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Beyond class and nation: Individualization and transnationalization of social inequalities
Abstract
Individualization theory has been understood as a way of challenging the common paradigms within the studies of social inequality. This shift also addresses how the transnationalization of social inequalities challenges and alters the given framework of institutional settings - nation state (parties), trade unions, welfare state systems and the national sociologies of social inequalities. In this essay I will test the ′cosmopolitan perspective′ and how it relates to social inequality focusing on three cases: (1) the inequality of global risk; (2) the European dynamics of inequality; and (3) transnational inequalities, which emerge from the capacities and resources to transcend borders. Before that I will tackle the questions: What exactly constitutes individualization and to what extent is it displacing class structures?
... The mentioned problems are embedded in a current period of social change that has led sociologists like Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Manuel Castells or Zygmunt Bauman to develop narratives resembling very much the classic authors of sociology, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber in their attempt to understand and explain large scale processes, who did the same between the mid-19 th and the early 20 th century. Beck (1986) coined the term "Second modernity" for the ongoing changes to highlight their structural comparability with the great changes that shook Western societies on their way to modernity -or better: to what had used to be called modernity, namely the institutions of industrial society perceived as breathtakingly modern in the 1950s when comparing to the 1830s, which look so depressingly traditional when judged from today's view. ...
... ch. 5;Beck 2008) This process has large positive, liberating implications. And due to institutional persistencies, for some years its seemed as if one could have both, individualization and the old partitioning institutions. ...
The first decades of the 21st century see a world in crisis not less than the early 20th century did. Sociology describes a ’second modernity’ emerging, and a loss of institutional performance and legitimacy, globalizations, social inequalities, economic crises, political violence and terrorism in times of hugely shifting global resource distributions are much the same in both century starts. Behind this similarity, this paper sees one common cause: The Europe of Western Christianity had a specific ‘groups under roofs’ structure that partitioned individuals but linked them as groups in open instutional structures. This model was especially successful and spread its heritage in the form of partitioning forms of democracy across the globe. But partitioning democracy is successful only in ‘groups under roofs’ societies, and hence it did not properly work outside the West, and does neither work on the global level nor in contemporary individualized Western societies. An adequate problem solution capacity can only be (re-)gained with Civil democracy that stores and uses trust not in the form of one-every-four-years ballot mark, but in a (not necessarily but adequately IT-based) system that allows for the flexible storage of trust relations to diverse kind of civil society actors and the support of direct democratic decision making as the norm. As systemic solution, Civil democracy demands a social movement for its realization.
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag systematisiert Kriterien, mittels derer die - nach wie vor umstrittene - Individualisierungsthese nach Ulrich Beck bislang empirisch überprüft wurde und diskutiert, wie diese zu bewerten sind. Zu diesem Zweck werden fünf Kriterien vorgestellt und anschließend unter theoretischen und empirisch-konzeptionellen Aspekten auf ihre Zweckmäßigkeit für die Überprüfung von Individualisierungsprozessen hin diskutiert. Ein zentrales Ergebnis lautet, dass insbesondere solche Kriterien wenig zweckmäßig sind, die sich allein auf die Freisetzungsdimension der Individualisierungsdiagnose richten. Folglich ist ein komplexerer Ansatz der empirischen Überprüfung anzustreben, wozu der Beitrag heuristische Orientierungen anbietet.
The opinion about the internationalization and transnationalization of classes and elites is deeply divided. This article deals with such query on the basis of an empirical study about the nationality and the careers of top managers from economically most powerful European (Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain) and non-European countries (China, Japan and USA). The findings are evident. Only every twentieth top manager is of foreign origin and only every fourth local top manager has ever studied or worked, abroad. More than two years, even just one out of seven local top managers has lived abroad. Even just one out of seven local top managers has lived abroad for more than two years. The main reason for this is the hegemony of traditional national career types. The inter-and transnationalization of the business elites proceeds a lot more slowly than many sociologists and economists suppose. But there are great differences between the several countries. The process is most advanced in Germany and Great Britain. In France by contrast, it even reverses in the younger generation.
