concepts developed and the politics of plural societies. We have no intention of resolving this problem in summary fashion. As a result, the next chapter is devoted in its entirety to an analysis of politics in the plural society using the tools and language of this chapter. 58. E. E. Schattschneider, \"Intensity, Visability, Direction and Scope,\" American Political Science Review 51, no. 3 (September 1957): 933-42 (quotation at p. 937).

Politics in plural societies : a theory of democratic instability

Study Guide Preface and Acknowledgments Part I: Introduction The Past, Present, and Future of Social Inequality (David B. Grusky) Part II: Forms and Sources of Stratification The Functions of Stratification Some Principles of Stratification (Kingsley Davis & Wilbert E. Moore) The Dysfunctions of Stratification Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis (Melvin M. Tumin) Inequality by Design (Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martn Snchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss) Concluding Commentary to Part Two New Light on Old Issues: The Relevance of "Really Existing Socialist Societies" for Stratification Theory (Gerhard Lenski) Part III: The Structure of Modern Stratification Theories of Class Marx and Post-Marxists Alienation and Social Classes (Karl Marx) Classes in Capitalism and Pre-Capitalism (Karl Marx) Ideology and Class (Karl Marx) Value and Surplus Value (Karl Marx) Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Ralf Dahrendorf) Varieties of Marxist Conceptions of Class Structure (Erik Olin Wright) A General Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure (Erik Olin Wright) Class Conflict in the Capitalist World Economy (Immanuel Wallerstein) Weber and Post-Weberians Class, Status, Party (Max Weber) Status Groups and Classes (Max Weber) Open and Closed Relationships (Max Weber) The Rationalization of Education and Training (Max Weber) The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (Anthony Giddens) Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (Frank Parkin) Durkheim and Post-Durkheimians The Division of Labor in Society (Emile Durkheim) Are There Big Social Classes? (David B. Grusky and Jesper B. Srensen ) The Ruling Class and Elites Cassic Statements The Ruling Class (Gaetano Mosca) The Power Elite (C. Wright Mills) Elites and Power (Anthony Giddens) Contemporary Elites in "Mass Society," Capitalism, and Post-Capitalism The Political Class in the Age of Mass Society: Collectivistic Liberalism and Social Democracy (Edward A. Shils) The Inner Circle (Michael Useem) Post-Communist Managerialism

Social stratification :class, race, and gender in sociologicalperspective

“Quietly dazzling. . . . In this gripping account of welfare’s postcolonial history, Jordanna Bailkin throws the archives wide open and invites us to walk through them with new eyes—and with renewed appreciation for the intimate connections between empire and metropole in the making of contemporary Britain. The Afterlife of Empire challenges us to reimagine how we think and teach the twentieth century in Britain and beyond.” Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “A brilliant contribution to the history of twentieth-century Britain. It does what no other book has done: narrating the end of empire and the rise of the postwar welfare state together, while placing the stories of ordinary people—children, adolescents, parents, husbands, and wives—at the heart of this account. With this book, Bailkin transforms our understanding of how some of the most critical issues of twentieth-century British history were not just perceived, but lived.” stephen j. brooke, York University The Afterlife of Empire investigates how decolonization transformed British society in the 1950s and 1960s. Although usually charted through diplomatic details, the empire’s collapse was also a personal process that altered everyday life, restructuring routines and social interactions. Using a vast array of recently declassified sources, Jordanna Bailkin recasts the genealogy and geography of welfare by charting its unseen dependence on the end of empire, and illuminates the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial. Jordanna Bailkin is Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professor of History and Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Washington. Berkeley Series in British Studies, 4

