Social Inequality, Conflict and Integration

From their beginnings, social sciences had modern forms of inequality at the center of their problematic: their reproduction mechanisms, their cleavage and/or impact on symbolic life, their inner relation with economic change and development, all these are central issues of social research. Yet while all of the forefathers of sociology thoroughly reflected on the conflictive or disintegrating potential of structured inequalities, dominant approaches in the past century progressively dealt with inequality as a rather technical problem of distribution. Paradoxically, the growing acceptance of inequality as a problem per se paved the way for an abandonment of the questions on its link with social integration (be it moral, normative, political, etc.) and conflict: an abandonment only revoked in the last decades.

Such questions have returned even broader, though. Does inequality actually tension social integration in any way? Does social conflict, even if as potency, necessarily emerge from structured inequalities? Or do reproduction mechanisms solve these issues entirely? These problems do not seem as trivial as they did once. Social sciences face the problem, thus, of how and when do inequalities lead to social tensions and threaten the social fabric. What inequalities, in what contexts? “Through” what actors, and leading to what?

This module shall discuss specific problems on the general implications of inequality, and its relation with social tension and cohesion. Young scholars dealing with research problems related to inequality, social conflict, integration and/or social mobilization are particularly encouraged to participate. Particularly, we want to engage with the thorny conceptual and epistemological questions which emerge when we relate actors’ positions and social structures, at one side, with their actions and orientations at the other. Central concepts such as class, interest, or legitimacy, shall be (re)examined and critically evaluated. Finally, the problematic links between structures, individual and collective action, and policy, all present a particularly complex problem of micro-macro linkage and causality. In the panel, participants will have the opportunity to discuss these and related questions in the frame of their own research projects.