GSOC 5118: Social Inequality
Fall 2012
Tuesday 4-5:50
6 E. 16th St. Room 906
Professor Robin Wagner-Pacifici
wagnerpr@newschool.edu
Office: 6 E. 16th St. 922
Office hours: Tuesdays 2-4 or by appointment
Course Overview: This course will examine social inequality in all of its
manifestations and will pose the question of what it means to fare well or to fare
badly in societies in which work, property, bodies and minds are differentially
valued and rewarded. Readings, films, and images presented in the course focus on
our contemporary society as well as extend historically and cross-culturally. The
course takes a phenomenological approach. The goal is to understand social
inequalities from the inside, through experience, rather than from the outside, predetermined by conventional labels, such as class, race, and gender, even as these
concepts inevitably structure much of the assigned research.
Students are required to: a) complete all required readings prior to each meeting;
b) write three memos (3-5 pages) discussing and analyzing the readings, and c) take
turns organizing and leading the discussions. The final assignment is to write a
theoretically informed, empirical paper or an empirically relevant theoretical paper
demonstrating a deep working understanding of the readings and themes of the
course. On the 7th week you will have to submit a short proposal in which you
outline the paper-idea; on the 10th week, you will provide an outline of the paper
you write, and schedule a meeting with me to discuss it. Final Papers will be due at
the end of the 16th week. We will arrange the sequence of class discussion leaders
during our first meeting.
A course works best when all participants come to every class meeting having
completed the assigned reading and having thought about the reading in order to
discuss it. I believe in staying close to the text and would ask that comments (both
appreciative and critical) refer to specific passages and sections in the books and
articles. Books listed below have been ordered at Barnes and Noble bookstore and
are also on reserve through the library system. All other readings are either on
Blackboard. Please let me know immediately if you have difficulty getting access to
the reading.
Books ordered at 18th St. Barnes and Noble
Stigma, Erving Goffman, Simon and Schuster, 1986.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, Frederick Douglas. Yale University Press,
2001.
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton, Signet Classics, 2000.
Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, Mary Pattillo, University
of Chicago Press, 2008.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF INEQUALITY
The phenomenological approach to inequality. Inequality or stratification; identities or
identifications; nature or culture; essence or context.
August 28 – Introduction to the premise and structure of the course. Review of the
syllabus and presentation of course requirements. Classical statements on inequality.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Book 1, Part 1, “Destiny.”
Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” and “Wage Labour and Capital.” Both
of these readings can be found in The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert Tucker, Ed. NB:
1972 Edition.
Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, “Some Principles of Stratification,” in Class, Status
and Power, Eds. Bendix and Lipset NB do not refer to the 1st Edition of this book.
September 4- Updating essential inequality concepts and variables: race, class, ethnicity.
Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality Chapter 1, “Of Essences and Bonds.”
Peter Wade, “Human Nature and Race,” Anthropological Theory, Vol. 4(2): 157-172.
Jiannbin Lee Shiao, Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer, and Daniel Selvig, “The Genomic
Challenge to the Social Construction of Race,” Sociological Theory 2012 30: 67-88.
September 11 –Updating concepts and variables (continued).
Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System, Ch. 5.
Randall Collins, “Situational Stratification,” Chapter 7 in Interaction Ritual Chains.
Kim Weeden and David Grusky, “The Three Worlds of Inequality,” American Journal of
Sociology May 2012, Vol. 117, No. 6, pp. 1723-1785.
Recommended:
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond “identity”” in Theory and Society 29,
2000.
THE AXIS OF WORK
September 18: Attaining Work – Access and Obstacles
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, Chapter 2 “The Social Space and its Transformations.”
Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality, Chapter 2, “From Transactions to Structures.”
No class September 25 – Yom Kippur
October 2
William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears, selected chapters.
Deirdre Royster, Race and the Invisible Hand, selected chapters.
Alair MacLean, “The Things They Carry: Combat, Disability, and Unemployment among
U.S. Men,” American Sociological Review 2010 75: 563-586
Recommended: John Berger, A Seventh Man
Loic Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘race question’ in
the US,” New Left Review 13, Jan/Feb 2002, pp. 41-60.
October 9: At the Workplace
Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality, Chapter 3, “How Categories Work.”
Joan Scott, “The Sears Case,” Chapter 8 in Gender and the Politics of History.
Beth A. Bechky, “Object Lessons: Workplace Artifacts as Representations of
Occupational Jurisdiction,” American Journal of Sociology, 100, No. 3 (November
2003): 720-52.
Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Factory, Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
Vincent Roscigno, Steven Lopez, and Randy Hodson, “Supervisory Bullying, Status
Inequalities and Organizational Context,” Social Forces 87(3), March 2009.
