Durable Inequality

Durable Inequality

Center for Studies of Social Change
New School for Social Research

November, 1995

These are edited versions of the Irene Flecknoe Ross Lectures at the University of California, October-November 1995. I am grateful to William Roy for organizing my participation in the lectures, Robert Emerson for presiding over them, and the UCLA audience for searching questions. Thanks also to Arthur Stinchcombe for his permission to quote from a semi-published paper that he never bothered to republish, and to Viviana Zelizer for editorial counsel. I have adapted some material in the lectures from my "Stratification and Inequality," in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History (New York: Garland, 1994), "The Weight of the Past on North American Immigration," Research Paper 189, Centre of Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, 1994, and "Social Movements and (All Sorts Of) Other Political Interactions - Local, National, and International - Including Identities: Several Divagations From a Common Path, Beginning With British Struggles Over Catholic Emancipation, 1780-1829, and Ending With Contemporary Nationalism," Working Paper 207, Center for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research, 1995. I have also drawn ideas and materials from Capitalist Work and Labor Markets, by Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, a book in progress for Westview Press.

Contents:

Lecture 1. Of Essences and Bonds
Lecture 2. From Transactions to Structures
Lecture 3. Accumulated (Dis)Advantage
Lecture 4. Forms of Inequality
References

1. Of Essences and Bonds

We could reasonably call James Gillray (1757-1815) Britain's first professional cartoonist (George 1967: 57; Hill 1976). He left us unforgettabel images of public and private affairs under George III. Very few handsome people figure in Gillray's caricatures. In the savage portrayals of British life he drew, etched, and colored toward 1800, beefy, red-faced aristocrats commonly tower over other people, while paupers almost invariably appear as small, gaunt, and gnarled. If Gillray painted his compatriots with malice, however, he also observed them acutely.

Take the matter of height. Let us consider fourteen-year-old entrants to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst to represent the healthier portion of aristocracy and gentry, fourteen-year-old recruits for naval service via London's Marine Society to represent the healthier portion of the city's jobless poor. At the 19th century's start, poor boys of fourteen averaged about 4 feet 3 inches tall, aristocrats and gentry of the same age about 5 feet 1 inch (Floud, Wachter & Gregory 1990: 197; for the history of the Marine Society as an aristocratic benefaction, see Colley 1992: 91-93). An average beginning military cadet stood some ten inches taller than a newly-recruited mariner. Because poor youths then matured later than rich ones, their heights converged an inch or two by adulthood. Nevertheless we can imagine their counterparts in the army: aristocratic officers glowering down half a foot or more at their plebeian troops. Such an image gives meaning to the phrases "high and mighty," "haughty," and "look down on someone."

Poor people have few good times. But the years around 1800 brought low-income families especially bad times. In the short run, massive diversion of resources and manpower to French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars depleted domestic production and drove up consumer prices. Over the longer run, the urbanization, industrialization, and sharpened inequality promoted by capitalist expansion were then aggravating hardships of Western Europe's poorer households. As they left production of their own food faster than agricultural productivity rose, hardship extended to their daily bread.

In this Nobel Prize lecture, economist and economic historian Robert Fogel points out that at nutritional levels prevailing toward the end of the 18th century, in England and France from 3 to 10 percent of the workforce had too little food for sustenance of any effective work at all, while a full fifth of the population commanded too little for more than a few hours of light work per day (Fogel 1994: 371-374). At those low nutritional levels, furthermore, English and French workers were extremely vulnerable to chronic disease, hence liable to worklives disrupted by illness and early death. Fogel speculates that malnutrition itself thereby accounted for the stunning proportions of beggars - up to 20 percent of the entire population - reported in various regions of 18th century Europe.

Over population categories, regions, and countries, as Fogel and other researchers have recently established, material well-being and stature vary in strong relation to each other (Floud, Wachter & Gregory 1990, Fogel 1993, 1994, Komlos 1987, 1990, 1994). Well-being and height link through food consumption; victuals invigorate. Although genes set variable limits to height distributions in human populations, childhood nutrition strongly affects the degree to which any individual approaches her or his genetic limit. Low birth weight, which typically results from a mother's illness and malnutrition, predicts reliably to a child's health problems, diminished life expectancy, and smaller adult size.

Within a given population, furthermore, short stature itself generally predicts to higher levels of morbidity and mortality - most likely not because of height's inherent advantages but because on the whole short stature correlates with unfavorable childhood health experiences and lesser body strength. Rising height across an entire population therefore provides one of our clearest signs that its well-being is increasing, marked adult height differentials by social category within the male or female population a strong indicator of durable inequality. That average heights of adults in western countries have typically risen six inches or so over the last century and a half reflects a significant rise in living standards. That at my modest altitude I easily see over heads of many adult males with whom I travel on New York subways - especially those speaking languages other than English - suggests that in capitalist countries we still have profound inequalities of life experience to identify and explain.

Since sexual dimorphism prevails among primates and since humans commonly live in mixed-sex households whose members share food, one might suppose that female-male height differences differ from class inequalities in deriving almost entirely from genetic predisposition. Not quite. Nature and nurture do disentangle with difficulty when it comes to such matters as sex differences in body size. As James Tanner puts it:

... variation between the heights of individuals within a subpopulation is indeed largely dependent on differences in their genetic endowment; but the variation between the means of groups of individuals (at least within an ethnically homogeneous population) reflects the cumulative nutritional, hygienic, disease, and stress experience of each of the groups. In the language of analysis of variance, most of the within-group variation is due to heredity, and most of the between-group variation is due to childhood environment (Tanner 1994: 1).

For "group", read "category", then recognize that class, gender, race, ethnicity, and similar socially-organized systems of distrinction clearly qualify. (I will follow current conventions by speaking of "sex" in reference to X and Y chromosome-linked biological differences, "gender" in reference to social categories.) In each of these cases, differences in "nutritional, hygiene, disease, and stress experience" contribute to differences in adult stature. Researchers in the field have so far done much more with class differences, national differences, and change over time than with male/female differences.

Still, gender may constitute a category marking distinctive childhood experiences, even when it comes to nutrition. We have enough episodic documentation concerning gender discrimination with respect to health care, feeding, infanticide, and general nurture, as well as slivers of evidence suggesting gender-differential patterns of improvement or decline in nutrition under the influence of broad economic fluctuations to support hypotheses of widespread unequal treatment of males and females, of inequality in their resulting life chances, hence of a social contribution to gender differences in weight and height as well. If the contemporary United States seems to have passed the food-supply threshold below which most households make regular if implicit choices concerning who of their members will have adequate nourishment, the hungry world as a whole still features gender discrimination in nutrition.

Here Fogel's line of investigation crosses the inquiries of Amartya Sen (Sen 1981, 1982, 1983, 1992). From his analyses of poverty and famine onward, Sen has sniffed out voluntarily unequal treatment in the presence of resources that could assure more general welfare, including the establishment of gender-differentiated claims on such resources. "There is a lot of indirect evidence," he comments, "of differential treatment of women and men, and particularly of girls vis-à-vis boys, in many parts of the world, e.g. among rural families in Asia and North Africa. The observed morbidity and mortality rates frequently reflect differential female deprivation of extraordinary proportions" (Sen 1992: 123). The most dramatic observations concern female infanticide through direct attack or (more often) systematic neglect, which analysts have frequently reported for strongly patrilineal regions of Asia (Johnsson & Nygren 1991, Langford & Story 1993, Lee, Campbell & Tan 1992, Lee, Feng & Campbell 1994, Muhuri & Preston 1991, Yi et al. 1993).

People of western countries have not much practiced selective female infanticide. But western states have often reinforced gender distinctions in nutrition and nurture, notably by confining military service to males, diverting food stocks from civilian to military use, providing superior health care for troops, and assuring soldiers better rations than the general population. Florence Nightingale, after all, more or less invented professional nursing as we know it while organizing the health care of fighting men during the Crimean war. If military men at war have historically faced exceptional risks of violent death and disabling disease, in recent centuries they have also typically received three square meals a day when civilians, especially female civilians, were tightening their belts.

Such socially-organized differences in well-being illustrate the main subject of these lectures: the causes, uses, structures, and effects of categorical inequality. They will not ask "What causes human inequality in general?" but "How, why, and with what consequences do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life-chances distinguish members of different socially-defined categories of persons? How do categorical inequalities form, change, and disappear?" Let us concentrate, furthermore, on distinctly-bounded categories such as female/male, aristocrat/plebeian, citizen/foreigner, religious affiliation, ethnic origin, or race rather than continua such as rich/poor, tall/short, ugly/beautiful, and so on. Bounded categories deserve special attention both because they provide clearer evidence for the operation of durable inequality and because their boundaries do crucial organizational work.

My central argument, in fact, will run like this: durable inequality among categories arises because people who hold power in reward- and punishment-allocating organizations solve pressing organizational problems with the distinctions involved, and multiple parties - not all of them powerful - then acquire stakes in those solutions. Variation in the form and durability of inequality therefore depends chiefly on the nature of the organization(s) involved, previous social locations of the categories, character of the organizational problems, and configurations of interested parties.

Consider some quick examples. Stalin knits together an effective political machine by recruiting ethnically-identified regional leaders, training them in Moscow, making them regional party bosses, and giving their ethnic identifications priority within partly-autonomous political jurisdictions. When the center later relaxes its grip, political entrepreneurs within regions mobilize followings around those ethnic identities, others mobilize against them, and ostensibly age-old ethnic conflicts flame into civil war.

Again, the founder of a small manufacturing firm, following models already established in his trade, divides the firm's work into clusters of jobs he sees as distinct in character and qualifications, then recruits workers for those jobs within well-marked ategories. As turnover occurs and the firm expands, established workers pass word of available jobs among friends and relatives only to collaborate with them once they join the workforce, those new workers therefore prove more reliable and effective than others hired off the street, and all concerned come to associate job with category.

Another case in point. Householders in an urban neighborhood build up a precarious system of trust on the basis of common backgrounds and shared relations to third parties, live with persons and property at risk to that system of trust, then react violently when newcomers whom they cannot easily integrate into the same networks threaten to occupy part of the territory.

Members of an immigrant stream, finally, peddle craft goods from their home region on bigcity streets, some of them set up businesses as suppliers, manufacturers, or retail merchants, new immigrants (and, for that matter, migrants returning home) find work in the expanding trade, and not only an immigrant niche but an ethnically-specific international connection provides exclusive opportunities for the next generation. In all these cases, organizational improvisations lead to durable categorical inequality.

While feelings of identity, on one side, and intergroup hostility, on the other, may accompany, promote, or result from such organizational solutions, the relative prevalence of such attitudes plays a secondary part in inequality's extent and form. Or so I will argue. It follows that reduction or intensification of racist, sexist, or xenophobic attitudes will have relatively little impact on durable inequality in these respects, while the introduction of certain new organizational forms will have a large impact.

