This talk is an introduction to relational inequality theory (RIT), with applications to linked employer-employee data sources. RIT makes the following assertions: Resources, like money, jobs and dignity, are generated in organizations. Actors make claims on those resources. Some people are denied access to organizational resources through processes of social exclusion and social closure. Others appropriate resources based on their ability to exploit weaker actors in interactional and exchange relationships. Actors are more or less powerful in these claims-making processes, and this relational power tends to be associated with categorical distinctions such as class, occupation, gender, education, citizenship, race and the like. Institutions and organizational fields influence, but do not determine, action and opportunities. Rather, actors use cultural and other tools to devise local strategies of action.
“Building on Tilly’s Durable Inequality, this book offers an ambitious framework for a sociology of inequality anchored in organizations. Focused on exploitation and exclusion, the authors complement some of the main analytical strands in current sociology and economics of inequality. Their contributions to the comparative analysis of contexts and social processes is bold and daring. Their multi-level analysis will certainly be debated in sociology and beyond.”
– Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
The event is organized by Are Skeie Hermansen as part of Young CAS Fellow 2019/2020, with financial support from the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and in collaboration with the Young Academy of Norway (AYF).