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Provides a comprehensive analysis of the development of intergenerational mobility in West Germany pursuing both a period and a cohort perspective. Concerning the evolution of social fluidity in the period from 1976 to 1999 we find indications of a slight, yet not statistically significant, trend towards more social fluidity. A clear and significant increase of social fluidity, however, is found when analysing the mobility patterns of cohorts born between 1920 and 1969. The increase in social fluidity is most probably due to declining class inequalities in educational attainment. The chapter also elaborates the impact on mobility patterns of the turbulent political, social, and economic history of twentieth-century Germany that probably explains the difference between the findings of the period and cohort perspectives.

This chapter is concerned with changes in the level of educational attainment in Britain. It discusses and evaluates sociology's contribution to understanding class inequalities in educational attainment. It begins with empirical studies documenting the extent of class inequality in education. It then describes methodological work concerned with measuring class differentials in educational attainment. Finally, it explores possible explanations for the persistence of class inequalities.

This chapter reviews evidence about two complex trends: the increase in economic inequality and the decrease in union membership. In two fundamental ways, class inequalities underlie this inquiry into both the roots and the consequences of inequalities of political voice. Inequalities of political participation are, first, grounded in disparities in income, occupation, and especially education. As this chapter demonstrates, social class has multiple consequences for differences in individual and collective political participation. Second, inequalities on the basis of class shape the content of political conflict. That is, class differences are an important source of political division. Although the list of contentious political issues in contemporary America is long and varied, there can be no doubt that matters associated with differences in income and material well-being are critically important in generating political conflict.

This chapter reveals that the fair housing movement in the Route 128 area created the grassroots support and legal means to fight racial discrimination through methods that simultaneously revealed the serious limits of suburban activists to solve the problems of systemic inequality. The agendas and policies of the fair housing movement grounded in the ideals of equal opportunity and meritocratic individualism led to the creation of pathbreaking new laws and a new outpouring of support for the cause. The movement, nevertheless, succeeded in helping only a handful of primarily middle-class African Americans move into affluent communities. While the results did have symbolic importance, they did little to alleviate the housing problems of the majority of Boston's African American population or patterns of systemic residential segregation. Thus, the fair housing movement contributed to liberal ideals and modes of activism and perpetuated larger patterns of residential and class inequality.

This chapter begins with an account of the shared egalitarian outlook by considering the Left's objections to class inequality. Progressive writers and politicians employed a variety of arguments against inequality. By documenting the range of these arguments, this chapter gives an initial indication of the character of the British Left's egalitarian vision. It then asks whether progressives saw the aims of social mobility and meritocratic equal opportunity as able to satisfy their concerns about class inequality. It maintains that a meritocratic distribution was seen as an insufficient realisation of the Left's understanding of social justice.

Class analysis is concerned with how patterns of advantage (and disadvantage) are transmitted and reproduced over time. However, the passage of time (such as the life-course transitions associated with ageing, cohort changes from one generation to the next, and longer-term socio-economic changes) makes the question of how class inequalities endure a complicated one. This chapter examines how change over time requires us to rethink the nature of class inequalities, by taking a closer look at the relationship between ‘class’ and culture, lifestyle and taste. It considers how social change in post-industrial societies has created a challenge for how we think about ‘class’, and led some to claim that ‘class is dead’. It then explores the counter-reaction by theorists who argue that ‘class’ today has a changed and increasingly cultural dynamic, with class inequalities reproduced through affluence and consumption practices and existing within processes of individualisation.

This concluding chapter considers the following questions. How can the dynamics of production-consumption in the luxury hotel aid in the better understanding of the legitimacy of class inequality in the service economy? How can the investigations into the link between service work and class can be further examined? And what are the possibilities for social critique and change? Among the topics that are revisited and re-examined in this final chapter are: service work and class entitlements; commodity fetishism and interactive normalization; and social reproduction.

This chapter establishes the context within which the schools and families at the center of this book enact their “class work” vis-à-vis the college applications process. Highlighting recent economic instability and stratification of higher education wherein college credentials matter more than ever, it becomes clear that the college process becomes a site where affluent families seek to “lock in” class advantage through the mobilization of all available capital—economic, cultural, and social. Through conscious efforts to exploit any and all opportunities to position advantageously in the college admissions process, students and parents in this particular strata of secondary schools effectively constrict access to highly and most selective colleges and universities for the rest of the middle class, and, by obvious and clear extension, the working class and poor. Class Warfare takes up this theoretically located “class” project via multi-year ethnographic research with three distinct groups of students in three upper-middle class secondary schools.

