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Purpose: Prior work has convincingly argued that social inequalities arise from the basic human tendency to place others into social categories with different cultural meanings and to allocate resources unequally across those categories. However, few studies have sought to identify the micro-level mechanisms that sustain and justify this categorical inequality. In this research, I show how affect control theory (ACT) can be used to generate novel predictions about the interaction processes that perpetuate stratification.

Methodology/Approach: I present a series of analyses based in ACT that examine (1) whether categorical inequality is reflected in cultural sentiments for social groups, (2) whether patterns of normative behavior and social treatment vary based on category membership, and (3) whether interactions produce different emotions based on category membership.

Findings: Analysis 1 identifies four distinct patterns of cultural meanings that differentiate the groups studied. Analyses 2 and 3 show how these differences in cultural meanings produce categorical inequality through interpersonal behavior and emotional experiences in normative social encounters. Unequal cultural meanings for social groups correspond with their positionality in the social order and support patterns of situated behavior and emotions that keep groups with different levels of status and power separate and unequal.

Originality/Value: This research shows how social norms constrain and enable actions and emotions by members of different social categories, how they depend on the combinations of actors who appear together in a given social encounter, and how they contribute to the reproduction of inequality in ways not well accounted for by earlier work.

Much of the theoretical literature on inequality assumes that the equalisand is a cardinal variable like income or wealth. However, health status is generally measured as a categorical variable expressing a qualitative order. Traditional solutions involve reclassifying the variable by means of qualitative models and relying on inequality measures that are mean independent. We argue that the way status is conceptualised has important theoretical implications for measurement as well as for policy analysis. We also bring to the data a recently proposed approach to measuring self-reported health inequality that meets both rigorous and practical considerations. We draw upon the World Health Survey data to examine alternative pragmatic methods for making health-inequality comparisons. Findings suggest significant differences in health-inequality measurement and that regional and country patterns of inequality orderings do not coincide with any reasonable categorisation of countries by health system organisation.

In the case of ordered categorical data, the concepts of minimum and maximum inequality are not straightforward. In this chapter, the authors consider the Cowell and Flachaire (2017) indices of inequality. The authors show that the minimum and maximum inequality depend on preliminary choices made before using these indices, on status and the sensitivity parameter. Specifically, maximum inequality can be given by the distribution which is the most concentrated in the top or bottom category, or by the uniform distribution.

Building on relational inequality theory, this paper incorporates social capital as a device to trace the flow of resources through relationships originating within and beyond organizations. I draw on a survey of over 1,700 lawyers to evaluate key dynamics of social capital that shape earnings: bridging and bonding, reciprocity exchanges and sponsorship, and boundary maintenance. The findings show social capital lends a lift to law graduates through bridges to professional careers and sponsorship following job entry. Racial minorities, however, suffer a shortfall of personal networks to facilitate job searches, and once having secured jobs, minorities experience social closure practices by clients and colleagues that disadvantage them in their professional work. A sizeable earnings gap remains between racial minority and white lawyers after controlling for human and social capitals, social closure practices, and organizational context. This earnings gap is particularly large among racial minorities with more years of experience and those working in large law firms. The findings demonstrate the importance of identifying the interrelations that connect social network and organizational context to impact social inequality.

In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of workforce diversity on labor market outcomes. We argue that to understand the impact of workforce diversity, we must consider the effects of power (the distribution of valued and scarce resources), status (the relationships among people and groups), and numbers (the compositional effects of the unit), whether in the work group, job, occupation, firm, or society. We then discuss the mechanisms that generate and reproduce these dimensions of inequality and explain how they contribute to everyday practices such as allocation decisions and evaluative processes and ultimately lead to sustained or durable inequality (e.g. labor force outcomes including attitudes, behaviors, and material and psychic rewards).

This chapter assesses how gender and disability status intersect to shape employment and earnings outcomes for working-age adults in the United States.

The research pools five years of data from the 2010–2015 Current Population Survey to compare employment and earnings outcomes for men and women with different types of physical and cognitive disabilities to those who specifically report work-limiting disabilities.

The findings show that people with different types of limitations, including those not specific to work, experienced large disparities in employment and earnings and these outcomes also varied for men and women. The multiplicative effects of gender and disability on labor market outcomes led to a hierarchy of disadvantage where women with cognitive or multiple disabilities experienced the lowest employment rates and earnings levels. However, within groups, disability presented the strongest negative effects for men, which created a smaller gender wage gap among people with disabilities.

This chapter provides quantitative evidence for the multiplicative effects of gender and disability status on employment and earnings. It further extends an intersectional framework by highlighting the gendered aspects of the ways in which different disabilities shape labor market inequalities. Considering multiple intersecting statuses demonstrates how the interaction between disability type and gender produce distinct labor market outcomes.

We propose an elaboration of the social structure and personality framework from sociological social psychology that is intended to promote integration across social psychological traditions and between social psychology and sociology, using the study of inequality as an example.

We develop a conceptualization of “generic” proximate processes that produce and reproduce inequality in face-to-face interaction: status, identity, and justice.

The elaborated framework suggests fundamental questions that analysts can pose about the macro-micro dynamics of inequality. These questions direct attention to the “how” and “why” of macro-micro relations by connecting structural and cultural systems, local contexts, and the lives of individual persons; highlighting implicit processes; making meaning central; and directing our attention to how people act efficaciously in the face of constraint.

Applying this framework, scholars can use existing theories and generate new ones, and can do so inductively or deductively.

Research on inequality is enriched by social psychological analyses that draw on the full complement of relevant methods and theories.

We make visible the social psychological underpinnings of sociological research on inequality and provide a template for macro-micro analyses that emphasizes the centrality of social psychological processes.

Scholars and activists working both within and outside the massive health-related machinery of government and the private sector and within and outside communities of color address the same fundamental questions: Why do health disparities exist? Why have they persisted over such a long time? What can be done to significantly reduce or eliminate them?

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.