ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines the more contemporary explanations for social inequality, focusing on broader or more generalized frameworks. Contemporary theorists build on or borrow from each of these perspectives, recognizing the importance of the large-scale structural factors identified by the classical theorists, but probing further about how these factors intersect with culture, interactional processes, individual identities, and definitions of self. One of the more enduring arguments, stemming largely from Durkheim’s work, is the idea that inequality is inevitable in any organized society due to individual differences in training and talent. Societies differ in their stratification systems because they contain different conditions that affect either one or both of the principal determinants of ranking—that is, either functional importance or scarcity. The cultural resources provide not only the framework for justifying the inequality, but they ensure that these inequalities are reproduced in the next generation.