With the latest data on income, wealth, earnings, and residential segregation by income, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, Tenth Edition describes a consistent pattern of growing inequality in the United States since the early 1970s. Focusing on the socioeconomic core of the American class system, author Dennis L. Gilbert examines how changes in the economy, family life, globalization, and politics are contributing to increasing class inequality. New to this Edition “The Class Basis of Trump's Victory” looks at why for the first time since before the 1932 election, the Republican presidential candidate won a greater proportion of the working class vote than the Democratic opponent. Addresses the role of technology and other factors in the decline of manufacturing employment and how the trend is crucial for understanding growing inequality and changes in working class family life. Offers international comparisons to show how the U.S. compares with other wealthy nations on social mobility and poverty, and questions our conception of the U.S. as a uniquely open society.

How inequality was forged, fought over, and forgotten through public policy in metropolitan Chicago. As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies. In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland’s established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.

This book contends that conventional class concepts are not able to adequately capture social inequality and socio-cultural differentiation in Africa. Earlier empirical findings concerning ethnicity, neo-traditional authorities, patron-client relations, lifestyles, gender, social networks, informal social security, and even the older debate on class in Africa, have provided evidence that class concepts do not apply; yet these findings have mostly been ignored. For an analysis of the social structures and persisting extreme inequality in African societies – and in other societies of the world – we need to go beyond class, consider the empirical realities and provincialise our conventional theories. This book develops a new framework for the analysis of social structure based on empirical findings and more nuanced approaches, including livelihood analysis and intersectionality, and will be useful for students and scholars in African studies and development studies, sociology, social anthropology, political science and geography.

Beyond the commonplace inequalities that many minoritized youth face in the United States, the post-Trump contemporary moment has created rampant racialized material and symbolic violence occurring against Latinx, immigrant and undocumented immigrant communities, Asian American, and African American populations. Race Frames in Education advances the conversation about racial equity in educational contexts with a unique analysis centered on the concept of racial projects—a way of thinking not only about systems of racial domination and subjugation, but also of resistance. Chapter authors center racial analyses across multiple educational and community-based settings to underscore how racial projects advance equity or reproduce inequality. This much-needed anthology addresses a pressing issue in society: how to center race and expose systemic racism in order to transform communities, schooling, and educational policies. It challenges White dominance in education and social policy and practice in order to understand the material effects of race, racism, and White supremacist logic on minoritized populations. Contributors: Jeremy Acree, Felicia Arriaga, Jorge Ballinas, Socorro E. Cambero, Gilberto Q. Conchas, Victor Dealba, Sarah Diem, Eric Felix, Joy Howard, Marina Lambrinou, Ruth Lopez, Enrique Ochoa, Gilda L. Ochoa, Leticia Oseguera, Katherine Rodela, Sophia Rodriguez, Rhianna Thomas, Adrian Trinidad, Kindel Turner-Nash, Sarah Walters

This book explores how the recent restructuring of farming and industry has affected economic and social equality in the United States. The author explains how the farm sector has undergone a dramatic restructuring with profound effects. Moderate-size family farms, the mainstay of American agriculture, have declined during the postwar period and are now under severe financial stress. Large-scale industrialized farms -- "the factories in the field," often run by corporations -- continue to expand their share of agricultural sales while small farms operated on a part-time basis appear to be replacing traditional family farming. Lobao shows that public concern about farm restructuring is indeed warranted and that the nation now appears to be losing its most beneficial farms as well as industries. While local and regional social and economic forces and state policy can be brought to bear on these trends, Lobao particulary focuses on how community empowerment and broad-based political coalitions offer the most promise for fundamental change.

The international sociological community has engaged recently in a controversial discussion on social inequality. There is a vigourous debate on whether the traditional concepts of social class and social stratification are still useful. Some researchers argue that social classes still offer a key explanation to social inequalities while others challenge the long-standing tradition of class analysis. New approaches have been proposed to describe recent social changes in the stratification system: vanishing middle class, two-thirds societies, cosmographic inequality, and classless society, among others.