The study of inequality has been at the core of sociology since its inception. In fact, we trace this scholarship back before sociology was a discipline. Stratification, which indicates that society is divided into unequal groups, has received much attention, as has the concept, social inequality, which suggests that there is more than one axis upon which society is divided. Sociologists are concerned not only with describing these social divisions, but with explaining the mechanisms through which inequalities are produced, maintained and reproduced. Scholars in this field use a diverse range of methodologies and theories.
Although this topic is far too broad to cover comprehensively in one semester, this course will provide its participants with an overview of the theoretical and empirical developments in this body of scholarly work. We will focus first on theories that seek to explain inequality and debates about how to conceptualize and measure inequality. We will then turn to a handful of social processes and institutions that have been shown to produce inequality. As most of the work in this field has limited its focus to inequality within a society or nation-state, the bulk of the course presents material from this point of view. However, we end the course with a discussion of global inequality, which has brought a new set of questions to this discussion.