If so, the identification of such organizational forms becomes a significant challenge for social scientists. It also follows that similar organizational problems will generate parallel solutions in very different settings, in articulation with very different sets of categories, hence that matches of positions with categories and justifications for such matches will vary much more than recurrent structural arrangements - as when similar clusters of jobs acquire contrasting racial, ethnic, or gender identifications in different labor markets. Social scientists dealing with such durable forms of inequality must hack through dense ideological overgrowth to reach structural roots.

Within studies of gender discrimination, of race relations, of ethnicity, of class conflict, of citizenship such a structuralist argument has, of course, important precedents. UCLA's own faculty has contributed mightily to our understanding of structural inequality in each of these regards. I can't hope to teach Roger Waldinger about immigrant niches, Ruth Milkman about gender discrimination, Rogers Brubaker about ethnicity and citizenship, Melvin Oliver about racial divisions, or Ivan Szelenyi about politically-generated inequality. In each respect, the literature is vast, my expertise insufficient, evidence mixed, current controversy therefore intense.

My self-appointed task is instead to address troubles that emerge from the crossing of these literatures. Trouble begins when we try to synthesize understandings of these different kinds of inequality. Trouble comes in four packages. First, observers often ground explanations for each form of inequality separately in perennial but peculiar forces. If sexism springs from age-old patriarchy, racism from the heritage of slavery, denigration of non-citizens from state traditions, however, it is hard to see why mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in these regards have such striking resemblances.

Our second trouble comes from the weakness of all available explanations for interaction among various forms of categorical inequality. Despite illuminating analyses of ethnic niche-formation and variable principles of citizenship taken one at a time, no one has provided a compelling explanation for the simultaneous differentiation of jobs and entrepreneurial niches by gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship. What intersection of employers' and workers' preferences, for example, could explain sharp segregation in all these regards at once?

Trouble number three concerns transmission of categorical inequality to new members of the related categories. Do instantaneous configurations of interest or impulse that seem plausibly to account for short-run generation of inequality continue at work from one generation to the next, or do some other mechanisms congeal categories with unequal relations among them? In none of these well-documented fields do we have a convincing explanation of inherited inequality.

Finally, reliance in the last instance on shared interests, motivations, or attitudes as the causes of inegalitarian institutions also causes serious trouble. Resort to mental states as fundamental causes of inequality leaves mysterious by what cause-effect chains they actually produce the outcomes commonly attributed to them - especially considering how rarely we humans accomplish the precise ends we consciously pursue (Merton 1936). If collectively a whole population sustains a set of preferences simultaneously ordered by gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship, whose mental processes contain these preferences, how do they order the preferences, and what translates preferences into a wide range of structural inequalities?

Let us look more closely at the last difficulty, which besets much of today's social science. Most people seeking to explain social processes choose among three ontological foundations. First, methodological individualism presumes that social life results chiefly or exclusively from the actions of self-motivated, interest-seeking persons. Second, phenomenological individualism posits conscious minds as the ultimate social reality; with sufficient doubt about the possibility of reliable communication among minds phenomenological individualism becomes solipsism. Third, systems theories impute self-maintaining logics to social structures: groups, organizations, institutions, or that big, vague structure analysts call "society." Some theorists, to be sure, combine two of these foundations, as in Emile Durkheim's recurrent image of an individual face to face with a society or Alfred Marshall's representation of a calculating buyer or seller who confronts an impersonal market. Methodological individualism, phenomenological individualism, and systems theories all assume the existence of self-sustaining essences: individual, collective, or both.

A fourth possibility exists: relational models of social life beginning with interpersonal transactions, ties, or bonds. Since Charles Peirce and Georg Simmel relational models have haunted social science; phenomenological individualists such as George Herbert Mead who wanted to represent the effects of social interaction on consciousness and action have recurrently heard relational voices. These days the program of "structural sociology" as variously advocated by such theorists as Mark Granovetter, Alejandro Portes, and Harrison White most aggressively advances relational models. In economics, institutionalists also make allowances, generally more grudging, for relational effects (e.g. Akerlof 1984, Jacoby 1990, Lazonick 1991, North 1991, Osterman 1993, Simon 1991, Williamson 1991). In his Foundations of Social Theory (1990), the late James Coleman feinted repeatedly toward relational accounts of norms, commitments, and similar phenomena, but pulled his punches as they approached the target. His mathematical formulations tellingly portrayed a single actor's computations rather than interactions among persons.

Strongly relational analysis remains very much a minority movement in social science as a whole. Individualisms and holisms continue to reign. In the choice between essences and bonds, nevertheless, I come here to hold high the banner of bonds. More narrowly, I claim that an understanding of how transactions clump into social ties, social ties concatenate into networks, and existing networks constrain solutions of organizational problems clarifies the creation, maintenance, and change of categorical inequality. Although my concern about inequalities in contemporary capitalist countries - especially the United States - motivates my inquiry, instead of closing in immediately on today's inequalities I am pursuing an indirect strategy, stepping back from current American discussions of comparable worth, white racism, or immigrant/native differentials to place durable categorical inequality in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspective. A relational view identifies, I think, common causal mechanisms beneath the bewildering variety of concrete inequalities.

We began, for example, with stature and differential nutrition by category. One can, of course, construct essentialist accounts of the matter, instisting on the experience of individual metabolizing organisms. The superb work of Fogel and associates certainly depends on clear understanding of how individual bodies acquire, accumulate, and expend energy. Yet feeding, the crucial social process, is doubly relational: like the categorically-differentiated forms of money Viviana Zelizer has so dramatically brought to our attention, diets and manners of feeding vary systematically from one social category to the next, marking the boundaries between them (Zelizer 1994). They also depend on relations among members of distinct categories, as Marjorie DeVault has shown us in her analysis of women feeding men (DeVault 1991). Commensalism relates people, but also depends on strongly-structured relations among them.

Here, then, is my plan. The remainder of this lecture defines terms, then follows up the general distinction between "essence" and "bond" accounts of inequality. My second lecture takes us from transactions to labor markets. Lecture three discusses how disadvantages cumulate, but also how categorical inequalities change. In the final lecture, I inventory forms of inequality and their intersection.

Inequality in general consists of the uneven distribution of attributes among a set of social units: individuals, categories, groups, regions, or something else. Social scientists properly interest themselves especially in the uneven distribution of costs and benefits - goods, broadly defined. Relevant goods include not only wealth and income but also such various benefits and costs as control of land, exposure to illness, respect from other people, liability to military service, risk of homicide, possession of tools, and availability of sexual partners. Students of social inequality have paid little attention to uneven distribution of other attributes such as genetic traits and musical tastes except as they correlate with uneven distribution of goods in this broad sense.

Goods vary in the extent to which they are autonomous (observable without reference to outside units, as in accumulations of food) or relative (observable only in relation to other units, as in prestige). On the whole, inequalities with respect to autonomous goods reach greater extremes than with respect to relative goods. Here we will concentrate on autonomous goods, treating relative goods chiefly as they result from or contribute to inequality in autonomous goods.

Estimating inequality of any set of social units presents three major problems: to identify and bound the units under comparison, to weigh the importance of different goods, and to decide whether the weighted differences are "large" or "small." Generally speaking, all three judgments require a theory of the larger social structures in which the units are embedded. The difficulty compounds with the summary measurement of inequality and its changes among many units, for example (as in many analyses of long-term change) among all households in a national population or (as in many world-system analyses) among all the world's states. There analysts usually adopt two linked strategies: 1) choose a single criterion good (such as current income) they regard as correlating with a number of other inequalities, 2) compare the actual distribution of that good with a standard of absolutely equal distribution; such widely used devices as the Gini index and the Duncan dissimilarity index illustrate the combined strategy. Measurement problems matter crucially in empirical investigations of inequality, but these lectures will say little about measurement.

Although analysts sometimes apply the term loosely to all sorts of inequality, stratification designates the rare form of disparity that clusters social units by layers, or strata, which are homogeneous with respect to a wide range of goods (both autonomous and relative), and which occupy a single well-defined rank order. A true system of stratification resembles a pyramidal skyscraper, with its summit and base, its distinct levels, its elevators and stairways for movement from level to level, and its array of multiple graded niches.

Large organizations such as armies sometimes stratify internally: they create bands of homogeneous rank that reach across the whole organization, segregation among ranks, and rituals of succession from rank to rank. As a consequence, localities depending on large, stratified organizations (such as company towns and military bases) likewise fall into ranked strata. But no general population larger than a local community ever maintains a coherent system of stratification in a strong sense of the word; even the so-called caste system of India accomodated great variation in rank orders from village to village. In general, rank orders remain inconsistent, apparent strata contain considerable heterogeneity, and mobility blurs dividing lines. Stratification is therefore a matter of degree.

Inequality is likewise a matter of degree, but for the opposite reason - because it is ubiquitous. Whatever the criterion of equivalence, no two social units ever command precisely equivalent arrays of goods for more than an instant. Possession of different sorts of goods, furthermore, couples loosely enough that the same social unit moves in several directions simultaneously; inequality is always in flux. Any unified, fixed model of inequality - and, a fortiori, of stratification - we impose on social life caricatures a dynamic reality, etches a Gillray portrait of social interaction. As with other useful caricatures, then, the secret is to sketch a model that brings out salient features of its object, but never to confuse model with reality.

Since the later 19th century, individualistic models of inequality have crowded out categorical models. From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, classical economists generally analyzed categories and relations among them: chiefly land, labor, and capital for Smith, capital and labor alone for Marx. They examined, for example, returns to these factors considered collectively and situated socially rather than returns to individual effort. Discussing the wages of labor, for example, Smith reasoned:

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen (Smith 1910 [1776]: 1, 58-59).

Although Smith certainly saw market conditions - in this case, especially current rates of growth in demand for labor - as crucial to the advantage of one party or the other, he reasoned about categories, groups, institutions, and relations. Those relations emphatically included collective, categorical, unequal power.

The neoclassical revolution, however, diverted economic attention from categories to individuals and markets. On the assumption that the market itself operates impartially, since the later 19th century economists and their imitators explaining categorical phenomena have usually tried to reduce them to individual causes. It has become habitual: faced with male-female differences in wages, investigators look for average human-capital differences among the individuals involved. Encountering racial differences in job assignments, researchers ask whether across categories individuals distribute differently with respect to residential location. Uncovering evidence of sharp ethnic differences in industrial concentration, analysts only begin to speak of discrimination when they have factored out individual differences in education, work experience, or productivity.

These methodological precautions seem natural because of their familiarity, yet few students of social processes would employ logically similar procedures in trying to determine whether and why Jews and Catholics have differing views of divinity, whether some geographic boundary really separates French people from Spaniards, or why white South Africans, on average, enjoy much higher incomes than their black fellow-citizens. The presupposition that inequality results from individual-level variation prevails, at least in the world of work and labor markets.

