Tag Archives: Economics

The Social Acceptance of Inequality: On the Logics of a More Unequal World

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Duina, Francesco and Luca Storti, eds. 2025. The Social Acceptance of Inequality: On the Logics of a More Unequal World: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 12/12/2025 (https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197814499.001.0001).

The world has staggering levels of inequality. Most people worry about this. Some, however, accept or even approve of those inequalities. Why? The Social Acceptance of Inequality offers the first comprehensive analysis of the logics people use in support of economic inequalities. Turning to case studies from across the globe, it examines four primary logics. Market and economic logics see people accept and even approve of economic inequalities because of the positive material outcomes for societies with which they are purportedly associated. Moral logics see people thinking of inequalities as fair according to “higher” or ethical principles, such as meritocracy. When relying on cultural and institutional logics, people view economic inequalities as consistent with established or emerging outlooks, policies, or organizational arrangements. Using group and ethnic logics, people justify inequalities on the basis of hierarchical distinctions between “superior” and “inferior” collectivities. These logics do not exist in isolation: They often interact with each other and inevitably function in particular political, economic, and cultural contexts. With contributors from across the world and the social sciences, evidence comes from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Attention goes not only to those in positions of privilege but also to those in vulnerable positions who, despite their conditions, look favorably on inequalities. With original analyses employing a wealth of methodological approaches, The Social Acceptance of Inequality offers a compelling investigation of the logics of acceptance, their variations and intersections, and how we may move toward a less unequal world.

Managing Corporate Virtue: The Politics of Workplace Diversity

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Bereni, Laure. 2025. Managing Corporate Virtue: The Politics of Workplace Diversity in New
York and Paris: Oxford University Press.

A major tenet of contemporary capitalism holds that what is good for
business can align with what is good for society. Efforts toward more
diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces epitomize this rising
ideology, termed responsible capitalism. An increasingly common
managerial mantra is “diversity means business.” But how does it play
out in the daily life of organizations? Drawing on interviews with
diversity managers, a historical review of practitioner literature, and
observations from organizations in New York City and Paris,
Managing Corporate Virtue goes beyond the rhetoric of diversity
initiatives to uncover the concrete challenges faced by those tasked
with implementing them. This book reveals the persistent fragility of
diversity efforts, which are often sidelined; subject to the variations of the legal, social, and
political environment; and require constant efforts to sustain managerial support. Practitioners
must prove their programs are neither merely virtue signaling nor the Trojan horse of political,
legal, or moral pressures that would unsettle the corporate order. Ultimately, by exploring the
day-to-day work of diversity managers in the United States and France, the book exposes the
contradictions lurking beneath the neoliberal promise of harmony between profit and virtue.

Class, the welfare state, and redistributive attitudes: A methodological Intervention

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Melcher, C. R., van der Naald, J., Torres, C., & Lindsay, S. C. (2025). Class, the welfare state, and redistributive attitudes: A methodological Intervention. The Social Science Journal, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2025.2582481

Prior research has found that measures of welfare state generosity and social class are, at best, unevenly related to individual redistributive attitudes. We suggest that these uneven relationships are at least partially due to a methodological misspecification prevalent in much of the existing literature, as well as a theoretical shortcoming of the rational choice assumptions undergirding the supposed link between economic self-interest and redistributive attitudes. Using a cross-national sample and multi-level modeling, we illustrate that the effect of income on subjective perceptions of economic well-being differs greatly depending on the generosity of the welfare state. Individuals perceive their class position differently depending on the welfare state context. Thus, we argue that the welfare state moderates the effect of class on redistributive attitudes, not just mediates it, as much of the existing literature assumes. We illustrate this moderating effect systematically using a battery of redistributive attitudes.

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From Equality to Economic Development: Culture, Intersectionality, and Justifications for Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy in the United States, 1973–1988

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Gracia J Lee, From Equality to Economic Development: Culture, Intersectionality, and Justifications for Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy in the United States, 1973–1988, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2025;, jxaf012, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxaf012

This article examines the discursive strategies underpinning advocacy for women’s entrepreneurship policy in the United States between 1973 and 1988. It demonstrates a shift in policy justifications from equality to economic development leading up to the passage of the Women’s Business Ownership Act in 1988. This discursive shift shows how women evoked the cultural ideas of gender sameness and equal opportunity, yet their claims were further shaped by the masculine logics of small business, policy changes, and pushback against affirmative action in the 1980s. Bridging ideas from the civil rights, anti-poverty, and women’s movements in the United States and abroad, advocates also addressed the problems and interests of intersectionally marginalized poor mothers and Black women, alongside middle-class White women. The case of women entrepreneurs thus highlights the need for attention to the interplay between cultural ideas, the sociopolitical context, and intersectional dynamics when analyzing gender as a political category.

Through the Prism of Community Development: Decolonization and the Cold War Politics of Agrarian Modernization in East Pakistan

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Hussain, M. (2025). Through the Prism of Community Development: Decolonization and the Cold War Politics of Agrarian Modernization in East Pakistan. Social Science History, 49(4), 883–907. doi:10.1017/ssh.2025.21

With the Cold War’s epicenter shifting from Europe to the Third World, the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy concerns of containing the Soviet bloc were tied to questions of socioeconomic development. Besides “trade and aid,” the appeal of this shift rested on the apparent complementarity between ideas of rural modernization and the practices of agrarian democracy. “Community development” referred to a series of projects initiated by the Ford Foundation and postcolonial governments toward this cultural-political end. This article examines the contested meanings, practices, and outcomes of such a project in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Drawing on the project’s archives and published sources, it addresses how and why a disjuncture between the political-societal aspirations of decolonization and the hardening Manicheanism of Cold War competition came to characterize the contested trajectory of this project. As its proponents and detractors negotiated competing expectations, inter-regional tensions, and geostrategic interests, this disjuncture gave way to a developmental ideology envisioned around the technocratic nodes of population control and food production. Consequently, the supposed complementarity between “agrarian democracy” and modernization was relegated to the margins of developmental thinking, even as growing rural unrest and Cold War realpolitik propelled its need for legitimizing new claims on political power. The prism of community development enables a novel analysis of the conjunctural dynamics of mid-twentieth-century decolonization and the contingencies of Cold War politics of agrarian modernization.