“INEQUALITY AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM”

Conceptual Literature
Inequality—the state of not being equal, especially in status, Rights, and opportunities1—
is a concept very much at the heart of social justice theories. However, it is prone to confusion in
public debate as it tends to mean different things to different people. Some distinctions are
common though. Many authors distinguish “economic inequality”, mostly meaning “income
inequality”, “monetary inequality” or, more broadly, inequality in “living conditions”. Others
further distinguish a rights-based, legalistic approach to inequality—inequality of rights and
asso-ciated obligations (e.g. when people are not equal before the law, or when people have
unequal political power). Concerning economic inequality, much of the discussion has boiled
down to two views. One is chiefly concerned with the inequality of outcomes in the material
dimensions of well-being and that may be the result of circumstances beyond one’s control
(ethnicity, family background, gender, and so on) as well as talent and effort. This view takes an
ex-post or achievement-oriented perspective. The second view is concerned with the inequality
of opportunities, that is, it focuses only in the circumstances beyond one’s control, that affect
one’s potential outcomes. This is an exante or potential achievement perspective.

There are a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the literature
on environmental justice and environmental inequalities in need of refinement. Using data from
the recycling industry, the author proposes an environmental inequality formation (EIF)
perspective to address these issues. The EIF perspective synthesizes three major points that are
largely neglected in research on environmental inequalities: (a) the importance of process and
history, (b) the role of multiple stakeholder relationships, and (c) a life-cycle approach to the
study of hazards. The EIF model captures sociological dynamics in ways that suggest that
environmental racism and inequalities originate and emerge in a much more complex process
than previously considered. Theory building in this area of research will aid scholars in
understanding the mechanisms that produce environmental inequalities as well as their
socioenvironmental consequences.

For the analysis of socioeconomic differences in health and mortality, a basic definition
and understanding of social inequality is needed. Societies consist of individuals, who are all
different. The notion of social inequality only refers to differences in such parameters that have
an influence on the social position of an individual. These characteristics are resources, or goods
in a broad sense, that are much in demand in the society. In order to count as social inequality the
unequal distribution of these goods must not be natural or accidental, eg, the size of a person’s
body, but must be systematically made by a social process. If this systematically unequal
distribution occurs regularly between the same social groups, this inequality will be perceived as
inequity and can become a social problem (Hradil 2001: 29). Hradil summarizes his definition of
social inequality as follows:“Social inequality exists when people frequently receive more of a
society’s ‘valuable goods’ than others owing to their position in the social network of
relationships.”(Hradil 2001: 30). This definition implies that differences in eye color, body
height, physical handicap, etc. cannot be called social differences or social inequality because
they are not the result of a social process. To be precise, even height is not purely biological or
genetic since it also depends on class. But what is more important is that such characteristics
have a social meaning and can imply serious social advantages or disadvantages for individuals
(Goldman 2001b: 23). Characteristics like height show that physical attributes pose a special
problem with regards to a clear definition of social inequality. Of course society cannot be
blamed for an individual’s body height or a handicap, but if we look at a more complex
characteristic like beauty or health, there are many ways in which these “resources” are
distributed by social mechanisms. This will be discussed later. According to Hradil it is
important to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate inequality. Sociological research
focuses not only on illegitimate inequalities which are generally considered unjust, eg, income
differences between men and women with the same qualification level, but also on generally
accepted differences, eg, income differences between persons with very different levels of
qualification (Hradil 1987a: 16).
Thematic Literature

Over the past decade, the social scientific analysis of inequality has been renewed with a
vigour and urgency which is desperately necessary to respond to the burgeoning challenges of
the twenty-first century. The tempered optimism of the last decades of the twentieth century
based on economic and technological growth which appeared to have played a transformative
role in improving the lives of millions of poor people over much of the world has given way to a
much bleaker sense of the intractability of emerging challenges of the twenty-first century.
Climate change, intensifying medical crises most obviously manifest in the Covid-19 pandemic,
and deepening militarist and nationalist politics have become increasingly evident. Many of
these concerns crystallise around a recognition of the persistence, and even escalation of
inequalities across many dimensions of economic and social life since the late twentieth century.
Only 20 years ago, inequality had been seen to be a marginal and even receding issue which
would be sidelined by modernisation and economic growth. Some sociologists (Pakulski and
Waters 1996) had diagnosed “the end of class”. Influential sociologist Manuel Castells (1996)
had even proclaimed “the end of patriarchalism”. Although claims that racial divisions were
being alleviated in an allegedly “post-racial” environment were generally treated with
scepticism, they were still widely aired, especially with the election of Barack Obama as
President of the United States. How dated and parochial this optimism now seems in the grim
year of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the festering, brutal reality of inequalities
across numerous dimensions all too visibly.

A major intellectual driver of the renewed social scientific interest in inequality has been
the development of a powerful branch of the discipline of economics which conducted
trailblazing long-term analysis of inequality trends within nations and across the globe. This was
a movement of seismic importance since previously, the study of inequality (or “distribution”)
was a backwater of the economics discipline. From the 1970s, an inspiring group of economists
including Anthony Atkinson, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz insisted on the need to take
inequality seriously and developed new measurement tools for studying inequality trends. By the
early twenty-first century, these crystallised in the development of the World Top Incomes
database in 2011, and in 2015, renamed as the World Wealth and Income Database. In the past
decade, a number of pioneering publications from the group associated with the “World
Inequality Lab” have attracted much interest and dramatically re-energised the study of
inequality (Piketty 2014, 2020; Atkinson 2015; Zucman 2015; Alvaredo et al. 2018, see special
issues of British Journal of Sociology, BJS 2015). A central intellectual move has been to shift
attention away from the analysis of poverty towards the entire distribution with a special
concentration “top end” incomes and wealth, thereby placing the most significant beneficiaries
of economic growth under the spotlight in a more critical and forensic light than was previously
the case. This readily mapped onto increasing public concerns about the burgeoning fortunes of
the super-rich amidst the stagnation of opportunities for many.

In the past decade, this important current of research has fused with an awareness of the
need to analyse inequality globally. Studies of inequality have therefore moved away from the
North American and European heartlands to embrace a more global perspective (compare Piketty
and Saez’s 2003 initial study of the United States with Piketty 2014 and Piketty 2020). This
current research partly emerges from the critique of national framings of inequality, as if national
boundaries were the inevitable receptacle for social divisions, rather than being part of wider
global dynamics (see Bhambra 2007; Anand and Segal 2015; Milanovic 2016; Savage 2021b).
This sensitivity also recognises the distinctiveness of the trajectories of developing countries
with more serious inequality problems and the need to bring these nations more closely into
view. In developing nations, inequality has always been the core theme of social scientists,
especially sociologists. However, they have experienced the same scenario of older optimism
transitioning into a later grim mood a few decades later, just as European and American social
scientists have, but in an even more sped-up fashion. Even in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, major emerging economies, such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and South Africa, were
being hailed as success stories in a period of rapid economic growth. Social scientists saw the
rise of the middle class and the reduction of poverty as being of major historical significance
(Kharas 2010; Li 2010; Li et al. 2013; Li 2015; Bartelt and Sievers 2017). There were also
situations where long-term rising inequality in Chi