Social Inequality, Stratification and Mobility

The course aims at introducing students to the study of a central topic in social sciences, namely social stratification, inequality and mobility. The main theories explaining stratification and inequality will be reviewed, as well as how inequality shows up in everyday life as concerns its main dimensions (symbolic, economic, related to power) and how it changes over time.
The main goals then are: analyze the social structure as segmented by classes, social status, ethnicity, gender, age; understand how the three fundamental resources (power, prestige and privilege) are distributed among groups and individuals, and how this unequal distribution is legitimated, naturalized and maintained; detect when and how inequality is the outcome of discrimination; examine the social structure as resulting from these processes from both a macro and a micro standing. In addition, students will learn the main approaches to the study of social mobility, ie. how the social structure changes, when analysed in terms of class or strata, designing either an open or a rigidly structured society, in which individuals and groups may move more or less freely within the social structure.

By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and outline the main dimensions of social inequality, to choose the relevant indicators (either social class schema, like the EGP or Wright's, or prestige/status scales), to distinguish inequality from discrimination, to outline the fundamental features of the latter phenomenon in contemporary societies, particularly with respect to gender and ethnicity. Students will also be able to critically consider the various explanation of inequality by identifying the scientific paradigm that originated them. They will also master the empirical analysis of social mobility, both in absolute terms (via inflow and outflow tables) and in relative terms (via odds ratios), also in a comparative setting.