One of my great teachers, I fear, introduced abiding mischief into sociological discussions of inequality and mobility. Pitirim Sorokin's Social Mobility, first published in 1927, popularized not only representations of inequality as stratification but also ideas of vertical and horizontal mobility. Sorokin said explicitly that "Social stratification means the differentiation of a given population into hierarchically superposed classes" (Sorokin 1959: 11). Stratification implies social strata: upper, middle, and lower, or some other bounded vertical division. Thus Sorokin committed his followers to the suppositions of continuous, consistent hierarchies transecting whole populations, of discrete individual locations within those hierarchies, and of well-marked boundaries between classes.

Summarizing the causes of stratification, furthermore, Sorokin gave them a distinctly individualistic cast:

first, the very fact of living together; second, innate differences of individuals, due to the differences in the complements of their chromosomes; third, differences in the environment in which individuals are placed since the moment of their conception (Sorokin 1959: 337).

Although the first cause, the "very fact of living together", sounds groupish, it turns out to consist for Sorokin of an inevitable division between (few) leaders and (many) led. Intergroup and interpersonal processes - of struggle, conquest, or otherwise - play no part.

Sorokin's analysis of vertical and horizontal mobility compounds the difficulty by fostering the illusion of a continuous, homogeneous two-dimensional grid within which individuals and aggregates of individuals occupy specific cells and move along geometric paths. The seductive spatial metaphor misleads analysts to the extent that inequality consists of organized relations among groups, categories, or individuals; that different forms of inequality order the same groups, categories, or individuals differently; that changes in patterns of inequality result from intergroup processes. Since all these conditions actually obtain, sociologists would have benefited if Sorokin had never mentioned vertical and horizontal mobility.

When they adopted status-attainment models of mobility and inequality, sociologists accentuated the shift from collective to individual effects. "In the most brilliant destructive paper in the history of sociology," Arthur Stinchcombe remarked some time ago,

Otis Dudley Duncan (1966) stopped research into the relation between the labor market in which fathers had attained their status and the labor market in which sons attained theirs. His solution to the difficulties of such analysis was to regard the father's achievement only as a feature of the biography of sons, to be related to other features of that biography (such as later status attainment by the son) by regression analysis or qualitative loglinear models for sons. This tradition has however given a very queer tone to the mobility literature, since it deliberately starts off by talking as if people promoted themselves instead of being promoted by employers, or as if failure and success in self-employment depended on fathers rather than on success in a modern market (Stinchcombe 1978: 1).

In an earlier review of the Christopher Jencks et al. Inequality (1972), Stinchcombe had made the essential distinction between two ways of representing inequality of paired persons: first as a difference in positions of the two individuals with respect to similar variables, second as a characteristic of the relationship between them. "The second kind of analysis," he then pointed out, "requires the comparison of social systems (at the very least, social systems containing the pair), since data on variables describing pairs cannot be derived from data on isolated individuals" (Stinchcombe 1972: 603).

Human capital theory offers a closely-related individualistic account of inequality, with the additional feature of radical depersonalization. In strict human-capital models, neither the worker nor the worker's effort earns the rewards of work; instead, previous investments in the quality of workers and effort command current returns. Again Stinchcombe's remark applies: such analyses rule out relations among workers or between bosses and workers, net of education and other individual experiences, as sources of inequality.

Individualistic analyses of inequality have all the attractions of neoclassical economics: nicely simplified geometric analogies, reassuring references to individual decision-making, insistence on efficiency, avoidance of inconvenient complications such as beliefs, passions, culture, and history. They fail, however, to the extent that essential causal business takes place within social relations among persons and set of persons. That extent is, I claim, very large. If so, we have no choice but to undertake relational analyses of inequality - whether or not we finally couple them to individualistic elements of relevant decision processes.

No doubt this way of putting it reminds you of the old saw about economics explaining how people's ordered choices produce collective effects and sociology explaining why people have no choices to make. But I will urge no such deterministic view; on the contrary, my account of inequality will build relentlessly on counterfactuals, on could-bes and might-have-beens. For social life in general, valid explanations proceed from specifications of possible configurations to specifications of circumstances differentiating those configurations from others that could, in principle, also form. My central counterfactuals will concern organizational problem-solving and collective acquisition of stakes in organizational arrangements.

Although it dovetails with abundant recent work by institutional economists and economic sociologists, even where it stands on solid logical and empirical ground my approach will encounter three significant barriers to acceptance. First, as institutional economists themselves have taught us, established solutions generally have the advantage over innovations in the short run because transaction costs of devising, perfecting, installing, teaching, and integrating new solutions to problems exceed costs of maintaining old ways, the more so to the extent that old ways articulate well with a wide range of adjacent beliefs and practices. As in organizational life, so in social science: the well-developed apparatus of individualistic analysis will not displace easily.

Second, and less obvious, the sort of relational analysis I am advocating clashes with the narrative mode in which people ordinarily think and speak about social processes. At least in western countries, early in life people learn to tell stories in which self-motivating actors firmly located in space and time produce all significant changes in the situation through their own efforts. Actors in narratives need not be rational or efficient, but their own orientations cause their actions. Narratives feature essences, not bonds. By-products of social interaction, tacit constraints, unintended consequences, indirect effects, incremental changes, and causal chains mediated by non-human environments play little or no part in customary narratives of social life. Relational analyses of ineqality affront narrative common sense by insisting that just such subtle ramifications of social interaction produce and sustain unequal relations among whole categories of persons.

Proximity of social-scientific analysis to moral discourse erects a third barrier to acceptance of relational explanations for inequality. In a narrative mode, social science closely approaches the prevailing discourse of morality, in which we judge intentions and actions of self-motivated individuals according to certain criteria of adequacy: goodness, fairness, authenticity, or something else. Every social-scientific narrative invades moral ground, a fact which helps account for the passion such narratives often stir in the hearts of people outside the profession.

Even non-narrative explanations for inequality, however, touch moral discourse. Doubly so, in fact: both because rejection of self-motivated actors as sufficient causes for social outcomes challenges standard premises of moral discourse and because relational analyses invoke counterfactuals. Counterfactuals say that other arrangements were, are, or will be possible, hence that present circumstances do not embody the best of all possible worlds.

In principle, the deployment of valid counterfactuals - valid in the sense that they incorporate causal sequences known to be possible - equips social scientists to criticize and compare moral doctrines, political programs, and ideologies very effectively. Every such doctrine includes assertions, implicit or explicit, of possible social conditions; most also include assertions concerning paths from the present state of affairs to those possible conditions. Those assertions invite social-scientific criticism and comparison. If a politician argues that we should exclude Asian and Latin American immigrants in order to improve the job prospects of existing American workers, social scientists may of course discuss the value premises of such a recommendation, but they have special expertise in examining the causal reasoning it involves.

By the same token, we can anticipate heated resistance to causal analyses, however well founded, that contradict the possibility arguments built into cherished doctrines. Here the second and third obstacles combine. For widely-accepted American moral, legal, and political doctrines enshrine the individual as conscious, responsible, efficacious agent of her own actions. Here, too, individualism reigns. Anyone who locates efficacious social action in the contract, not the signers, in the plot, not the players, in the conversation, not the speaker, invites intuitive rejection on behalf of cherished creeds. I therefore ask you to hear me out, follow my reasoning carefully, draw conclusions dispassionately before letting the intuitive implausibility of relational explanations cause their premature rejection. In return, I will do my best to make those explanations clear and compelling, then to hear objections you may raise.

I have undertaken my inquiry because I believe the intensity of American inequality causes unnecessary suffering and because - on the grounds I have just been identifying - social scientists can help discover means of alleviating inequality and its attendant suffering. Yet in these lectures I will not try to formulate remedies or to persuade you of their efficacy. If we can arrive together at a better understanding of causes, effects, and crucial questions yet to answer, we will accomplish all we can hope for in the brief time we have together.

2: From Transactions to Structures

My friends at Michigan's Survey Research Center would not have approved. Our rambunctious interview did not conform to professional standards. During the spring of 1988, Pierine Piras, Philippe Videlier, and I sat drinking coffee and nibbling cake in the living room of a modest Mamaroneck, New York house. Mamaroneck lies on Long Island Sound about twenty miles north of New York City. We were speaking with a man I'll call Franco Bossi, born in Roccasecca, Italy, not far from Rome, ninety-two years earlier.

Given our standard options of English, French, or Italian for the interview's language (none of us had mastered the dialect of Roccasecca), Mr. Bossi had chosen Italian. Mrs. Bossi, in her eighties, and their daughter Rosa, in her sixties, interrupted frequently to contradict, refresh, complete, or refine Mr. Bossi's recollections when they were not urging him to shift from his rusty Italian to his accented, ungrammatical, but fluent English. Mr. Bossi remembered the Mamaroneck of World War I era as very Italian:

Tutti qui, sto villagio dove stamo me now, tutti Italiani, Italiani, Italiani! La most part era Roccasecca. Tutte le zone...Siciliani...Calabresi assai, Calabresi assai...Napolitani...Down in Mamaroneck they use to call a "Guinea Town" because the Italians they calls the "guinea", it's a nickname.

As of the 1910 census, in fact, only about a sixth of Mamaroneck's population was Italian-born. In Washingtonville, the section of Mamaroneck away from the water on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, about a third of all households then had Italian-born heads. But teen-aged Franco Bossi, recently arrived from Roccasecca with his parents, surely lived in a much more Italian world than that.

Not that his parents had come straight from the old country. "I was not born yet, my father left my mother pregnant," reported Mr. Bossi,

he went to Brazil. It was a lot of people that say: "Let's go to Brazil! Let's go to Brazil!" A lot of work over there. So my father went there and all the day he picked coffee, bananas, all this stuff, rice, fruits, but the most were in Brazil for coffee. They must have been in the country, but I don't know the name, but that's where they grew coffee. He only stood one year over there. The heat! La calor, ooh!... You can't stay there! And the bugs! My father came over here.

He came to the U.S. around 1898, roughly midway through the first important wave of migration from Roccasecca to Mamaroneck and the rest of Westchester County, which lasted from 1890 or so to World War I. Franco Bossi's father became a construction laborer in Mamaroneck, while Franco himself later found work as a gardener on one of the estates that were springing up along Long Island Sound as the new railroad, then paved motor roads, made Westchester easily accessible to Manhattan.

American restrictions on immigration after World War I greatly slowed the movement of workers from Roccasecca to Mamaroneck and nearby towns. At that point, many more Ciociari (as people from the paese including Roccasecca call themselves) began migrating to France, especially to Lyon's industrial suburbs. But after World War II a new round of migrants took the American road. "My mother and father got married," one fifty-year-old immigrant we can call Anthony Bianco told us, "and went to France because he had three sisters there, one in Saint-Romain-le-Puy and two in Villeurbanne [both towns in the vicinity of Lyon]. My father stayed three years but then he wasn't happy with life there, it was too hot living next to the glassworks, so he went back to Roccasecca. My brother and I had been born in France - my older brother, who now works for the railroad in Rome. My uncle had a motel in Mamaroneck, and we had gotten married, he was there when we got married and said, you were born in France, I can sponsor you, so three months later I came here on my French papers."

