This book offers an exciting new perspective on differentiation and inequality, looking at how our most personal choices (of sexual partners, friends, consumption items and lifestyle) are influenced by hierarchy and social difference.

This book looks at how sociological concepts that were first 'invented' and applied to describe social inequality in Europe were also used to understand and explain inequality in the United States. However, under very different circumstances and conditions the concepts needed to be adjusted - either through changing their precise meaning or by using related concepts. In Concepts of Social Stratification the author tries to analyse this change by looking at how some of the most prominent American sociologists have tried to conceptualise their own society while at the same time addressing the complex relationship between an assumed political equality and de facto social inequality.

The mass expansion of higher education is one of the most important social transformations of the second half of the twentieth century. In this book, scholars from 15 countries, representing Western and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Israel, Australia, and the United States, assess the links between this expansion and inequality in the national context. Contrary to most expectations, the authors show that as access to higher education expands, all social classes benefit. Neither greater diversification nor privatization in higher education results in greater inequality. In some cases, especially where the most advantaged already have significant access to higher education, opportunities increase most for persons from disadvantaged origins. Also, during the late twentieth century, opportunities for women increased faster than those for men. Offering a new spin on conventional wisdom, this book shows how all social classes benefit from the expansion of higher education.

This book contends that conventional class concepts are not able to adequately capture social inequality and socio-cultural differentiation in Africa. Earlier empirical findings concerning ethnicity, neo-traditional authorities, patron-client relations, lifestyles, gender, social networks, informal social security, and even the older debate on class in Africa, have provided evidence that class concepts do not apply; yet these findings have mostly been ignored. For an analysis of the social structures and persisting extreme inequality in African societies – and in other societies of the world – we need to go beyond class, consider the empirical realities and provincialise our conventional theories. This book develops a new framework for the analysis of social structure based on empirical findings and more nuanced approaches, including livelihood analysis and intersectionality, and will be useful for students and scholars in African studies and development studies, sociology, social anthropology, political science and geography.

The book offers an in-depth analysis of several important theories of social class and stratification, both past and present. This critique is underpinned by a single, coherent analytic framework organised around the notion of ownership. This original approach allows the book to offer alternative treatments of the issues dealt with by the thinkers discussed here. The central argument here is that there are only two classical theories of social class, namely those developed by Marx and Weber, and this clear systematisation of the main attributes of approaches to class and stratification makes it possible to see that many theories traditionally considered as class ones refer, in fact, to social stratification.

The caste system has conventionally been perceived by scholars as a hierarchy based on the binary opposition of purity and pollution. Challenging this position, leading sociologist Dipankar Gupta argues that any notion of a fixed hierarchy is arbitrary and valid only from the perspective of the individual castes. The idea of difference, and not hierarchy, determines the tendency of each caste to keep alive its discrete nature and this is also seen to be true of the various castes which occupy the same rank in the hierarchy. It is, in fact, the mechanics of power, both economic and political, that set the ground rules for caste behaviour, which also explains how traditionally opposed caste groups find it possible to align in the contemporary political scenario. With the help of empirical evidence from states like Bihar, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, the author illustrates how any presumed correlations between caste loyalties and voting patterns are in reality quite invalid. Provocative and finely argued, Interrogating Caste is a remarkable work that provides fresh insight into caste as a social, political and economic reality.

The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.

Bringing together various statements on social stratification, this collection offers contributions to debates on the nature of race, class, and gender inequality.

An intellectual history of contrasting ideas around the power of the arts to bring about personal and societal change - for better and worse. A fascinating account of the value and functions of the arts in society, in both the private sphere of individual emotions and self-development and public sphere of politics and social distinction.