Durable Inequality

"This is a very influential book. Durable Inequality is a systematic analysis of how sociological identity strengthens inequality. Tilly focuses on two main mechanisms. The first is opportunity hoarding, which means that in-groups attempt to reserve opportunities for themselves. For example, in the United States, typically the budget of schools in many towns is based on the wealth of the local taxpayers. “The system of high-quality schools is set up so that the families who benefit from it are the ones who already have advantages” In the wealthy suburbs of Boston, you have high-quality schools which transmit advantages from one generation to the next. The system is set up so that the families who benefit from it are the ones who already have advantages—that’s an example of opportunity hoarding. Tilly identifies opportunity hoarding and other social mechanisms that explain why inequality endures. In The Dignity of Working Men , I identified census tracks in the Parisian and New York suburbs with large numbers of working-class people. I define ‘working-class’ as low-status white collar workers, such as people who work in sales and blue-collar workers. I interviewed randomly-selected people in their homes and elsewhere. I asked them questions designed to discover what criteria they used to evaluate others. I would systematically cull the criteria and then compared the criteria used by the majority group (white workers) with the criteria used by the most stigmatized groups in each country—North-African immigrants in France, and African-Americans in the United States. There were clear differences in how different groups defined morality. For instance, white workers in the States emphasized the most important dimension of morality was the “disciplined self”; that is, paying your bills and working hard. African-Americans, meanwhile, stressed the “caring self,” which has to do with solidarity and sympathy for other human beings and respect for where they come from. There were also clear differences between the two countries. In both, I asked the subjects to name their heroes. Donald Trump came up a lot in the United States, where subjects were more likely to name “material success” as a reason for considering someone a hero. In France, far fewer emphasized this. The goal isn’t to say all the French are this way and all Americans are that, but rather to analyze what cultural membership means in each context, how the worth of people are assessed, so that inequality can be challenged in both. “Donald Trump came up a lot in the United States, where subjects were more likely to name “material success” as a reason for considering someone a hero” I focus on problems that are similar in different institutional contexts. For instance, in my book How Professors Think , I look at evaluation in the context of higher education: How does peer review work? What kinds of criteria are most valued across disciplines—for instance, philosophy and economics versus history and anthropology? How do universities assess what research is significant? I spoke to members of peer review panels and looked at the formal criteria that were used by universities such as originality, but also investigated various forms of diversity: ethnicity, type of institution (e.g. liberal colleges, top research universities) and geographic diversity."