Anthony worked for a year as a gardener, then spent nineteen years in construction before becoming a laborer for the county government. His family now has branches in Italy, France, and the United States, each of them concentrated in a few adjacent locations. Other natives of Roccasecca we met in Mamaroneck had lived in Brazil and Argentina. Some had relatives in Toronto, although (in what may be a testimony to either Toronto's hospitality or the United States' immigration controls) we encountered no Roccaseccani who had first emigrated to Toronto only to move on to New York. But a well-established network of kinship and acquaintance link Roccasecca and nearby villages in central Italy, Villeurbanne and adjacent industrial towns in France, São Paulo in Brazil, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Toronto in Canada, and the northern suburbs of New York City.

At this stage of a long-delayed inquiry, I conjecture that the migration chains connecting Roccasecca with Mamaroneck first took shape in contacts among the village's stonecutters, who went from site to site for construction in Europe, only to return to their farms in the off season. When contractors starting building dams and reservoirs to meet New York City's enormous demands for water, some of them reached out to Italy for their stonecutters. Most of them brought laborers with them, we speculate, most of them returned to Italy when their jobs were done, but others - both stonecutters and their less skilled helpers - liked the opportunities they saw in the New York area, and stayed on. Later migrants moved directly into the construction of roads and railways, or into gardening on the great estates that lined the nearby Atlantic shore. Many more made their bundles and returned to Italy, but again some stayed on, married, settled their families, and bore children who were Americans. By this speculative account, Anthony Bianco arrived in the United States sixty years or so after those who established the Roccasecca-Mamaroneck link, Franco Bossi and his compatriots.

In the slumberland of my life's dormant research projects, the Mamaroneck inquiry is the one I would most like to revivify. Piras, Videlier, and I undertook the research because it investigated an imperfect but fascinating natural experiment in the creation of durable inequality. From a thousand-person agricultural village, hundreds of emigrants went to Mamaroneck and vicinity, hundreds more to Villeurbanne and vicinity. In Lyon's suburbs, they generally took factory jobs; their children rapidly became working-class French people with Italian names but little other Italian identification. In Westchester, Italians whose families originated in Roccasecca concentrated heavily in landscape gardening, where the current generation enjoys a near-monopoly of the local business. Within family firms, a Catholic parish, and ethnic neighborhoods, they have retained a much stronger identification with Italy and small enterprise.

Anthony Bianco lived a complicated migration history, but not much more intricate than the average. In any case, his history tells us something far more important than how complicated life is. In Roccasecca, Anthony's family, and most of their neighbors, were peasants. In New York's suburbs, Anthony's descendants have become shopkeepers and landscape gardeners, while others having essentially the same origins have become French industrial workers, Brazilian businessmen or perhaps - we don't yet have the evidence - schoolteachers in Toronto. (My collaborators uncovered a similar range of destinations among closely-connected people during their interviews in the region of Lyon.)

Transplanted Italians now bear different kinds of names, speak different languages, wear different clothes, follow different politics, do different kinds of work, have different memories and hopes for the future. What made the difference? In these cases, we're tempted to call it luck. Ability, determination, and prior wealth or education certainly seem to have mattered little, while the presence of a relative who could provide aid and information mattered a great deal. That presence, however, was not a lucky coincidence, but the pivot of an extensive migration system that brought Roccaseccani to Mamaroneck and nearby towns while carrying their close kinsmen and neighbors to Lyon, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, or Toronto. However much the experience of any particular migrant might seem to depend on chance and individual taste, the experience took shape within stringent limits set by preexisting contacts.

Those of you who specialize in migration and ethnicity have long since recognized in my rambling account of Mamaroneck's migrants telltale signs of chain-migration and niche-formation. Mamaroneck's Italian immigrant niches lack the neatness of those Roger Waldinger and Alejandro Portes have identified in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, but they likewise display the strong impact of the path by which a given category of people entered the American economy on opportunities open to subsequent members of that category. In fact, the Mamaroneck story shows us not the perpetuation but the creation of a category - Italian-Americans - by the migration process itself. It also shows us how subsequent generations use the created category. Matching the category "Italian-American" to the business of landscape gardening sequestered opportunities for poor Italian peasants and their descendants, but also fenced off those opportunities from other people, including the growing number of black residents in Mamaroneck and adjacent Westchester towns.

Ciociari who came to Mamaroneck were solving an everyday organizational problem - finding paid work in a strange land - and creating categories more or less inadvertently, but as they did so a set of social relations in which multiple parties had stakes took shape. Interested parties included kinfolk in Italy and America, fellow Ciociari emigrants, and a variety of local employers. By analogy with other niche-builders who tell similar stories today, we can reasonably suppose that they hoarded information about opportunities, shared it chiefly with closely-connected others, excluded strangers, maintained contact with their place of origin through letters, remittances, and occasional visits. Thus their interactions with others created durable categorical inequality.

We can return to Mamaroneck after an excursion into very different terrain, formation of categorical inequality within the American health-care industry. The parallels will eventually turn out to be revealing. From the late 19th century onward, physicians, then nurses, then other specialists struggled more or less successfully to form monopoly control over training, hiring, dispensation of services, and fee-setting within their own state-protected zones. In so doing, they created unequal but sharply-bounded categories.

It wasn't easy. With American independence, the country's political fragmentation undermined all legal supports for medical monopolies; during much of the 19th century, specialties, doctrines, and forms of practice competed in wonderful profusion. State and local governments generally resisted licensing and restricting medical treatment or the dispensation of drugs. Physicians and surgeons as a whole enjoyed little prestige and less income. Their variety nevertheless resembled that of clergy in our own time: just as American clerics run from Episcopalian bishops to part-time street preachers, medical specialists ranged from Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, to itinerant herb-sellers.

The parallel with clergy extends to doctrine and practice. As Paul Starr describes the American medical situation:

More than a qualified analogy links religious and medical sects; they often overlap. The Mormons favored Thomsonian medicine and the Millerites hydropathy. The Swedenborgians were inclined toward homeopathic medicine. And the Christian Scientists originated in concerns that were medical as well as religious. In America various religious sects still make active efforts to cure the sick, while the dominant churches are more or less reconciled to the claims of the medical profession and have abandoned healing as part of pastoral care (Starr 1982: 95).

Various medical persuasions warred with each other for a century. Winners became "the profession" while losers remained "sects".

Intellectual and organizational fragmentation in medicine permitted medical schools to multiply and a great variety of practitioners to hang out their shingles. Elite physicians bemoaned their loss of standing, so much so that Dr. Benjamin Joy Jeffries titled his 1888 annual address to the Massachusetts Medical Society "Re-establishment of the Medical Profession" (Vogel 1980: 59). The profession's reestablishment took a major political effort, but it occurred. The effort interwined with importation from Europe of the new "scientific medicine" characterized by antisepsis, bacteriology, x-rays, and the coupling of clinical practice to research. Formation of Johns Hopkins' medical school in 1893 signaled the new commitment to science, and to consolidation of control over medical education. In 1901 the previously-ineffectual American Medical Association reorganized with the intention to "foster scientific medicine and . . . make the medical profession a power in the social and political life of the republic" (Numbers 1985: 191). The AMA succeeded, with a vengeance.

Only during the early 20th century, nevertheless, did the "orthodox" majority of physicians join with their principal rivals, Homeopaths and Eclectics (as well as with university administrators, foundation executives, and hospital operators) in state-by-state alliances that licensed medical practice, excluded practitioners from outside their coalition as quacks, and limited the number of medical schools. A famous report on medical education by Abraham Flexner (1910) accelerated and justified the dissolution of the proprietary medical schools that had multiplied with rising demand for professional health services during the 19th century. The American College of Surgeons (founded in 1910 as the Clinical Congress of Surgeons) established a rating system for hospitals that promoted scientific medicine and physician control. Modeling their organization on hotels rather than prisons or asylums, hospital managers and their boards turned away from their previous orientation to charity for poor people and began active recruitment of well-off patients who had been receiving treatment at home. About the same time, neurologists began (less successfully than their internist cousins) to create "psychopathic hospitals" centered on identification, diagnosis, and treatment of the curable insane by the best scientific means (Rothman 1980: 324-335).

In a similar spirit, the American Medical Association, major drug manufacturers, and the U.S. government eventually worked out standards and agreements giving physicians substantial control over dispensation of medicines, a set of moves that considerably diminished the autonomy, scope, and authority of American pharmacists. Doctors shouldered their way into administrations of hospitals where trustees, lay administrators, and superintending nurses had previously held sway; within hospital hierarchies, men displaced women. While chiropractors, psychologists, optometrists, osteopaths, physical therapists, sellers of patent medicine, and a variety of other healers continued to attract patients, a relatively unitary medical establishment, headed by male MDs, came to dominate public policy.

Nevertheless, physicians faced a dilemma: how to take advantage of the new facilities without becoming their captives. For decades they maintained autonomy by means of a triple strategy:

first, the use of doctors in training (interns and residents) in the operation of hospitals; second, the encouragement of a kind of responsible professionalism among the higher ranks of subordinate health workers; and third, the employment in these auxiliary roles of women who, though professionally trained, would not challenge the authority or economic position of the doctor (Starr 1982: 220-221).

The mystiques of science and service made it easier for dominant doctors to build loyalty systems integrating would-be professionals and their helpers into the ethos, if not the financial rewards, of the medical profession. Nursing, for example, developed in a dialectic with physicians' hegemony. American nursing professionalized through a system in which students learned their craft in hospital-based schools, thereby supplying the bulk of patients' personal care under intense time-discipline at very low cost; from only 3 in 1873, the number of nurses' training schools in hospitals increased to about 1,600 by World War I (Baer 1990: 462). Graduate nurses then went out to serve contract by contract in private homes or, more rarely, as public-health employees or private-duty nurses for affluent hospital patients. Thus with the collaboration of a few supervising graduate nurses, hospital administrators drew on a cheap, compliant, and committed labor force.

In the course of these changes, physicians became prosperous, doctors turned much more frequently to surgery for internal ailments such as appendicitis and tonsilitis, medical practice capitalized, insurance companies began intervening directly in medical care and policy, and hospitals became central as loci of treatment for the wealthy as well as the poor. Midwives lost their place to medical doctors; having attended roughly half of all American births in 1900, by 1930 midwives accounted for only 15 percent of births; by 1973, far less than 1 percent (Litoff 1978: 27, 58, 114). By that time, a double transformation of childbirth was well under way: not only were physicians taking over the supervision of childbearing, but women were increasingly giving birth in hospitals. Until drug companies, equipment manufacturers, hospital administrators, insurers, and government officials developed a common interest in centering medical treatment on heavily-capitalized and cost-effective hospitals, laboratories, and clinics rather than doctors' offices, the strategy worked extremely well. It gave physicians high incomes, extensive autonomy, and considerable political power.

