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Introduction

1.1 The importance of inequality

Inequality and its counterpart, equality, are words of many meanings. Inequality is deployed in diverse settings by a range of actors. It is both assumed as a fact of everyday life and denounced as an offence to a civilized society. Inequality and the discussions and debates associated with it are rediscovered and rehearsed anew over time and in changing contexts. Many of these debates have been central concerns since the early days of sociological investigation, but are reworked for the purposes of and to meet the needs required by policy makers, politicians, academics, campaigners, and individuals seeking to make sense of their lives. They are underpinned by normative perspectives on human motivation and the way that society functions, perspectives which themselves are subject to re-creation as different discourses come to dominate and shape people’s thinking (Foucault [1969] 1972).

In political and popular discourse, inequality emerges as lack of opportunity, as the counterpart to effort and achievement, as simply differences between people, as well as an expression of the disadvantage suffered by vulnerable groups in society. In this last use (in)equalities can even become synonymous with the definitions of groups themselves or the more general promotion of equalities. For example, the body responsible for overseeing the implementation of anti-discrimination law in the UK, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, refers to protected groups in the language of equalities groups.

Inequalities can be distinguished in terms of whether they are inequalities of opportunity, inequalities of outcome, inequalities of access or inequalities in entitlement, and are also differentiated as to whether they are just or unjust, avoidable or unavoidable, ‘natural’ or artificially sustained. At the same time these uses often merge or overlap, creating apparent contradictions or confusions, or resulting in slippages that allow for different understandings of inequality to operate side by side. One person’s equality is another’s inequality.

This introduction sets out to describe some of these uses of the terms equality and inequality, to disentangle them in relation to the underlying concepts and literatures from which they derive, and to help reveal how they are reworked in practice. In particular it highlights how commitment to equality may operate alongside the acceptance of wide inequalities between individuals or groups of people. Separating the more technical usage of commonplace words from the general currency is something with which sociologists have continually to engage, and this often requires some compromise between the two to facilitate communication outside the academy. This is, for example, a particular conundrum for researchers on ‘race’ and ethnicity: how to reveal the inequalities faced by marginalized groups without acceding to the language of race, which is obsolete and theoretically discredited (Banton 1998).

The first part of this chapter is, then, concerned with concepts and definitions. Providing an account of the conceptual and definitional issues in discussing inequality leads to an outline of how terms for inequality/inequalities are used in this book and how they apply across social groups. The second part considers more directly the coverage of the book: what is included and what is excluded, which groups are considered as subject to inequalities and on what basis. It asks: What are the major inequalities that affect people’s lives, and how do they vary with circumstances? It also treats the question of the extent to which individual bases of inequality can be considered separately and how far the experience of inequality always has to be considered in a multifaceted or intersectional context. Finally the introduction outlines the structure of the book and the key features that appear across chapters as well as those that are distinctive within chapters.

Inequality in policy and research

Inequality is a longstanding subject of sociological concern. It is implicit in research on stratification as well as on poverty, wealth and the varying aspects of social position. These concerns and bodies of sociological research often reappear in new forms in the mouths of politicians and others who help to frame the ways we think about our society. Discussions of inequality and cognate issues such as poverty have arguably come to much greater prominence in political debate in recent decades and have developed corresponding commonsense meanings that have their own logics and contradictions. Overall, there appears to be a widespread acknowledgement of the value of equality and its promotion within policy and society. But that support for equality can be found on close inspection to be bounded.

We have, for example, seen ‘equality of opportunity’ strongly endorsed as social mobility has moved into the political limelight. Social mobility has for decades proved a major component of the sociology of stratification and the subject of some of the pioneering works of British sociology, from Glass’s (1954) study onwards. It is also an area of sociological analysis that has been considered worthy of extended contention and critique (Crompton 1998) and subject to the promotion of alternative analytical approaches. However, despite a range of rigorous studies in recent years, class analysis and investigations of social mobility have ceased to be regarded as so central to much contemporary British sociology, though they remain a thriving area in the international arena. The fact that it is now such a key concern of both left and right suggests that this is a good moment to reconsider both the implications of a commitment to a particular concept of equality implied by social mobility and the contribution to our understanding that sociological analyses have to offer. Social mobility and an open society, though widely regarded as ‘good things’, raise a number of problems for the realization of a just society and demand scrutiny of what might be regarded as fair outcomes for individuals. These problems typically remain unacknowledged at the level of political debate.

We also see increasing attention paid to inequality as difference in all its facets in the policy arena. Intersectionality, developed, refined and debated within feminist theory, is now a core term for policy organizations such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, where attempts to mainstream it, to pin it down and to operationalize it in relation to an extended set of inequality ‘domains’ are accompanied by a revival of debates in the sociological and policy literature on its proper usage and its shifting application. Furthermore, inequality in everyday lives is picked up in policy concerns with work–life balance, which have begun to appropriate insights from research and analysis into the domestic division of labour that challenged the earlier tendency of sociology to focus on the ‘public sphere’. Political anxieties about ‘new’ immigration struggle to incorporate some of the shifts in the recognition and understanding of ‘others’ beyond the (post)colonial context. Who is different, who is unequal, and to what extent explicit inequalities or differentiated opportunities are justified are questions raised by highlighting the experience of marginalized and continually redefined outsiders. Moreover, such debates show how much internal inclusion and emphasis on local equalities is predicated on a process of boundary setting, albeit the boundaries of who is included and who excluded remain somewhat indistinct and have been subject to continual reworking since the earliest immigration legislation. New boundaries and new inequalities also come to the fore in the recent emphasis on religious inequality and difference – an emphasis which both stimulates and feeds on the expansion of sociological investigation into religious minorities and on the intersection of religious affiliation with more traditional interpretations of ethnic difference.

In these – and other – ways, (in)equality is very much in the mainstream of political debate. Yet in its very prominence there is a risk that concepts, and the differences between uses of equality, become blurred. It often appears that the contradictions between promotion of equality and simultaneous implementation of measures that perpetuate inequalities are not fully recognized. For example, we can observe the consensus that has developed among politicians from both sides of the political spectrum in espousing social mobility, fairness and the fact that children should not be constrained in their opportunities by accidents of birth. This occurs at the same time as an increase in economic inequality. It also coincides with an increasing tendency for sanctions against those who do not engage in paid work to be built into the changing form of the UK’s (and other countries’) welfare states, with punitive and derogatory language referring to the ‘workshy’ and limited support for those not in employment. These are tendencies which have been found as much under ‘left’ as under ‘right’ governments. On the one hand, equality of opportunity is regarded as fundamental and in accordance with the right of everyone to ‘get on’, presupposing that there must be some who do not make it; on the other hand, the belief in human motivation does not extend to those who cannot for whatever reason achieve; instead they are considered to require external...