300090 Inequality and Asymmetrical Dependency: A Global Perspective (S) (WiSe 2021/2022)

The seminar will analyze the emergence and function of societal inequality in premodern and modern societies from a historical and comparative perspective. It will look at premodern societies that have a strong preference for institutionalized inequalities as basic building blocks of the structure of society. Then, at the beginning of modernity in the eighteenth century, there is a preference shift from inequality to equality. However, in the functionally differentiated society of the modern world, new inequalities arise in all the function systems of society. We will study inequalities of wealth and income, education, work, and other societal resources. The seminar will search for causal mechanisms producing inequality and it will look at poverty and exclusion as the most extreme versions of modern inequality. Secondly, we will explore the link from inequality to asymmetrical dependencies. The preference shift from dependence to freedom/independence is another of the dramatic transformations at the beginning of modernity. The seminar will identify systematic origins of strong dependencies in modern world society, and it will study the forms of ‘modern slavery’ that emerge in the present-day world although slavery has everywhere been ‘abolished’ at some point in the 19th century. The last meeting will look at a third split in the structure of society. The third promise of modernity besides equality and freedom was the promise of solidarity and universal brotherhood. This promise is revoked by sociocultural polarizations that internal to countries and regions separate populations and groups that in processes of polarization opt for observing one another as strangers. Reciprocal strangerhood is a strong form of societal division.

1 (October 19) Equality and Inequality in Modern Society: The Perspective of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann
Parsons, Talcott, Equality and Inequality in Modern Society, or Social Stratification Revisited, 1977
Luhmann, Niklas, Zum Begriff der sozialen Klasse, 1985

2 (October 26) Estate, Caste, Class, Strata: The Inequalities of the Early Modern World and Modern Continuities of these Structures
Toennies, Ferdinand, Stände und Klassen, in: Handwörterbuch der Soziologie, 1931
Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus, 1970
Tilly, Charles, Durable Inequality, 1998

3 (November 2) Biological Inequality and Inequalities in Hunter/Gatherer Societies
Boehm, Christoph, Ancestral Hierarchy and Conflict, Science 336, 2012, 844-847
Pringle, Heather, The ancient roots of the 1%, Science 344,, 2014, 822-5
Hayden, Brian, Social Complexity, in: The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter Gatherers, 2014
Smith, Eric Alden/Codding, Brian F., Ecological Variation and Institutionalized Inequality in Hunter/Gatherer Societies, PNAS 2021

4 (November 9) Economic Inequality from the 19th to 21st Century and the Contribution of Education to Inequality
Milanovic, Branko, Global Inequality, 2016
Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the 21st Century, 2017
Atkinson, Anthony B., Inequality: What Can Be Done, 2015
Goldin, Claudia/Katz, Lawrence F., The Race between Education and Technology, 2008

5 (November 16) The Future of Work, Technological Change and its Relation to Inequality
Autor, David H., Work of the Past, Work of the Future, AEA Papers and Proceedings 109, 2019, 1-32
Autor, David H./Dorn, David/Hanson, Gordon, When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men, 2018
Kalleberg, Arne L., Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, 2011

6 (November 23) Mechanisms of Inequality: Cumulative Advantage, Path Dependencies, Preferential Attachment, Status Hierarchies
DiPrete, Thomas A./Eirich, Gregory M., Cumulative Advantage as a Mechanism for Inequality, Annual Review of Sociology 32, 2006, 271-297
Gould, Roger V., The Origins of Status Hierarchies: A Formal Theory and Empirical Test, American Journal of Sociology 107,5, 1143-1178
Merton, Robert K., The Matthew Effect in Science II: Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property, Isis 79, 4, 1988, 606-623

7 (November 30) Poverty and Exclusion
Banerjee, Abhijit V./Duflo, Esther, The Economic Lives of the Poor, Journ of Economic Perspectives 21, 2007, 141-167
Parker, Ian, The Poverty Lab, The New Yorker, May 10, 2010
Stichweh, Rudolf, Leitgesichtspunkte einer Soziologie der Inklusion und Exklusion, in; Stichweh/Windolf, Inklusion und Exklusion, 2009

8 (December 7) Asymmetrical Dependencies in Modern Society and the Emergence of
Modern Slavery
Coleman, James S., The Asymmetric Society, 1982
Emerson, Richard M., Power-Dependence relations, American Sociological Review 27, 1962, 31-41
Casciaro, T./Piskorski, M.J., Power Imbalance, Mutual Dependence and Constraint Absorption, Administrative Science Quarterly 50, 2005, 167-199
O’Connell Davidson, Julia, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom, 2015
Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death, 1982/2018
Roberts, Neil, Freedom as Marronage, 2015

9 (December 14) Sociocultural Polarization
Stichweh, Rudolf, How Do Divided Societies Come About? Persistent Inequalities, Pervasive Asymmetrical Dependencies and Sociocultural Polarization as Divisive Forces in Contemporary Societies, Global Perspectives (Los Angeles), 2021
Klein, Ezra, Why We’re Polarized, 2020
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, 2016