Even professionalized nurses and technicians, for the most part, found themselves relegated to fixed inferior salaries and work under doctors' authority. Through the 20th century, nurses - not only graduates of hospital nursing schools and university programs, but also practical nurses and nurses' aides - have actually delivered the bulk of direct commercial health care. Nurses' work centers on ministration to sick bodies: feeding, cleaning, monitoring, administering medicine, managing complaints, providing moral support, and watching them die. Despite the rise of paperwork and high-technology treatment, bodywork remains the center of nursing.

For nurses, the great 20th-century changes concerned not technology but conditions of employment. First, around World War II began a major shift of graduate nurses from job-by-job contracts (so-called "private duty", whether in homes or hospitals) to direct employment in hospitals; prior to then, nursing students had done the major part of general in-hospital nursing, just as doctors-in-training - interns and residents - did the bulk of in-hospital doctoring. Second, nursing differentiated into multiple levels and specialties, with graduate nurses serving as bosses and intermediaries among patients, physicians, subordinate workers, and hospital managements. Third, nursing work itself incorporated more and more machinetending and record-keeping. The generality of nursing skills, thus the replaceability of one nurse by another, declined dramatically.

At a very different scale from Italian migration to Mamaroneck, the American health care industry exemplifies emergence of categorical inequality through interactive solution of organizational problems by installation of categories in which multiple parties, however reluctantly, acquired stakes. Within health care, orthodox physicians initiated a classic process of professionalization, painfully enlisting state aid in defining their own category, establishing control over membership and practice within that category, creating regular relations to other professionalizing categories such as nurses and pharmacists, stigmatizing rival categories of practitioners and - for a time - inscribing professional categories with other categorical distinctions of gender, race, and ethnic origin.

Health care notoriously connected job categories with ethnic, racial, and gender categories outside its professional zones: among kitchen help, file clerks, practical nurses, attendants, and many more workforce divisions. In those regards, it resembled most other American industries. But health care's professionalized sectors experienced ironies more dramatic than those appearing elsewhere in the industry. First, physicians' and other professionals' reliance on state support for their monopolies ultimately made them vulnerable to state intervention on behalf of politically-mobilized categories suffering exclusion from relevant professional training and appointments. Second, capitalization, bureaucratization, and government intervention into provision of health care undermined the economic and decision-making power of those professions that maintained organizational autonomy and fee-for-service prosperity by keeping their distance from big health-care organizations. The very embedding of categorical inequality, here separating certified members of professions from the uncertified, in adjacent social structure constrains subsequent collective advantages and disadvantages of category members.

Italian immigration to Mamaroneck and changes in American health care's professional structure have distinctly different histories; no invariant descriptive scheme of any richness can encompass both of them neatly. Yet both of them conformed to similar causal principles. To see their connections, we need a set of transactional concepts, concepts shifting emphasis of inequality from individual orientations and actions to relations among actors. Here is a chain of essential concepts:

actor:: any set of living bodies (including a single individual) to which human observers attribute coherent consciousness and intention
category:: a set of actors distinguished by a single criterion, simple or complex
transaction:: a bounded communication between one actor and another
tie:: a continuing series of transactions to which participants attach shared understandings, memories, forecasts, rights, and obligations
role:: a bundle of ties attached to a single actor
network:: a more or less homogeneous set of ties among three or more actors
group:: coincidence of a category and a network
organization:: group in which at least one actor has the right to speak authoritatively for the whole
identity:: an actor's experience of a category, tie, role, network, group, or organization, coupled with a public representation of that experience; the public representation often takes the form of a shared story, a narrative

Counter-intuitively, categories take relational forms. Let me expand the earlier definition. A category consists of a set of actors who share a boundary a) distinguishing all of them and b) relating all of the to c) at least one set of actors visibly excluded by that boundary. For obvious examples, consider women, a category excluding men; blacks, a category excluding whites; slaves, a category excluding masters and other free persons; or Muslims, a category generally excluding non-Muslims, but in particular locales excluding Jews, Orthodox Christians, Druse, Baha'i, and others.

Categorical work always includes the imputation of distinctive qualities to actors on each side of the boundary; in the crucial case of paired categories, actors on the two sides engage in mutual labeling. Yet categories rarely pervade life so thoroughly as to forbid cross-cutting categorical memberships. Many actors occupy multiple categories without great difficultly, just so long as relations defining one category activate at different times and/or in different circumstances from those defining other categories. As Erving Goffman's discussions of off-microphone behavior by broadcasters and our own experiences talking on telephones while carrying on other local sociability indicate, people are quite capable of doing the work of two or more categories simultaneously if they have devices for segregating categorical relations from each other (Goffman 1981: 267).

Some categories result from deliberate design, many more from incremental interaction. By definition, groups and organizations incorporate categories into their networks; a group is any categorically-defined network, an organization any group in which some actors have rights to speak authoritatively for the whole. Outside of organizations such as firms and voluntary associations, categories rarely form as deliberate outcomes of planned social action. The most prominent exceptions in this regard occur in situations where political entrepreneurs have something to gain by asserting and promoting the existence of a categorical entity which, if recognized, enjoys some sort of collective advantage; claims to speak on behalf of an oppressed, unrecognized, and unorganized nation have this character, as do the demands of social-movement activists to be heard as spokespersons for their unjustly disadvantaged constituencies. (I am not talking about established social-movement organizations such as environmental-action associations, but of claims to speak on behalf of all environmentally-conscious citizens, all humankind, or even all living things.)

Otherwise, categories usually form as by-products of social interaction that simultaneously a) connects people who share or thereby acquire common traits and b) segregates them in some regards from other people with whom they nevertheless maintain significant relations. Thus ostensibly ethnic faction fights often occurred in South Africa's mining compounds during the 1940s, but the actual identities assumed by rival gangs depended intimately on the mix of origins within a compound, the consequent segregations of barracks, and the ethnic divisions of labor within the mine. Police from Randfontein reported of an April 1940 fight that:

The cause of the trouble originated underground the week before. Two Xosa (sic) boss boys assaulted a Pondo. The Xosas were charged with assault and released on bail . . . The assault caused ill-feeling amongst the Pondos. During the afternoon of 21.4.1940, Xosas, of which one section Bo[m]vanas, visited native huts on Panvlakte. The Bo[m]vanas assaulted 4 Xosas. The Xosas returned to the compound and thereafter attacked the Bo[m]vana section . . . A Pondo took advantage of the turmoil to avenge the assault by the Xosa boss boys on a Pondo the week before and fatally stabbed a Xosa . . . A Pondo was arrested . . . A party of Pondos demanded the release of the prisoner . . . [When this was refused] they replied that they would attack the Xosa unless the prisoner was released. Information was then received that the one affected section of the Xosas . . . of the night before, had joined forces with the Pondos to attack the rest of the Xosas (Moodie 1994: 183).

Police assumed a major division between "Pondos" (that is, Mpondo) and Xhosas, with the latter divided into Bomvana and others, the Bomvana unaccountably defecting from their Xhosa category to ally with the Mpondo. In this particular situation, all three sets of miners spoke Xhosa, but the Bomvana, small in number, lived in their own section of a so-called "Xhosa" block, while the Mpondo lived elsewhere. On other occasions, Mpondo and Bomvana readily fought each other. Mine managers grouped workers by linguistic similarity, which then produced boundaries and categories over which young men were willing to kill each other. If we looked farther into the categories "Mpondo" and "Bomvana", furthermore, we would discover that they, too, designated relations among locally-distinguished aggregates rather than irreducible nuclei of solidarity, connection, and common culture. Locally-available boundaries defined entire categories much more definitively than did common culture or long-term internal solidarities. Yet once those boundaries stood in place, participants and observers alike attributed hard, durable, even genetic reality to the categories they inscribed. Wherever they came from, they had serious social consequences.

The same holds generally for ethnicity, gender, race, community membership, and other categories sociologists once lumped together as ascribed statuses. They do boundary work, defining relations and locating distinctions between members of different categories more reliably than they create internal solidarity, homogeneity, or connectedness. They do the work of distinction, more or less as Pierre Bourdieu defines that work. Once any of these categories exists, nevertheless, it lends itself to serious social work.

Institutional economists have indirectly recognized the practical importance of categories by stressing the comparison of markets and hierarchies, markets lending themselves to spot interchanges having low transaction costs, hierarchies facilitating interchanges where high transaction costs prevail. Thus they account for the prevalence of bounded firms, which in idealized markets have no rationale at all. While acknowledging the advantages of hierarchy in circumstances where coercion rather than commitment or compensation makes the difference between success and failure, I suggest that the boundary itself has an effect, containing local knowledge, circumscribing vacancy chains, limiting liability, and affording leverage to those who control membership in the organization, hence access to its benefits.

Here, however, I want to underline the significance for organizations of ostensibly extrinsic categories. Extrinsic categories do not form part of a given organization's definition, but often define systematic differences in activities, rewards, power, and prospects within that organization. Gender distinctions provide obvious examples: ritualized differences between male and female places in religious organizations, girls' gym classes versus boys' gym classes, distinctions in military service, sex-typing of occupations. When Trond Petersen and Laurie Morgan report that "Occupation-establishment segregation accounts better for wage differences between men and women than any other set of variables studied in the literature on wage differences" (Petersen & Morgan 1995: 344) they make one step more precise a finding sociologists have been turning up in cruder versions for two decades; inverted, the finding says that sex-typing extends massively not just to broad occupations but to specialized jobs within firms. Elsewhere and at other times, race-typing, ethnic typing, religion-typing, kinship-typing, and locality-typing have operated just as pervasively and consequentially, sometimes several of them at once.

In the world of work and labor markets, these elements and processes have precise equivalents. Work includes all effort producing use value that is transferable in principle to others than its producers. Work transactions link producers to producers, producers to recipients, and recipients to recipients. In the working world, crucial ties take the form of contracts combining repeated transactions with rights, obligations, monitoring, and enforcement.

Even in the contemporary United States, a majority of work effort takes place outside the zone of firms and long-term employment for wages, which is also the zone of labor markets. Food preparation, child care, yard work, private medical practice, free-lance writing, drug-dealing, and a thousand other varieties of work form their own roles - bundles of work contracts each involving a single worker. In comparison with other economies past and present, nevertheless, capitalist economies bundle work contracts with unusual frequency into those positions we call jobs, in which at least one of the contracts links worker to employer, stipulating claims the employer may make on the worker's effort in return for a schedule of compensation settled in advance of the effort.

