A Sense of Inequality [Hardcover]

We have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts peoples lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes peoples everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice?

This book considers what provokes everyday views or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as class, gender, racial or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.

In this fascinating monograph, Bottero (Univ. of Manchester, UK) provides a detailed review and critical assessment of the social processes involved in the toleration, acceptance, condemnation, and resistance to inequality. Offering a wide-ranging overview of the topic, this book serves as an in-depth exercise in the social psychology of inequality, probing the propagandistic, affective, and pragmatic dynamics that make revolutions rare but not unthinkable. Undertaking an extensive analysis of previous major works on the subject, Bottero actively engages with the questions and answers that shaped the field. Acknowledging the importance of the symbolic legitimation of inequality, she argues that people are not ignorant of social relations, nor hoodwinked by the powers that be, so much as constrained by the realistic practices of their everyday lives. Her argument is compelling, wl3$