Through the overarching lens of the concepts of social advantage and disadvantage, this new and original edited volume - with contributions by 14 distinguished authors - provides an overview of a variety of conceptual frameworks and a spectrum of social inequalities, processes and divisions. It discusses poverty, social exclusion, capability deprivation, rights violations, social immobility, and human or social capital deficiency. From a global, European and UKperspective, it addresses the origins and effects of advantage and disadvantage in relation to family and childhood, education, work, and old age and the implications of divisions based on gender,'race', ethnicity, migration, religion, neighbourhood, and the experience of crime.
Does protest influence political representation? If so, which groups are most likely to benefit from collective action? The Advantage of Disadvantage makes a provocative claim: protests are most effective for disadvantaged groups. According to author LaGina Gause, legislators are more responsive to protesters than non-protesters, and after protesting, racial and ethnic minorities, people with low incomes, and other low-resource groups are more likely than white and affluent protesters to gain representation. Gause also demonstrates that online protests are less effective than in-person protests. Drawing on literature from across the social sciences as well as formal theory, a survey of policymakers, quantitative data, and vivid examples of protests throughout U.S. history, The Advantage of Disadvantage provides invaluable insights for scholars and activists seeking to understand how groups gain representation through protesting.
The authors combine a philosophical analysis of the idea of disadvantage with proposals for moving society in the discretion of equality, by 'declustering disadvantage'. The book will help political philosophers, social policy theorists, and practitioners involved in the design and delivery of actual social policy.
What enables some organizations to routinely perform better than others? Conversely, what makes some firms consistently perform worse than their competitors? Within a single corporation, what enables some teams or individual firm members to outperform their counterparts? Through the concept of social capital, this book addresses these questions by studying the effects of relationship networks on the ability of corporate players (firms and their members) to attain their professional goals. The idea of social capital has become one of the premier approaches to studying networks in the context of organizations but the literature still lacks a conceptual paradigm that connects the various approaches, definitions and measure of social capital into an integrated analytical model. By explicitly connecting social networks to the goals of corporate players, this book provides a unifying framework to the study of social capital in an organizational context. In this volume `social capital' is defined as the resources that accrue to an actor through his or her social relationships and that aid in the attainment of goals. The book introduces the new notion of `social liability' as a framework to analyze the negative effects social networks can have on the attainment of goals by firms and/or their members. Corporate Social Capital and Liability thus presents a new way to tie together findings and approaches in the literature by explicitly addressing the distinction between networks and outcomes, the distinction between networks at the level of firms and networks at the level of individuals, and the distinction between positive outcomes of social structure (social capital) and negative outcomes (social liability). The book's contributors are forty-six acclaimed scholars from around the world with backgrounds in management, business and sociology. Together, they describe how social relationships within and between firms positively affect the ability of corporations to achieve fruitful alliances; gain access to information, resources, knowledge and financial capital; and recruit qualified personnel. The book makes an explicit distinction between networks at the level of firms and networks at the level of individuals. The outcomes of networks are also considered at these different analytical levels by addressing such questions as: how do social relationships between firms assist firms and individuals in the attainment of their goals? How do these relationships obstruct goals? What is the effect of networks between individuals (within and between firms) on the performance of these individuals and the firms they work for? Can networks be managed to yield social capital rather than social liability? The unifying framework of social capital and social liability is helpful in studying business enterprises, and also useful in other disciplines which analyze social networks and organizations, such as community studies, economics, and political science.
The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.
The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
This book provides an accessible overview of human needs, exploring how they may be translated into rights. It also looks at how social policy can be informed by a politics of human need.
Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award, Section on Aging and the Life Course, American Sociological Association Senior citizens from all walks of life face a gauntlet of physical, psychological, and social hurdles. But do the disadvantages some people accumulate over the course of their lives make their final years especially difficult? Or does the quality of life among poor and affluent seniors converge at some point? The End Game investigates whether persistent socioeconomic, racial, and gender divisions in America create inequalities that structure the lives of the elderly. “Avoiding reductionist frameworks and showing the hugely varying lifestyles of Californian seniors, The End Game poses a profound question: how can provision of services for the elderly cater for individual circumstances and not merely treat the aged as one grey block? Abramson eloquently and comprehensively expounds this complex question.” —Michael Warren, LSE Review of Books “The author’s approach situates inequality experienced by older Americans in a real world context and links culture, social life, biological life, and structural disparities in ways that allow readers to understand the intersectionality of diversity imbued in the lives of older Americans...Abramson opens a window into the reality of old age, the importance of culture and the impact it has on shared/prior experiences, and the inequalities that structure them.” —A. L. Lewis, Choice
Many Americans, holding fast to the American Dream and the promise of equal opportunity, claim that social class doesn't matter. Yet the ways we talk and dress, our interactions with authority figures, the degree of trust we place in strangers, our religious beliefs, our achievements, our senses of morality and of ourselves—all are marked by social class, a powerful factor affecting every domain of life. In Facing Social Class, social psychologists Susan Fiske and Hazel Rose Markus, and a team of sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and legal scholars, examine the many ways we communicate our class position to others and how social class shapes our daily, face-to-face interactions—from casual exchanges to interactions at school, work, and home. Facing Social Class exposes the contradiction between the American ideal of equal opportunity and the harsh reality of growing inequality, and it shows how this tension is reflected in cultural ideas and values, institutional practices, everyday social interactions, and psychological tendencies. Contributor Joan Williams examines cultural differences between middle- and working-class people and shows how the cultural gap between social class groups can influence everything from voting practices and political beliefs to work habits, home life, and social behaviors. In a similar vein, Annette Lareau and Jessica McCrory Calarco analyze the cultural advantages or disadvantages exhibited by different classes in institutional settings, such as those between parents and teachers. They find that middle-class parents are better able to advocate effectively for their children in school than are working-class parents, who are less likely to challenge a teacher's authority. Michael Kraus, Michelle Rheinschmidt, and Paul Piff explore the subtle ways we signal class status in social situations. Conversational style and how close one person stands to another, for example, can influence the balance of power in a business interaction. Diana Sanchez and Julie Garcia even demonstrate that markers of low socioeconomic status such as incarceration or unemployment can influence whether individuals are categorized as white or black—a finding that underscores how race and class may work in tandem to shape advantage or disadvantage in social interactions. The United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality and one of the lowest levels of social mobility among industrialized nations, yet many Americans continue to buy into the myth that theirs is a classless society. Facing Social Class faces the reality of how social class operates in our daily lives, why it is so pervasive, and what can be done to alleviate its effects.