For work, salient networks include markets, linked chiefly by relations of compensation; hierrarchies, centering on relations of coercion, and coalitions, featuring relations of commitment. The network we call a labor market links employers and a set of workers (actual or potential) deemed to be similar in qualifications by relations of hiring, separation, transfer, and promotion. As is no doubt obvious by now, extrinsic networks (categorical or not) cross-cut and constrain all work relations. Work-related groups - combinations of categories and networks - include industries, trades, and professions. To the extent that they acquire effective decision-making structures, they crystallize into organizations, among which we find firms, labor unions, and trade associations. From transactions to organizations, these concepts allow us to think about work as a set of activities centering not on isolated individuals but on social relations among actors. The distinctive capitalist complex of firms, jobs, and labor markets constitutes a special case of work's organization, one that falls far short of exhausting the forms of work even in our own country and era.

Both intrinsic and extrinsic categories play significant parts in the organization of work. Intrinsically, boundaries of firms, professions, trades, and industries come immediately to mind. But within firms organization charts provide cartoons of multiple categories: divisions, departments, pay grades, specialized clusters of jobs, and more. Most large American firms cluster jobs along a continuum from command-and-promotion pools (whose occupants have opportunities to rise within well-defined hierarchies in which from the start they devote significant shares of their efforts to controlling other people's work) to turnover pools (in which promotion ladders are short or non-existent, benefits minimal, and tenure uncertain). The venerable distinction between primary and secondary labor markets rests chiefly on the relative predominance of the two sorts of job cluster. Such intrinsic categories facilitate the installation within firms and industries of inequalities with respect to pay, power, autonomy, perquisites, tenure, and deference.

Intrinsic categories likewise figure in work outside the zone of firms, jobs, and labor markets, as in professional boundaries that separate private-practice physicians, psychologists, lawyers, or architects from their clients as well as relations among owners, tenants, and rental agents in real estate. Outside of organizations, however, intrinsic and extrinsic categories blur into each other, precisely because work embeds so deeply in nonwork networks such as those defined by kinship and ethnicity. Family farms, ethnic stores, households, casual prostitution, and punk music intertwine intrinsic and extrinsic categories.

Still, the contrast between firm-based work and other work remains a matter of degree. Extrinsic categories such as race, gender, and ethnicity loom large within firms for two overlapping reasons: 1) because members of firms ease their organizational work by mapping extrinsic into intrinsic categories, and 2) because members of firms employ categorically-organized networks outside the firm to carry on important activities. In the first regard, for example, employers hire female secretaries for male executives, thus importing a powerful distinction and relation directly into the firm. In the second regard, workers organize their searches for employment through segregated networks created or recast by chain migration, employers hire chiefly on recommendations of existing workers, and an ethnically-segregated niche forms within the firm.

In both regards, we notice effects of a condition strongly implied by transaction-cost economics, but generally ignored by practitioners of that art: organizational designs and their changes cost something to conceive, test, modify, install, teach, and enforce. The more unfamiliar the design, in general, the greater these costs. In response to such costs, managers and other members of work organizations generally prefer familiar models, including categorical models, for work contracts, and readily incorporate existing social structure - emphatically including extrinsic categories - into their organizations. Most organizations therefore take shape and change not as efficiency-driven designs but as mosaics of established models and extrinsic social structure.

In Mamaroneck, we saw a classic application of these principles to employment-oriented chain migration and ethnic niche-formation. Both in the public sector and in family firms Ciociari specialized in earthwork: landscape gardening and closely-related pursuits, which thereby acquired Italian labels and excluded non-Italian workers. In American health care, we witnessed deliberate creation of intrinsic work categories through professionalization, their installation in such organizations as hospitals, and their frequent reinforcement through matching with extrinsic categories of gender, race, and ethnicity.

Although categorical stereotypes, enmities, and fears unquestionably welled up in both experiences, we need not attribute to them much autonomous importance in explaining the organizational processes involved. Creation or installation of categorical distinctions does crucial organizational work. Extrinsic categories usually intersect, and often reinforce, the intrinsic categories put in place by managers and modified by bargaining with existing workers. How they do so, with what consequences for the people involved, will occupy my remaining lectures.

3. Accumulated (Dis)Advantage

Within the space our world calls South Africa, midway through the mid-seventeenth century Dutch settlers formed a colony on the Cape of Good Hope, long a crucial landfall for voyagers between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. For two centuries, Europeans and their descendants then clung chiefly to South Africa's coasts. The major exceptions were the largely Dutch cattlemen who spread into interior regions, impressing local Africans as slaves and near-slaves on their large estates. With the discovery of diamonds along the Orange River in 1867 and, especially, the unearthing of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, Europeans, their weapons, and their capital rushed away from the sea. Diamonds and gold embittered the struggle for territory between the British, backed by imperial might, and the Dutch-tinged amalgam of other European settlers who had come to be known as Boers, one of those wonderful labels first used in opprobrium for its implications of rusticity and boorishness but eventually worn with pride by its recipients.

British-Boer military struggles began in earnest during the 1790s, continued through the 19th century, and culminated in the South African war of 1899 to 1902, known as the Boer War to Britons, the Second War of Freedom to Afrikaners, and a time of troubles for black Africans. Britain's violent victory found a hundred thousand Boer women and children in concentration camps, more than a hundred thousand Africans likewise incarcerated, Boer farms in smoking ruins, the victors confronted with a problem Niccolò Machiavelli had pondered for the benefit of princes four centuries earlier: given a conquest, whether to destroy, coopt, or rebuild existing forms of government. Having already destroyed so much as to disperse and deplete the African labor forces of farms and mines, rulers of the new South African state eventually chose a combination of cooptation and reconstruction: first creating a partly autonomous Transvaal government, then integrating it into a new Union of South Africa, finally staffing its bureaucracies and coercive forces disproportionately with Boers, but deeply reorganizing controls over the non-European population.

The latter process raised what South African and British elites called the Native Question. That Question actually entailed two closely-twined conundrums: 1) how to integrate black Africans into the new state while keeping them compliant and subordinate, 2) how to commit African labor to farms, to urban services and, above all, to man-devouring diamond and gold mines. The first involved maneuvering among missionaries who considered themselves uniquely qualified to define and defend native welfare, chiefs who claimed competing jurisdictions within predominantly African areas of settlement, and capitalists who already depended heavily on African labor. The second involved assuring that each year pastoral and agricultural communities would continue to send several hundred thousand able-bodied workers, mostly male, for labor away from home, yet reabsorb them when employment slackened or they lost strength.

South African authorities sought to answer both questions with a series of efforts at category-building. The most general categorical cut divided Europeans from Natives, matching to those categories unequal and separate territories, protections, and rights of citizenship. The government used taxation, deprivation of land, and outright compulsion to drive Natives into labor markets. Economic inequalities nevertheless paralleled legal inequalities; in the gold mines, where law and standard practice strictly segregated white from black jobs, "White gold miners' annual cash earnings were 11.7 times the cash wages of black gold miners in 1911, and 14.7 times in 1951" (Thompson 1990: 156).

On the European side an additional line between British and Afrikaners defined opponents in conflicts that several times approached civil war. On the Native side, however, South African authorities found not sharp lines but a kaleidoscope. Thousands of categories designated and divided different sets of the non-European population, many of them falling into broadly similar linguistic groupings such as Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho without their occupants' being much aware of the similarities, some of them harking back to kingdoms that had dominated different parts of the region before Dutch and British hegemony, but few of them designating sharply-bounded populations having long histories of geographic and social segregation.

In a remarkable series of direct interventions, the South African state set out to create racial categories that would serve as the basis of unequal rights and rewards. From 1903 to 1981, state-appointed commissions repeatedly enlisted administrators, social scientists, missionaries, professionals, and capitalists in the work of defining the major categories of Natives, assigning them collective characters, and recommending policies based on those characterizations. They regrouped the thousands of available categories into a handful, attached them to territorial "reserves" currently little populated by Europeans, categorically differentiated their rights to work temporarily outside those reserves, and thus produced gradations of citizenship according to officially-assigned ethnicity. The so-called Coloured people - 8 percent of the national population in 1936 - contained the overflow: nonwhite people who could not be forced into one of the standard categories.

The installation of Apartheid from 1948 onward reinforced categorical differences previous administrations had created. It did so with greatly increased intensity: uprooting Africans and Coloured people from long-established urban residences, herding Africans into small, fragmented, overpopulated homelands, even segregating European children into different schools according to the language spoken at home, English or Afrikaans.

The Tomlinson Commission of 1950-1954, a prime architect of Apartheid, enshrined ethnographers' distinctions among languages and cultures - Nguni, Sotho, Venda, and Shangaan-Tsonga - on the way to recommending separate lands and statuses for each of them. It also asserted that each of them divided into lineage-defined tribes, typically headed by a single chief. Thus for a series of South African peoples, including various categories of Europeans and Asians, the Tomlinson Report adopted a model of long-established nations which as they matured acquired, or would acquire, their own separate states (Ashforth 1990: 159). Indeed, the report recommended a kind of ethnic cleansing, exchanging white and black populations until they filled substantial homogeneous regions, with the black-occupied regions further segregated by assigned linguistic-cultural category (Ashforth 1990: 176).

To be sure, the white demand for black labor in cities, mines, and farms subverted all plans for total segregation of South Africa's populations. But it did not keep authorities from building racially-defined categories deeply into the country's legal and economic structures. Even the partial legalization of black unions in 1979 inscribed government-recognized racial divisions into the law. Recipients of this organizational largesse faced an acute dilemma: accept state-endorsed categorization and retain meager claims to land and employment; reject it and abandon all state-enforced rights whatsoever.

Separatist policies nonetheless had unanticipated consequences. First, they drove Africans, Indians, and Coloureds into a common front as Apartheid governments increasingly deprived the latter two categories of distinctive rights they had previous enjoyed. Then they made government-defined African identities available as bases of political mobilization. "As the South African state in 1990 began to shift away from formal racial exclusion and segregation, toward `non-racial' democracy," remarks Anthony Marx,

racial identity and mobilization has lost some of its salience. In its place, political entrepreneurs have increasingly relied on "tribal" or "ethnic" identities as the basis of mobilization, as indicated by Zulu nationalism and "coloured" fears of African domination under the ANC (Marx 1995: 169).

Parallels to recent ethnically-defined nationalisms in former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union should give us pause. The Zulu-based and state-subsidized Inkatha movement of M.G. Buthelezi exemplifies the stakes even some Africans acquired in the categories earlier imposed by white South Africans to sustain their domination.

Marx extends his comparison to the United States and Brazil, pointing out a deep irony: to the degree that a state installs categorical racial distinctions in its laws and institutions, it can use coercive power legally to enforce discrimination. Yet under changed circumstances those categories become available as bases of mobilization and of demands for rights. In Brazil, where racial inequalities run very deep but lack legal recognition, organizers of black people have little success in mobilizing their constituency and pressing for redress. The United States, where legal sanctioning of racial distinctions reached much farther than in Brazil but fell far short of South Africa, occupies a middle ground in these regards. Thus politically-enforced categorical inequality sustains widespread discrimination, but with changed political alignments offers significant opportunities for collective action on the part of underdogs. Ethnically or racially defined political management strikes back as erstwhile managers falter.

