Political Sociology and the People's Health [Hardcover]

A social epidemiologist looks at health inequalities in terms of the upstream factors that produced them. A political sociologist sees these same inequalities as products of institutions that unequally allocate power and social goods. Neither is wrong -- but can the two talk to one another?

In a stirring new synthesis,Political Sociology and the People's Healthadvances the debate over social inequalities in health by offering a new set of provocative hypotheses around how health is distributed in and across populations. It joins political sociology's macroscopic insights into social policy, labor markets, and the racialized and gendered state with social epidemiology's conceptualizations and measurements of populations, etiologic periods, and distributions.

The result is a major leap forward in how we understand the relationships between institutions and inequalities -- and essential reading for those in public health, sociology, and beyond.

Acknowledgements

Foreword: For the People's Health - Why this Book Series of Small Books with Big Ideas?
Nancy Krieger

Introduction: Political Sociology & Social Epidemiology

1. Key Concepts, Measures, & Data

2. New Questions & Answers about Embodied Social Inequalities

3. Scientific Challenges to Engaging Political Sociology & Social Epidemiology

Bibliography

Index

If the goal of the book was to present big ideas in a small package, it undoubtedly succeeds ... this book is destined to be a key text for students of health disparities. --Population and Development Review

Jason Beckfieldis Professor and Chair of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. He conducts inter-disciplinary research on how institutional arrangements -- the rules of the game that organize power in social life -- structure inequality, including the gl-