This chapter explores racial politics during the First World War, which acted as a catalyst in which old and richly drawn contests of authority and power were shifted on their axis, disrupted, and transformed. From the ascendant black capital of Harlem, a militant “New Negro” movement had emerged, its proponents hoping to more dramatically leverage the “new theater” created by the war to reshape global relations of race and class inequality, to celebrate militant and respectable black masculinity, and to replace an old cadre of elitist and ineffectual black leadership with a new brand of uncompromising mass politics. Joining the stream of West Indians heading for New York, Marcus Garvey was a fortunate witness to the birth of the New Negro movement. By the end of the war, thoughts of returning to Jamaica forgotten, he had begun to pull the movement's center of gravity toward himself and his organization.

This chapter studies health inequalities from a generational perspective but also aims to adopt a life course perspective. It explains that the life course approach emphasises the dimension of time from the individual's perspective by, for example, focusing on the long-term consequences of specific historical conditions encountered earlier in life. It discusses some important topics related to generations and the life course approach. It presents data and the construction of key variables and provides some background data on class differences in mortality by birth cohort. It analyses childhood class inequalities for different birth cohorts across various parts of the life course and how these differentials relate to adult class position. It also presents results that focus on how ill health is differentiated depending on a person's total class experience in life so far. It also discusses how to interpret the findings.

This chapter examines the importance of growing class inequality as a driver of employment growth in paid domestic labor by drawing on macrosociological, rather than microsociological, literature. More specifically, it considers what explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in paid domestic labor over time and space. After comparing the microsociology of paid domestic labor with the modernization theory and the macrosociology of domestic labor, the chapter analyzes the 1990 census data for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. It shows that income inequality is a significant predictor of the proportion of women workers employed in domestic labor, as was the case in the 1980s in southern California. It also attributes the expansion of employment in paid domestic work in the late twentieth century to widening class inequality, including inequality among women.

This chapter compares the gender dynamics of the Great Depression of the 1930s with those of the Great Recession associated with the 2008 financial crisis. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between gender and unemployment, and between gender and family dynamics during the economic crises. It then examines the family wage and married women's employment in the 1930s as well as inequality among women during the Great Recession. Despite the many changes in gender relations that unfolded in the intervening decades, the chapter shows that the structural effects of the two economic downturns were similar. In both cases, female unemployment increased less, and later, than male unemployment, and birth, marriage, and divorce rates declined as well. The Great Depression spurred a political transformation that led to a sharp reduction in economic inequality, accompanied by a dramatic upsurge in union organizing. Neither of these developments took place after the 2008 crisis. Instead, inequalities between the haves and have-nots have continued to widen, and especially class inequality among women.

This chapter examines general patterns of social inequality among Muslims and non-Muslims, with particular reference to inequality between the genders and between classes. Using a variety of indicators, it considers the status of women in public life, popular attitudes toward gender-based inequality, and structural inequalities in well-being. More precisely, it analyzes data on women in the workplace using earned income ratio as well as the representation of women in high politics based on the women's share of seats in the national legislature and the percentage of women personnel at the ministerial level of government as of 2008. The chapter also explores whether gender-based inequality is inscribed in the Qur'an and/or the Hadith of Islam, along with the possible causes of class-based inequality.

This chapter advocates the development of comparative organizational research designs as the empirical basis for studying both the generic and contingent processes that generate inequality. After explaining where past quantitative and qualitative researchers have gone wrong, it goes on to examine and promote contemporary comparative organizational research designs. Two in-depth case studies highlight the intersection between a relational inequality theoretical approach and comparative organizational research designs. The first examines organizational variation quantitatively, highlighting the roles of categorical intersectionality, organizational practices, and US and Australian national political economic institutions in expanding and contracting workplace class inequalities. The second focuses on three qualitative case studies of claims-making over surgical training regimes, highlighting the role of institutionalized power, gendered struggles, and cultural framing in contestation over status and divisions of labor. Finally, the chapter examines the potential of comparative meta-analyses across existing single-organization case studies for generating generic theories about relational inequalities.

This chapter addresses the “white worker” in President William Jefferson Clinton's attempts to distance himself from affirmative action and argues that taking a longer historical view is indispensable to understanding the recent past. It also hopes to make a modest contribution to efforts to look at the neoliberal views of race and of white working class historically. Neoliberalism's appeals to the white working class under Clinton largely focused on issues that were ostensibly race-neutral but are in fact highly charged in racial terms. The three broad generalizations presented suggest that even in its Rustin-inspired, social democratic variant race-neutrality is itself a problematic strategy and also leads away from meaningful mobilizations against class inequality. To capitulate to race-neutrality, and thus to white supremacy, is to abandon white workers to their own worst impulses and to their society's. It is to close, rather than to open, space for class politics.

This chapter analyzes data drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study to assess the contribution of primary and secondary effects in creating class inequalities in the United States, considering both high school completion and the transition from high school to university degree. It also discusses the causal model underlying the primary-versus-secondary-effects distinction and explores alternative causal paths from social background to transition. Primary and secondary effects are both present in the United States, as in other countries. The chapter regards the causal identification challenges to be sufficient grounds for caution in interpreting differences between what-if transition rates from these models as causal quantities that reflect choice-based secondary effects.