on the history of labor struggles but contrasted itself with the Old Left that saw economic issues as always primary. It embraced traditions of radical democracy, the struggle for Civil Rights, and the peace movement.
C. Wright Mills (excerpted here) famously documented the existence of a “power elite.” This was more than a matter of simple inequality. Members of this elite were connected to each other across fields and professions, for example, generals to bankers, politicians to lawyers. They went to the same schools and belonged to the same organizations, like the Council on Foreign Affairs or certain clubs in New York. They were not only privileged; through these connections, they exerted power. Relatedly, Steven Lukes (excerpted here) showed that power was reflected not only in the making of decisions but also in determining what decisions would be on the agenda and shaped the very wants, desires, and attitudes of citizens.
Michael Mann (also excerpted here) offered perhaps the most fundamental theory of social power.6 This was not, he suggested, just a matter of influence or even control exercised in society. Societies themselves were and are organized as power networks. Power was deployed hierarchically, of course, but also laterally, determining who and what was brought into a particular network. And, power was evident not only in explicit domination like that of a boss over subordinates but also in forms like what Mann called “infrastructural power” – the capacity to extend bureaucratic systems at a distance. In modern societies, states are able to exert influence and collect taxes as effectively at the geographical edges of countries as at the center.
Mann and other sociologists of the next generation shared with functionalism the question of how society was held together at a large scale. Parsons had called this “the problem of order,” tracing it back to Thomas Hobbes. His answer was basically that order was achieved by a system in which the different parts of society met each other’s needs and those of society as a whole. Schools, for example, met industry’s needs for educated (but also disciplined) workers. Industry in turn met consumers’ needs for products. Together, they contributed to society’s overall prosperity. But when functionalists said that the social system “worked,” critics asked “worked for whom?” Their answers pointed attention to patterns of inequality.
Inequality can of course be organized in different ways, from slavery to a feudal hierarchy to the special privileges bureaucrats and party officials have enjoyed in communist societies. In modern capitalist democracies, citizens are at least legally free to pursue different careers, but they are rewarded unequally. Functionalists, like many economists, have argued that differences in wages and salaries mainly reflect a necessary incentive system.7 Critics charge that this might justify some inequality, but not the amount typical of modern capitalist societies.
The “incentive” view fits better when there is a high level of social mobility – that is, when large numbers of people are able to move up in the social hierarchy. This was characteristic of Europe and the United States, as the middle class expanded after WWII. Since the 1970s, rates of social mobility have declined sharply. Inheritance explains more of people’s economic opportunities – like whether their families can help them buy houses. Not only do more people now find upward mobility blocked, many also experience downward mobility, for example, by losing good jobs with benefits and becoming unemployed or forced to accept work closer to the minimum wage. It is often the same categories of people who inherit better opportunities or more constrained life chances. As Charles Tilly (excerpted here) showed, inequality can be structural and durable without being the result of functional imperatives.
Indeed, in almost all the capitalist democracies, inequality has grown more extreme since the middle of the 1970s.8 In the 1950s, CEOs were paid about 20 times what a typical worker earned. In the United States, they now make more than 300 times the average worker’s pay. This is not only higher than it used to be, it is higher than in other successful capitalist countries – such as Norway, for example, or France. Pay differentials are shaped by culture and power, not just functional necessity. It is no accident that the United States has not only the highest levels of CEO compensation in the world but also the most violent history of resistance to labor organizing.
More generally, contemporary sociologists point out that inequalities of wealth may be both more extreme and more durable than inequalities of income. The gap between those with $100,000 salaries and those with only $50,000 salaries is real, but it pales by comparison with the gap between those with billions of dollars in assets and all those who must sell their labor to live. It is easier to move wealth – capital – from one country to another or from the manufacturing industry to high-tech IT companies; it is much harder for workers to adjust when their jobs vanish.
Upward mobility is associated with societies in which there are many relatively permeable layers. Sociological theorists contrast such “stratification” systems with class inequality in which divides are sharper. Marx emphasized the categorical difference between owners of the means of production (capitalists) and workers who had no choice but to sell their labor. Class inequality remains a basic concern for sociological theory. It shapes every aspect of social structure.
In and after the 1960s, however, other dimensions of inequality demanded increased attention. Previous analyses of class have often emphasized the situation of white men, but race, ethnicity, and gender have also been basic dimensions of inequality. In each case, power has been mobilized to maintain inequality. And, there are other dimensions: sexual orientation, disability, and immigration status. In each case, contemporary sociological theorists are attentive not only to material inequality but also to issues of voice, cultural expression, and recognition of difference. They focus not only on the explicit exercise of interpersonal power but also on the ways in which culture and social structure distribute power unequally. Even a seemingly equal interaction between men and women or Black and White citizens is typically shaped by their previous experience of established inequalities and power dynamics. Likewise, unequal pay is not just a matter of pay for workers in exactly the same job but also cultural norms for workers in similar jobs. Women working as nurses and teachers are required to have high levels of education but are paid less than men in other occupations with similar requirements.
More generally, contemporary sociology has come to see inequality as a matter of cultural as well as economic capital and of the influence of each on the other.9 Inequalities are reproduced when parents are able to get their children better education than others. They are shaped by the neighborhoods in which families live. They are shaped by accents in people’s speech.
Bourdieu
The most important theorist of the interrelationship of culture and inequality was Pierre Bourdieu (excerpted here). Bourdieu showed ways in which inequality was reproduced through a combination of culture, social structure, and individual internalization and the challenges of achieving agency for change. We do not just follow norms or rules, we develop habitual ways of acting. Bourdieu called this the “habitus.” But this is not just habit; it is also how we improvise new actions, even in new contexts, on the basis of our previous experiences. It is how a basketball player knows when to pass and how a stand-up comedian knows the timing crucial to a joke.10
What becomes a part of us in this way is shaped by structural patterns in society, but not so much in the abstract as in the ways we encounter them. We internalize the class structure, for example, from the perspective of where we started out and a trajectory of how we did in school, job applications and promotions, treatment by other individuals – even dating! – and institutions like banks. Our experience of inequality is shaped not only by economic capital – money – but also by cultural capital.
After WWII, for example, there was a massive expansion of public schooling. Attendance through high school became almost universal. This was pursued as an extension of democratic rights and an attempt to create greater equality – and it did open up some opportunities. Bourdieu himself grew up poor, the grandson of a sharecropper and the son of a postman in a rural village in a disadvantaged region.