Note the parallels between South African categorical experience and routine operation of work in capitalist countries. Once again we witness powerful people facing an organizational problem: in this case, creation and maintenance of a state that will preserve advantages of a small minority. We see Europeans establishing resource and power differentials within that state in three ways: creating manageable social categories by drawing sharp lines between populations rather than forming coherent entities within them; incorporating established and created social categories directly into state structure; organizing state-fostered inequality around those categories. Mapping of the categories into kinship plus categorical segregation of residences, schools, jobs, and military service assured the transmission of categorical memberships from one generation to the next.

In the long run, South Africa's white rulers blurred the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic categories, since vast categorical differences in rewards promoted solidarities and mutual identifications that had previously exercised little or no force. State-promoted racial categories became fundamental facts of life. In the process, multiple parties - including, for example, nominal rulers of nominally-independent homelands - gained investment in the Apartheid system.

Not that the system worked smoothly or achieved willing assent from the country's nonwhite majority. Contradiction between policies of segregation and demands for black labor guaranteed incessant tension, compromise, and conflict. From 1903 onward, South African authorities repeatedly experimented with reorganization of categories and inequalities attached to them. Small-scale resistance never ended. Large-scale blockage such as the Soweto uprising of 1976 (which began with black students' refusal to accept Afrikaans as their medium of instruction) recurrently revealed major fissures within the system. By 1989, in the face of growing isolation from the international community and widening splits within the white minority, even leaders of the National Party, Apartheid's author, recognized that its organizational solution had lost its viability.

By no means all categorical inequality, then, operates with quiet efficiency, drawing happy assent from its various participants. On the contrary: since categorical inequality always leaves members of certain categories visibly disadvantaged, it often occasions discontent and sometimes generates outright rebellion. The big question is whether the disadvantaged have sufficient knowledge, organizational capacity, and leverage to alter the system. In many systems they do not, both because the system delivers them rewards that are less bad than available alternatives and because the very arrangement of unequal categories deprives them of knowledge, organizational capacity, and leverage.

Categorical inequality obviously takes shape in many more setting than the four I have stressed so far: class differences in nutrition, American immigration, professionalization of health care, and South Africa's racially-defined institutions. It forms, for example, in the hearts of capitalist firms. Firms, as I pointed out last time, combine categories with the special sorts of coercion-containing networks institutional economists call hierarchies. Firms do a significant part of their organizational work through the creation and operation of intrinsic categories: divisions, departments, ranks, and more. They frequently match those intrinsic with extrinsic categories. With his typical Veblenian irony, for example, Arthur Stinchcombe has identified a relevant puzzle:

The fundamental generalization about entry into craft and professional jobs (and, as we have argued above, into higher management and top staff jobs in bureaucratic organizations) is the more democratic control over recruitment into a set of jobs is - that is, the more entry and training are controlled by workers in that set of jobs - the fewer women, blacks, Mexican-Americans, or immigrant workers are employed in the group (Stinchcombe 1990: 261).

While we do not usually speak of the problem in terms of democracy, Stinchcombe has it right: given intrinsic categorization of desirable jobs that affords their occupants considerable collective control over entry, training, tenure, advancement, and separation, participants regularly match intrinsic with extrinsic categories. They do so because powerful parties to the arrangement - both mangers and workers - make substantial organizational gains from the arrangement, and because recruitment occurs chiefly through the categorically segregated networks participants bring to the firm.

Although of course they merge, we can conveniently distinguish between recruitment networks and supply networks, recruitment networks being formed by hiring agents' searches for potential workers, supply networks consisting of preexising ties among potential and actual workers. The facts that even in the contemporary United States employers commonly start searches by asking current employers whether they know likely candidates and that employees commonly seek information on job opening for the benefit of potential workers with whom they already connect suffice to introduce enormous selectivity into the joining of recruitment and supply networks. Management's initial identification of intrinsic with extrinsic categories through the designation of certain jobs as men's work, women's work, Mexican's work, or something of the sort merely accentuates a process that tends to unfold even without self-conscious managerial incitement.

Why and how does it unfold? Consider the possible components of categorical inequality in regard to the rewards of work. Although plenty of work goes on outside of jobs and firms in any strong senses of the two words, let us speak temporarily of jobs and firms. Within firms, only small inequalities in rewards generally appear among occupants of jobs the organization identifies as the same; most such within-job inequalities result from seniority and similar widely-accepted grounds for discrimination. Large differences in rewards usually correspond to separate jobs, distinctive bundles of work contracts.

Firms bound and link jobs: identify some sets of jobs as belonging to the same category, relate some jobs to each other through linked work contracts, established mobility paths, or both. Skilled machinists may fall within the same organizational boundary and thus enjoy similar systems of reward, while their apprentices occupy jobs linked to their skilled elders by both shared work contracts and prospects for mobility. To the extent 1) that machinists receive distinctive rewards, 2) that recruitment to positions as apprentice machinist engages categorically segregated supply or recruitment networks and 3) that jobs as skilled machinist require promotion from apprentice, categorical inequality separates machinists from other workers in the firm. My earlier distinction between turnover pools and command-and-promotion pools, with their very different packages of rewards, illustrates the same principle. Such large differences typically generate intrinsic categories with well-marked boundaries governing not only forms of payment but also mobility chances, dress, demeanor, sociability, and belief.

Firms also rank jobs and categories of jobs with respect to each sort of reward they offer, with different kinds of rewards commonly correlating with each other but not defining identical rank orders; some jobs give more money, others more autonomy, and so on. We must distinguish ranking from sorting, the matching of individuals with jobs. Ranking processes determine how much inequality in rewards appears within a firm, but sorting processes determine to what extent those inequalities coincide with extrinsic categorical boundaries.

But why match intrinsic categories such as turnover pools to extrinsic categories such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, or social class? The reasons range from advertent to inadvertent. At the self-conscious end of the range, people who build or change organizations save effort by incorporating all sorts of existing social structure - standard work contracts, linguistic conventions, rhetorical routines, and much more - directly into organizational structure. Such deliberately-adopted devices often include importation of categories from outside: gender-typing, ethnic-typing, and so on. Members of the organization ordinarily borrow or build up shared beliefs about the appropriateness of such matching between extrinsic and intrinsic categories, as when Chris Tilly's fellow file clerks in a Boston hospital, exclusively female, told him the job was quintessential women's work because it required dexterity and attention to detail, while his fellow file clerks in an Oakland, California hospital, almost exclusively Filipino male, told him it was quintessential men's work because of the lifting and hauling it entailed.

At the scale's inadvertent end, however, lie an equally important set of organizational processes matching extrinsic to intrinsic categories. Here members solve various problems and capitalize on various opportunities by drawing on categorically-segregated networks. Thus workers trust, train, and help each other more fully when they share outside solidarities and common cultures, employers find new workers through the contacts of workers already on the job, subcontracting follows the lines of managers' previous collaborations, and the supply-driven recruitment of people from distinct extrinsic categories into adjacent intrinsic categories imports externally-established relations between the categories into the organization's daily life.

Let me put it more generally. Seen from the perspective of an entire labor force, categorical inequlity in work's rewards breaks down into effects of eight general factors:

categorical differences in job qualifications, which may of course result from discrimination in households, neighborhoods, schools, and other settings or unequal distribution across such settings
employer discrimination by category within equivalent jobs
categorical differences in potential workers' preferences for different jobs
bounding of jobs within firms
ranking of jobs within firms
linking of jobs within firms, which concerns not only mobility prospects, but also access to collaboration, patronage, and on-the-job training
categorical designation of jobs
categorical segregation of recruitment and supply networks by job and/or firm

In the form of human capital, discrimination, and queuing theories, standard models of inequality feature the first three factors: categorical differences in job qualifications, employer discrimination, and categorical differences in preferences. For all their prominence in the descriptive literature on work and labor markets, items 4 through 8 - bounding, ranking, linking, categorical designation of jobs, and categorical segregation of networks - have received little theoretical attention.

A ninth, even less visible, factor also helps produce categorical inequality: differential distribution of categories among firms and nonfirm worksites, including sites outside the labor force as customarily defined. Categorical inequality by age makes the strength of such effects clear: people under 15 or over 70 do plenty of useful work, but do little of it for wages in jobs, firms, or labor markets. The same sort of unequal distribution across sites of work occurs by gender, race, and national origin.

Without denying the presence of categorical human-capital differences, employer discrimination by category, and categorical variation in potential workers' preferences for different sorts of jobs, I claim that organizational processes of the sort I have been describing play a large part in the production, maintenance, and change of categorical inequality. Two implications follow: 1) preferences and wage bargains provide too thin a base for explanations of durable inequality at work; 2) a significant portion of that inequality results not from self-conscious discrimination but from the solution of other organizational problems by incorporation, often unintentional, of extrinsic categories into the structure of work and labor markets.

Once extrinsic categorical distinctions, inadvertent or otherwise, find their way into an organization, they tend to stay in place for the same reasons that other organizational features persist: because they become taken-for-granted bases of routine activities within the organization. Routine activities in question include not only the operations that installed extrinsic categories in the first place - justifying unequal rewards, recruiting new members, establishing authority relations, maintaining connections with outside sources of support, et cetera - but also the daily games of organization members: work-sharing, flirtation, patronage, snobbery, solidarity, recreation, simply finding their way around the bureaucracy. Categories become crucial chunks of local knowledge, correspondingly expensive to destroy or replace.

Although each set of categories brings its own cultural and organizational baggage (gender distinctions do not operate in exactly the same way as ethnic distinctions), their installation in similar organizations produces striking homologies of form and function. Thus the U.S. Navy, which long barred nonwhites from regular service with whites, nevertheless recruited black and Filipino men as officers' stewards, treating them as the functional equivalent of housemaids and cooks. In replacing newly-arrived Korean immigrants with Mexicans at the bottom levels of New York's delicatessens, Korean entrepreneurs have installed a mobility ceiling in a manner that observers of gender and race find thoroughly familiar. Rosabeth Kanter has long since documented similarities in the positions of token women and other minorities at the higher ranks of large organizations. Organizational forms and processes of categorical inequality repeat themselves in a wide variety of contexts.

The admirable literature on immigrant niches and entrepreneurship to which Ivan Light, Roger Waldinger, Alejandro Portes, and their co-workers have made major contributions abounds with evidence concerning the organizational forms and processes involved. Waldinger's forthcoming book on New York, for example, documents the centrality and persistence of work niches, both job-centered and entrepreneurial, to the varied experiences of major ethnic and racial categories since 1940. As my own story about Italians in Mamaroneck suggested, even through momentous changes in the overall economy the migration and employment histories of previous generations cast long shadows over the fates of today's category members.

