Introduction

This chapter discusses the relations between social structures, sociocultures, and social inequality in order to gain insights into social ontologies. Social structure describes the manifestation of social inequality in contemporary life-worlds. Global inequality is only one of the most pressing social issues of the 21st century, but also a topic increasingly addressed in the social sciences. The concept intends to cover the social dimensions of the ontological, as well as the ontological dimension of the social. It looks the ontological givenness of certain forms of collectivity in everyday life, but also at the practical meaningfulness of ontologically different forms of collectivity, within and between contemporary social configurations.