Understanding Social Inequality

Butler and Watt′s book is a timely call to social scientists to refocus attention on inequality and particularly on class...The book is a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding literature on social inequality in the Western nations and will help to reinstate class as a key interpretive concept in sociological analysis. --JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL WELFARE
Moving beyond the traditional dichotomies of social theory, Understanding Social Inequality brings the study of social stratification and inequality into the 21st century. Starting with the widely agreed "fact" that the world is becoming more unequal, this book pulls together the "identity of displacement" in sociology and the "spaces of flow" of geography to show how place has become an increasingly important focus for understanding new trends in social inequality.

Understanding Social Inequality charts a path through current debates and issues that studies of social inequality cannot afford to ignore, linking the study of social and class inequality to: recent theories and theorists, such as poststructuralism and Pierre Bourdieu; new social groups, from successful middle-class gentrifiers to the "working poor"; space, place and new forms of mobility and immobility; and the increasingly globalized nature of social inequality.

Accessible and engagingly written, this book stimulates the "sociological imagination", prompting readers to link personal experiences and public issues.