Globalization is changing the way we argue about justice. Arguments that used to focus chiefly on the question of what is owed as a matter of justice to community members now turn quickly into disputes about who should count as a member and which is the relevant community. Not only the substance of justice but also the frame is in dispute. The result is a major challenge to our theories of social justice, which have so far failed to develop conceptual resources for reflecting on the question of the frame. The article argues that in order to deal satisfactorily with this problem, the theory of justice must become three-dimensional, incorporating the political dimension of representation, alongside the economic dimension of distribution and the cultural dimension of recognition.
The individualization of risk is alleged to have generated a rise in flexible and insecure forms of non-standard employment, which in turn create 'new inequalities and insecurities' that permeate all social groups. Using longitudinal data from the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (1993-98), this study empirically assesses this claim by examining the levels of insecurity, composition and voluntary nature of jobs with irregular work times. The institutional structures of the individualist employment and liberal welfare regimes and education system are considered as important filters. Findings demonstrate that we have not entered a 'post-class' society, but that established inequality structures of social class, gender, and minority status persist. Jobs with irregular shifts have an internal hierarchy that produce different levels of economic, employment relation and social integration insecurity. The majority of youth in these jobs face higher insecurity and view non-standard shifts as involuntary, supporting the notion that risk is increasingly shifted from the state or firm to the individual. The broader implications for social life are then considered followed by the discussion of whether these are 'stop-gap' jobs or the creation of a 'precarious proletariat'.
Based on retrospective data from the ‘Socio-Economic Panel’ (SOEP), this paper deals with changes in the labour-force courses of West German men and women. Reformulating parts of the ‘individualization thesis’—widely discussed in German sociology—in terms of observable (dis-)continuities in the life-course, it concentrates on sequences of positions inside and outside the active labour-force. Using indicators for stability and heterogeneity and a typology of gender-specific labour-force courses, we find extraordinarily high amounts of stability and low heterogeneity in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the 1970s, there was decreasing stability and increasing variation, especially for the younger men, which breaks the dominance of the ‘normal male labour-force course’. The 1970s and 1980s seem to mark a new period of de-standardization and ‘stabilization of instabilities’ on the female side, too, because similar tendencies of less stability and more heterogeneity are found within the younger cohorts of women. But there is also a growing importance of continuous labour-market sequences amongst the younger women, perhaps leading to a sharper ‘polarization’ between family- and work-orientated life courses.
Individualization is often considered to be one of the most important social-cultural trends of the last decades. According to authors such as Ulrich Beck, Scott Lash and Anthony Giddens, it is one of the defining characteristics of late or `reflexive' modernity. However, there is not much empirical research on the phenomenon of individualization. This article examines the empirical evidence for a trend of individualization in the Netherlands. Three alleged consequences of the individualization process, namely detraditionalization, emancipation and heterogenization, are analysed using Dutch data. Only the hypothesis of detraditionalization is confirmed by the data. The emancipation hypothesis is, however, unambiguously refuted by the available data, while the data are not conclusive with respect to heterogenization. Hence, the empirical support for the individualization trend is much weaker than is often supposed.
It has been argued that social class, if not dead, is at least a 'zombie category' in contemporary Western society. However, epidemiological evidence shows that class-based inequalities have either persisted or widened, despite overall improvements in the health of Western populations. This article presents an exploratory qualitative study of the individualization of class identity and health conducted in a southern English city. Findings are presented in consideration of two competing argumentative positions around which participants worked to negotiate class identity and health. The first of these positions denied the significance of class for identity and health and was associated with the individualised heroic and stoic narratives of working class identity. The second position acknowledged the reality of class relations and their implications for health and identity, being associated with structurally and politically orientated narratives of middle class identity. In sum, resistance to class was associated with talk about individual, private experience whereas the acceptance of class was linked to discussion of health as a wider social or political phenomenon. This evidence lends qualified support to the individualization thesis: inequalities in health existing on structural or material levels are not simply reproduced, and indeed in some contexts may even juxtapose, accounts of social identity in interview and focus group contexts. Class identity and health are negotiated in lay talk as participants shift argumentatively back and forth between competing positions, and public and private realms, in the attempt to make sense of health and illness. The promotion of greater awareness and interest in health inequalities within wider public discourse may well help support attempts to tackle these injustices.