/pdf/the-afterlife-of-empire-17w2hdv191.pdf

The Afterlife of Empire

According to system justification theory, people are motivated to defend and legitimize social systems that affect them. In this chapter, we review fifteen years of theory and empirical research bearing on the motivational underpinnings of system justification processes. We begin by explaining why people are motivated to system justify (i.e., it serves certain social and psychological needs). We then describe five lines of evidence that corroborate the motivational claims of system justification theorists. Specifically, we find that (1) Individual differences in self-deception and ideological motivation are linked to system justification; (2) System threat elicits defensive responses on behalf of the system; (3) People engage in biased information-processing in favor of system-serving conclusions; (4) System justification processes exhibits properties of goal pursuit; and (5) The desire to legitimize the system inspires greater behavioral effort. We conclude by discussing the implications of a motivational approach for understanding conditions that foster resistance to vs. support for social change. System Justification is Motivated 1 System Justification: How Do We Know It’s Motivated? In her Ontario Symposium chapter on “The Tolerance of Injustice” Joanne Martin (1986, p. 217) raised a fundamental question: Why do “people who are clearly in a disadvantaged position— such as the poor, the underpaid, and victims of discrimination—often tolerate situations that seem unjust to an outside observer?” Variations of this question are at the core of theory and research by historians, social scientists, and particularly social psychologists, including Deutsch (1974), Lerner (1980), Crosby (1984), Tyler and McGraw (1986), Major (1994), Sidanius and Pratto (1999), and Olson and Hafer (2001). Our work on system justification as a motivated, goal-directed process follows very much in their footsteps. History reveals a staggering number of instances of decent people (as well as indecent people) not merely passively accepting—but sometimes even actively justifying and rationalizing— social systems that are seen as extremely unjust by outsiders, often in retrospect. The caste system in India has survived largely intact for 3,000 years, with 150 million Indians to this day declared “Untouchables” (Ghose, 2003). The institution of slavery survived for more than 400 years in Europe and the Americas. Colonialism was also practiced for centuries and still is in some places (as is slavery), and the apartheid system in South Africa lasted for 46 years. These social systems were (or still are) bolstered by motivated social cognition through the use of stereotypes, rationalizations, ideologies, and legitimizing myths (e.g., Faust, 1981; Frederickson, 2002; Jackman, 1994; Jost & Hamilton, 2005; Kay, Jost, et al., 2007; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). That is, there are profound psychological factors that motivate individuals to accept, even support, the existing social system, even if that system entails substantial costs and relatively few benefits for them individually and for the community as a whole (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004). Despite being the wealthiest society in history, the United States is a country in which 37 million citizens (approximately 12.6% of the population) are living in poverty (USA Today, 2006). Poverty rates for Blacks and Latinos in the United States are near to one in four (National Index of Violence and Harm, 2007). At the same time, the combined net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans exceeds 1 trillion dollars (Mishel, Bernstein, & Allegretta, 2005), with C.E.O.’s today earning approximately 500 times the salary of their average employee, up from a factor of 85 just one decade ago (Stiglitz, 2004). Theories of motivation that stress self-interest, identity politics, and the thirst for justice would likely predict that these facts would elicit widespread protest, rebellion, and moral outrage on the part of the disadvantaged. For instance, Gurr (1970) summarized his prominent theory of relative deprivation this way: “[M]en are quick to aspire beyond their social means and quick to anger when those means prove inadequate, but slow to accept their limitations” (p. 58). More recently, Simon and Klandermans (2001) argued that, “Feelings of illegitimate inequality or injustice typically result when social comparisons reveal that one’s ingroup is worse off than relevant out-groups” (p. 324). However, “quickness to anger” in economic and other spheres occurs more rarely than one would expect, and the “sense of injustice” is surprisingly difficult to awaken (Deutsch, 1974). Despite the fact that most Americans explicitly espouse egalitarian ideals, public opinion polls show that a strong majority perceives their economic system as fair and legitimate (Jost, Blount, Pfeffer, & Hunyady, 2003, pp. 55-57). In one particularly dramatic example, more than 80% of survey respondents belonging to the poorest economic classification endorsed the belief that “large income differences are necessary to get people to work hard” (Jost, Pelham, Sheldon, & Sullivan, 2003, p. 24). Those few who do campaign for social and economic change are, generally speaking, not the ones who would benefit the most from it, and they are frequently subjected to at least some degree of resentment and disapproval for their efforts (e.g., Diekman & Goodfriend, 2007; see also Frank, 2004; Kaiser, Dyrenforth, & Hagiwara, 2006; Rudman & Fairchild, 2004 for evidence of “backlash System Justification is Motivated 2 effects” against those who criticize or otherwise threaten the status quo). Moral outrage, in other words, is often more easily directed at those who dare to challenge the system than at those who are responsible for its failings. The poet, W.H. Auden (1939/1977), exercised considerable social psychological insight into this phenomenon when he wrote that: There is a merciful mechanism in the human mind that prevents one from knowing how unhappy one is. One only realizes it if the unhappiness passes, and then one wonders how on earth one was ever able to stand it. If the factory workers once got out of factory life for six months, there would be a revolution such as the world has never seen. (p. 402) This mechanism—like rationalization in general—is indeed merciful in certain psychological respects, because it helps people cope with and adapt to realities, including unwelcome realities (e.g., Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Jost & Hunyady, 2002, 2005; Kay, Jimenez, & Jost, 2002; Lyubomisky & Ross, 1999; McGuire & McGuire, 1991; O’Brien & Major, 2005; Pyszczynski, 1982; Taylor & Brown, 1988). But it is also potentially costly at the societal level, insofar as it undermines the motivation to push for progress and social change (Wakslak, Jost, Tyler, & Chen, 2007). The goal of this chapter is to shed light on the motivational dynamics underlying system justification tendencies in order to better understand some of the psychological obstacles to social innovation, system change, and the attainment of justice-related goals. Stalking the “Merciful Mechanism” We have, in essence, been stalking Auden’s “merciful” mechanism for nearly 15 years now and, if nothing else, we have given it a name: “system justification” (Jost & Banaji, 1994). Specifically, we have argued that in addition to well-known motives for ego and group justification that are assumed to serve personal and collective self-esteem and interests, people are also motivated to defend, bolster, and rationalize the social systems that affect them—to see the status quo as good, fair, legitimate, and desirable (Jost et al., 2004; Jost, Burgess, & Mosso, 2001; Kay, Jost, et al., 2007). System justification theory does not suggest that people always perceive the status quo as completely fair and just; as with other motives (including ego and group justification motives), the strength of system justification motives is expected to vary considerably across individuals, groups, and situations. In short, we are merely suggesting that people are prone to emphasize their system’s virtues, downplay its vices, and consequently see the societal status quo as better and more just than it actually is (Jost & Hunyady, 2005). 1 System justification theory bears some resemblance to just world theory (Lerner, 1980), which posits that people are motivated to believe that we live in an orderly, predictable, and just world in which people get what they deserve. Although many consequences of system justification and the belief in a just world are the same, the underlying motives are theorized to be somewhat different. Whereas just world theory concerns the desire for actual justice (i.e., the justice motive), system justification theory concerns the desire for the perception (or appearance) of justice (i.e., the justification motive). According to Lerner’s (1980) theory, people will only attempt to justify unjust outcomes when they are unable to engage in behaviors that would restore it directly. In theory, then, people who strongly endorse the belief in a just world should, whenever possible, choose more just alternatives to the status quo. By contrast, people who strongly endorse system-justifying belief systems are likely to support even an unjust status quo and to derogate potential

System justification: How do we know it’s motivated?

The term ‘identity’ tends to have positive connotations. This article presents an example of a lethal form of identity politics, where self-expression was not possible for victims or victimizers. A...

Philip Mason

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