Institutions and Actors in the Creation of Social Inequality: A Rational Choice Approach to Inequality

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 12. Occupations and Inequality

Abstract

Although specialists in the study of social stratification and mobility emphasize class reproduction, not a few people enter social classes different from their original classes. This occurs by two factors: structural changes and agency of actors. For example, the number of professional positions in children’s generation is larger than that in parents’ generation because of occupational and industrial changes. It is true that many children from professional class got newly created professional positions, but children from other classes also got them by studying very hard and attained higher education. They used their agency in response to the structural changes. This paper proposes a new theoretical framework to clearly understand the relationship between structure and agency in the creation of social inequality. To do that this paper follows three steps. First, it is pointed out that there are two types of inequality: inequality created by institutions and self-organizing inequality. The former is inequality created by structure, while the latter is created by agency. Second, the model of relative risk aversion proposed by Breen and Goldthorpe is revisited. I show that their model is a classic example of the interaction of the two types of inequality. Finally, I propose a general theoretical framework with which we clearly understand the interaction. The framework is based on Coleman’s scheme of the micro-macro linkage and demonstrates how prior institutions create inequality among actors, how actors rationally react to the inequality, and how their reactions accumulate to the macro level and create new social inequality.

Author

• Yoshimichi Sato, Tohoku University