasons: (1) through the lenses of social order, integration and political conflict, the middle classes serve as a buffer between the strata; (2) the middle classes are defined as household groups in middle-income ranges between poverty and richness. They are open to new consumer markets, new fields to study lifestyles and, in relation to this, new consumer behaviour; (3) the middle classes are of interest for investigating patterns of inequality and social mobility. This last point is of particular relevance in view of the proposed decline in the middle classes in a globalized world. An important research question is whether there is an ongoing “de-middledization”, a term coined by Bögenhold and Permana (2018). The question matters since all discussion on growing (or declining) inequality refers directly to the existence of the middle classes.
The concept of stratification refers to the idea of vertical segmentation in a sense of having more or less resources. There is apparently an analogy to the field of geology, where different forms of material stratification are investigated. The term “social stratification” is used to describe the system of social order in a vertical perspective. Degrees of stratification are always relational, and they express degrees of social inequality. Science is not primarily interested in the fate of individual actors but in social categories of humans as statistical categories.
The classic idea in Marx’s categorization was that access to means of production serves as the pivot point of all sociological and economic analysis. This view was universal and dominant for decades. The positioning of actors in the stratification system was located in relation to the system of industrial relations and ownership. Being wage or salary dependent implied belonging to the class of proletarians, whereas all others belonged to the class of the bourgeoisie, the class of capitalists. Marx never produced a systematic treatise of the class topic; at the end of the third volume of his famous Capital (Marx, 1977), the text ends abruptly and remains unfinished after the introduction. All that we have is a collection and interpretation of Marx’s ideas from various other places in his many written works. The principal view in the materialist Marxist perspective is that relations to the system of production govern the system of stratification. Accordingly, all other dimensions of life are subordinate to or consequences of the principal material position in society.
This programme was relevant for many academics for a long time, but has declined in its relevance and attraction during the last 40–50 years. Recent neo-Marxist approaches, especially the international world-system view by Wallerstein (2011), try to incorporate former analyses and modify the analysis process by adding global perspectives. An early programme contrasting to the dominant Marxist view was elaborated by Max Weber (1972 [1921]), who stressed the fact of differentiation (Giddens, 1973). Although he shared Marx’s view that issues of property or non-property are fundamental concerns in society, Weber concluded that, within those two categories, manifold further steps of separation can be found according to qualification and related labour market chances. He said that different individual market chances correspond with different life chances, and, consequently, he talked about many further classes within the two main categories. As far as we identify specific market chances, we can talk about specific classes. However, Weber also introduced the concept of status as the subjective feeling and orientation of people in terms of lifestyles and cultural expressions. The concept of lifestyle within the framework of his Protestant Ethics (Weber, 1988) is mostly used as a caricature of the modern and “standardized free” way of living.
Another interesting research lens is whether globalization can and must be seen as a process of increasing Americanization in a sense of McDonaldization, as George Ritzer (1993) suggested in his often quoted book The McDonaldization of Society (Bögenhold & Naz, 2018; Ritzer, 1993). McDonaldization reminds us of plastic cutlery, turbo capitalism and mass production of food as new ways of practising consumption. Of course, his book deals directly with the development and success of the well-known fast-food restaurant chain...