Recommended:
Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions, Chapters 2 and 5.
Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the
Twentieth Century.
David Halle, America’s Working Man, Part 2, Chapter 4, “An Automated Plant:
Overview,” and Part 3, Chapter 7 “Occupational Mobility and Security.”
October 16: The Home and the Street as Workplace
Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century
Economic Thought,” Signs, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 463-484.
Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Introduction, and Chs.
4 and 5.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, Chapter 2.
Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk, Introduction and Part 1 (up to page 111) and 231-252.
Clip from documentary film, Sidewalk, Mitch Duneier.
Recommended: Heidi Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and
Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” Signs 6, #3 (Spring, 1981).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, Chapters 1 and 6.
THE AXIS OF PROPERTY
October 23: What it Means to Own
Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in From Max Weber, Gerth and Mills, Eds.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Selected chapters.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, Introduction and Part 1, “A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste,” pp.xi - 96.
Recommended:
Frederick F. Wherry, “The Social Characterization of Price: The Fool, the Faithful, the
Frivolous, and the Frugal,” Sociological Theory 26:4 December 2008.
October 30: Possession Strategies and Boundaries
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Antoine Hennion, “Those Things that Hold us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Cultural
Sociology, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2007.
Rachel Sherman, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press, 2007. Chapter 6.
Recommended:
Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase.
November 6
Stephen Thernstrom, “Class and Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City: A Study of
Unskilled Laborers,” in Class, Status and Power, Bendix and Lipset, Eds
Evan McKenzie, Privatopia, Chapters 2 and 3.
Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block. Chapters 2,5, and 6.
Recommended:
Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality, Chapter 5, “How to Hoard Opportunities.”
November 13: Dispossession and Being Owned
Frederick Douglas, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas.
Jacob S. Rugh and Douglas S. Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American
Foreclosure Crisis,” American Sociological Review, 2010, 75(5) 629-651.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, Chapter 7, “The Choice of the Necessary,” pp.372-396.
Recommended:
Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature, pp. 38-50.
THE AXIS OF THE BODY
November 20: Constructed, Evaluated, and Medicalized Bodies
John Berger, “The Suit and the Photograph,” in About Looking
In-class: Michael Frisch, Portraits In Steel, with photographer Milton Rogovin. Cornell
University Press. 1993.
Erving Goffman, Stigma
Abigail Saguy and Anna Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,” Social
Psychology Quarterly 2011 74:53-76.
Recommended:
James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, Chapter 5, “Technowar
at Ground Level: Search and Destroy as Assembly Line,” pp.93-154.
Miriam Ticktin, “Where ethics and politics meet: the violence of humanitarianism in
France,” American Ethnologist, Volume 33, No. 1, February, 2006.
November 27: Engendered and Raced Bodies
“Pumping Iron, Part II: The Women” film
“The Miss Soviet Union Contest,” in-class film.
Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur
Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” in Feminist Studies
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Chapter 2, pp.36-64.
Edward Shorter, A History of Women’s Bodies, Chapters 2-4, 7, 9,11
Rene Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Agencies, Sperm Banks and the
Medical Market in Genetic Material,” American Sociological Review 2007 72:319-340.
Recommended:
Mary Poovey, “Scenes of an Indelicate Character: The Medical Treatment of Victorian
Women,” Representations, 14, Spring 1986, pp.137-168.
Carol Cohn, with Felicity Hill and Sara Ruddick, “The Relevance of Gender for
Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction,” The Weapons of Mass Destruction
Commission
Troy Duster, “Buried Alive: The Concept of Race in Science.” In Genetic
Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two-Culture Divide, Ed. Alan
Goodman, Deborah Heath, and Susan Lindee
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and
Abolition,” in Representations 24, Fall 1988, pp.28-59.
THE AXIS OF THE MIND
December 4: The Configuration of Intelligence and Prestige
Steven J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, selected chapters
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: intelligence and class structure
in America, chapters 13, 14, and 15. Response by Stephen Jay Gould.
“Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke” transcript of Supreme Court hearing
in, May it Please the Court.
Recommended: Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Chapters 1 and 4
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, selected chapter
Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, pp.98-130.
December 11: Knowledge as Capital
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, Chapter 8, “Culture and Politics,” and Conclusion “Classes
and Classification”.
Randall Collins, The Credential Society, Chapters 5 and 7.
Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission, chapters 1, 4, and 16.
“Grutter v Bollinger,” and “Gratz and Hamacher v Bollinger,” transcript of Supreme
Court oral arguments
Recommended:
Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber
Steven Brint, In An Age of Experts, Chapter 7, “The Influence of Policy Experts”
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College
Campuses, chapters 1 and 3.