1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Inequalities and the Life Course
Drawing upon perspectives from across the globe and employing an interdisciplinary life course approach, this handbook explores the production and reproduction of different types of inequality across a variety of social contexts.
Inequalities are not static, easily measurable, and essentially quantifiable circumstances of life. They are processes which impact on individuals throughout the life course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing, or distorting themselves along the way. The chapters in this handbook examine various types of inequality, such as economic, gender, racial, and ethnic inequalities, and analyse how these inequalities manifest themselves within different aspects of society, including health, education, and the family, at multiple levels and dimensions. The handbook also tackles the global COVID-19 pandemic and its striking impact on the production and intensification of inequalities.
The interdisciplinary life course approach utilised in this handbook combines quantitative and qualitative methods to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer strategies and principles for identifying and tackling issues of inequality. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding and eradicating the processes of production, reproduction, and perpetuation of inequalities.
Section 1– Inequality as process
Introduction - Doing Inequalities over the life course
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
- Inequality across time: social change, biography and the life course
- Poverty and economic insecurity in the life course
- Inequality as process
- Life course inequality and policy: a focus on child well-being
- Studying social inequality over the life course in modern societies. The methodological importance of life course studies
- The analysis of inequality in life trajectories: an integration of two approaches
- Evolution of COVID-19 lethality and geographically contrasting socio-economic factors in Brazil: a multilevel perspective
- Health inequalities across the life course: theories, statistical pitfalls, and the possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Mental health inequalities
- How an analysis of lifespan inequality can contribute to our understanding of life course inequalities
- Two centuries of inequalities: disability and partnership in Sweden
- The Covid-19 pandemic: inequalities and the life course
- Concepts of social stratification—static and dynamic perspectives
- Optimising the use of measures of social stratification in research with intersectional and longitudinal analytical priorities
- Stagnation and inequality in a historical view: a comment on Piketty's analysis of capitalism and the Portuguese case
- Things can’t only get better: inequality and democracy over a life-span
- Expansion and improved permeability of post-secondary education in Germany: consequences for social inequalities in educational attainment
- Educational expansion across cohorts and over the life course: an international comparison of (rapid) educational expansion and the consequences of the differentiation of tertiary education
- Class in successive life courses in Britain since 1945
- Mapping young Norwegians’ self-projects and future orientations
- Care inequality in later life in ageing societies: the unequal distribution of the intensity of informal support in Europe
- The apple, the tree and the forest: family histories as radars of social mobility and inequalities
- Family formation and social inequalities. A life course perspective
- Farewell’s children: using the life course perspective to understand female late fertility Rosalina Pisco Costa
- The mutual constitution of gendered and sexualised inequalities in life courses
- Gender trajectories and the production of inequalities from a life course perspective
- Inequalities in work and the intersectional life course
- LGBTIQ+ life course inequalities and queer temporalities
- The centrality of race to inequality across the world-system
- A life course approach to understanding ethnic health inequalities in later life: an example using the United Kingdom as national context
- The inequalities of empire: comparative perspectives
- How the COVID-19 pandemic is shifting the migrant-inequality narrative
Dale Dannefer, Chengming Han, and Jiao Yu
Leen Vandecasteele, Dario Spini, Nicolas Sommet, and Felix Bühlmann
Elisabetta Ruspini
Gary Pollock, Jessica Ozan, and Haridhan Goswami
Section 2– Assessing inequalities: complementary methods
Introduction - Imagining the understanding of inequalities
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
Gwendolin J. Blossfeld and Hans-Peter Blossfeld
Danilo Bolano and André Berchtold
Joseph F. Hair, Jr, Luiz Paulo Fávero, and Rafael de Freitas Souza
Fabian Kratz
Section 3 – The social stratification of health
Introduction - The inherent longitudinality of health inequalities
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
Jane D. McLeod and Max E. Coleman
Alyson van Raalte
Lotta Vikström, Kateryna Karhina, and Johan Junkka
Richard A. Settersten, Jr., Laura Bernardi, Juho Härkönen, Toni C. Antonucci, Pearl A. Dykstra, Jutta Heckhausen, Diana Kuh, Karl Ulrich Mayer, Phyllis Moen, Jeylan T. Mortimer, Clara H. Mulder, Timothy M. Smeeding, Tanja Van Der Lippe, Gunhild O. Hagestad, Martin Kohli, René Levy, Ingrid Schoon, and Elizabeth Thomson
Section 4 – Economic and wealth inequalities
Introduction - The challenge of complexity in the analysis of economic inequalities
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
Steffen Hillmert
Paul Lambert and Camilla Barnett
Francisco Louçã
Kevin Albertson and Richard Whittle
Section 5 – Youth, education and transition to adulthood
Introduction - Half way down the stairs – somewhere else instead
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
Nicole Tieben and Daniela Rohrbach-Schmidt
Pia Blossfeld, Gwendolin J. Blossfeld, and Hans-Peter Blossfeld
Ken Roberts
Ingunn Marie Eriksen and Kari Stefansen
Section 6 – Family and linked lives
Introduction - Families at the heart of linked (lives and) inequalities
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
Marco Albertini and Riccardo Prandini
Magda Nico and Maria Gilvania Valdivino Silva
Stefano Cantalini
Section 7 – Gender inequalities
Introduction - Gender inequalities: time-varying and trajectories
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
José Fernando Serrano-Amaya
Sofia Aboim and Pedro Vasconcelos
Phyllis Moen and Mahala Miller
Maria do Mar Varela and Yener Bayramoğlu
Section 8 – Racial and ethnic inequalities
Introduction - The weight of structure on the skin
Magda Nico and Gary Pollock
Manuela Boatca
Sarah Stopforth, Laia Bécares, James Nazroo, and Dharmi Kapadia
Cátia Antunes and Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Ferdinand C. Mukumbang
Biography
Magda Nico is a Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-ISCTE) and Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Research Methods at ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon. She is currently coordinating a project on the importance and dynamics of ‘linked lives’ within families. Her research interests include life course theory and methods, family histories, social mobility, and the processes of inequalities.
Gary Pollock is Professor of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He currently coordinates the European Research Council-funded Cohort Community Research and Development Infrastructure Network for Access Throughout Europe (COORDINATE) project and has previously led the European Cohort Development (EDCP) and Measuring Youth Well-Being (MYWEB) projects. His research interests include the design and analysis of survey data on children and young people and their life trajectories, particularly using longitudinal techniques.