Roger Waldinger makes many of the same observations I have offered you here on the basis of his and other people's research: ethnic-racial niches form within limits set by the preferences of owners and established workers, but once established easily reproduce themselves because of their reliance on categorically segregated networks for a wide variety of activities on and off the job. Through long struggles, New York's native blacks formed effective niches in different segments of public employment and health care, but in recent decades have repeatedly been beaten into expanding sectors of private-sector and entrepreneurial work by immigrant streams whose members formed niches, supplying compliant, low-wage workers and/or gaining access to ethnically-pooled capital. Waldinger also stresses a consequence I may have understated so far:

Frequent interaction in a highly concentrated niche promotes a sense of group identity; if the niche is one of the salient traits that group members share in common it also becomes an interest that helps define who they are. Thus, greater attention is paid to the boundaries that define the niche, and the characteristics of those who can and cannot cross those boundaries. Just as the niche helps identify "we-ness", it also serves as a mechanism for defining whom we are not (Waldinger 1995: 304-305).

He might have added: defining the limits of solidarity, trust, and mutual aid as well. To the extent that collaboration within a niche enhances the quality or efficiency of work, and that denial of collaboration accordingly degrades work performance, an effective niche reinforces its survival by delivering superior results to customers and other segments of the same organizations.

Waldinger takes a deeply historicist view, stressing path-dependency, arguing that each category's coping strategies and relations to opportunities at a given time significantly constrains its available strategies and opportunities in the next round. In that regard, he conforms to recent trends in the history and sociology of American immigration. A historicist view helps make sense of the connections between migration and durable forms of inequality, especially those forms people organize as ethnicity - as structured differences according to imputed national or racial origin.

For a long time, the standard vision of the immigrant portrayed someone who leaves the old country's security, passes through a period of risk and turmoil, then establishes a definitive equilibrium in the new country. If the immigrant comes to a great city such as New York or Los Angeles, most people find this vision all the easier to accept. Yet actual immigration experiences rarely approximate the classic model; instead we find people moving back and forth over long distances, relying heavily on colleagues, kinsmen, and Landsmänner as they make their ways, maintaining their preexisting personal networks at considerable expense, and generally refusing to become disorganized in the ways that classical theories predict. By now, a whole generation of researchers has documented the dense social relations that commonly accompany long-distance migration and subsequent problem-solving.

The old beliefs required active suppression of knowledge that most of us already have. For the histories of our own families, thoughtfully considered, generally contradict all these antitheses of immobility and mobility, order and disorder, contingency and constraint. Our individual and family histories vibrate with movement, with fortuitous connections, with chance meetings, with contingencies having very serious consequences over long periods of time. Yet, seen in perspective, they also embody striking regularities.

Let me illustrate with a personal example. I would not be here - that is, my parents would almost certainly never have met - except for the last-minute decision of my grandfather, a Welsh miner in a time of the mines' decline, not to take an available mining job in South Africa but instead to accept the invitation of his brother, a locomotive driver who had emigrated fifteen years earlier, to join him and his family near Chicago and look for work there. (A disputed family tradition says Uncle Chris, the Chicago brother, sent a telegram skillfully mediating between threat and dire prediction: "If you go to South Africa," he is supposed to have cabled, "I'll never speak to you again.") My grandfather ended up maintaining the machines of an Ovaltine factory in Villa Park, Illinois. His daughters, including my mother, met and married men who lived around Chicago, bore and raised children in the Chicago region. They constructed a tight kinship group consisting chiefly of their family's Chicago branch but ramifying back to Wales and England. Later, I worked summers in the Ovaltine factory to earn money for college... and my family often drank Ovaltine.

In one perspective, nothing could be more contingent and individual - a last-minute change of mind about a risky job seals the destiny of an entire family, not to mention their descendants. My grandfather's whim, however, did not cause his brother to leave for Chicago in 1908 or the Rhondda Valley's mines to falter in the 1920s. (Uncle Chris, furthermore, had joined their half-brother Sam, who even earlier had migrated to Chicago to work in retail trade.) My grandfather's apparently arbitrary choice took place within strong limits set by previous actions - his and other people's - and had significant effects on all his later choices. Few moments in most lives pose such fateful alternatives as Hugh Stott's 1925 decision to join his brother in Chicago, but much of long-distance migration brings together similar combinations of contingency and constraint.

Although no one involved at the time would have recognized the term, my mother's family was involved in a system of chain migration. Chain migration is the arrangement in which numerous people leave one well-defined origin serially for another well-defined destination by relying on people from the same origin for aid, information, and encouragement; most chain migrations involve considerable return of migrants to their place of origin. In fact, many chain migrations begin as circular migrations: seasonal, annual, or longer-cycle movement of agricultural workers, craftsmen, or petty merchants from a base to some other well-defined place where temporary work awaits them. In my mother's family story, the chain was short: from Sam Stott to Chris Stott to Hugh Stott and perhaps a dozen cousins, children, and siblings. Yet it came recognizably from the same process that produced chains spanning multiple generations.

The essence of chain migration was, and is, the existence of continuing contacts between a specific community of origin and a specific community of destination, involving frequent moves of persons between them with help and encouragement from the persons at both ends. Even including the forced migration of Africans (who arrived literally, but not figuratively, in chains) this sort of continuously-connected migration system accounts for the great bulk of the last five centuries' immigration to the Americas. That fact in itself should alert us to the likelihood that what happened to migrants at one point in time, and how they organized their migration, significantly affected the fate of both their descendants and later migrants.

We could stop there. By now we have plenty of evidence showing that the presence or absence of prior contacts has a strong effect on the paths and consequences of long-distance migration. In Toronto, Grace Anderson showed twenty years ago that the initial ties of very similar Portuguese immigrants to the metropolitan labor market significantly influenced the kinds of jobs with which they began, which in turn made a large difference to their relative success later on; ability and ambition paled in the light of prior social ties. In New York, Suzanne Model has shown that among Jews, Italians, and Blacks employment by members of the same ethnic category, on the average, contributed significantly to better jobs and higher incomes (Model 1985). Roger Waldinger's findings generally confirm Model's conclusion. That mutual employment grows up especially as a consequence of collectively-organized migration.

Even in the case of solitary migration, migrants commonly drew information, assistance, and financial assistance from network members who had already gone to America. The frequency of remittances from emigrants to homefolks and of steamship tickets prepaid by people at the American destination reveals the extent of that mutual aid. After a New Jersey lecture in which I made the same point, a second-generation Italian came up to me in indignation, objecting that "mutual aid" hardly described the situation in which kinsmen in Newark sent his father a steamship ticket, only to reveal on his arrival in America that he would have to work off the passage in their bakery at starvation wages; the day he finished repaying, the father had quit his job, left town, and severed connections with his exploitative cousins.

Let no one think, then, that the processes I am describing exclude exploitation, conflict, or antipathy. The tying together of people by mutual aid and obligation often breeds rancor as well as respect. Many immigrants gritted their teeth until they had enough money to go back to their communities of origin or rush off to another destination within their networks. Among streams connecting the Mediterranean with North America, typically half or more of the immigrants returned home. The high proportion of Mediterranean migrants who returned after trying their hands in America, or who swung back and forth between the two continents as employment opportunities dictated, superficially a sign of inefficiency in the migration system, actually testifies to the quick, effective flow of information about affairs at both ends of the many chains from Mediterranean to North America.

In 1906, 435,000 people left Italy for the Americas but a full 158,000 returned, and many "pendulated" between continents for some time (Harney 1984: 74; see also Harney 1985). Although that sort of evidence tells us nothing about organized or disorganized the migrants were, it is utterly inconsistent with the notion of a desperate cutting of ties to the old country. From what else we know about Italian migration, it depended heavily on spectacularly long chains between very specific origins and destinations within the continents. Padroni, or labor contractors, who recruited Italian workers for construction or agriculture in distant America, did exist, but they profited from or emerged out of existing migration chains. In any case, they accounted for only a small minority of Italian immigrants.

For decades, American factories did much of their work through subcontracting, farming out the production of major goods to a foreman or independent entrepreneur who actually hired his own labor force and delivered the goods for a price agreed upon in advance. Subcontracting articulates beautifully with chain migration, since the padrone has access to an indefinite supply of willing workers over whose fate - and hence whose job performance - she or he can exercise great control. Where an industry's recruitment and supply networks articulate with a migration chain and gain exclusive access to the relevant jobs, an ethnically segregated occupational monopoly appears. Since subcontracting is again actually increasing as what David Harvey calls "flexible capital accumulation" extends in capitalist countries, we can resonably predict an increase in the ethnic segregation of work in cities, like Chicago, where chain migration still prevails (Harvey 1989: 141-172).

Ethnic entrepreneurship often forms through a very similar process. When I lived in Toronto, my next-door neighbors were Macedonians. A steady stream of visitors from Macedonia came through the house next door. One day my neighbor explained, in roughly these terms: "We have short-order restaurants [the day of "fast food" had not yet arrived] and when we need someone to work in one of them we send back home for a young man. He cleans up and starts cooking as he learns English, then graduates to running the counter. When he's saved up some money and gotten pretty good in English, we try to set him up in his own restaurant. Then he hires newcomers." At that point, as my neighbor didn't say, the new restaurant owner owed plenty of money to his relatives, and had to rely on them for help in recruiting his workforce; these relationships reforged the migration chain. In that way, retail trades often become semi-monopolies of one national group or another - Indian newsstands or Koren groceries in New York, Italian barbershops in Toronto. UCLA's sociologists have been analyzing just such processes in Los Angeles for years.

What we already know about North American immigration casts doubt not only on grand stage schemes, but on all the usual ways of describing its consequences: as individual status-striving on the basis of variable "human capital", as wholesale transplantation of pre-existing Old Country groups and cultures, or as assimilation of uprooted individuals and groups to a new dominant cultures. The process has so much collective content that it makes little sense to treat it as a mere sum of individual episodes; what other people played a part in the migration deeply affected the relative success or failure of migrants. Immigrants do not cart alien culture in with their baggage, but take part in a system of understandings and connections that spans origin and destination. "Assimilation" poorly describes what happens to immigrants because groups create substantially different niches at the destination, because change occurs collectively, and because relations among people change much more than the people themselves do. These processes contribute mightily to categorical inequality.

In British nutritional differences, South African Apartheid, American manufacturing firms, hospitals, the small enterprises of chain migrants, and many more organizational settings, then, we discover similar self-reproducing patterns of categorical inequality. While each set of categories carries its own historical baggage, recurrent organizational problems lead to parallel structural solutions. The creation of intrinsic categories and the matching of intrinsic with extrinsic categories build durable inequality into organizations and attach them to networks - internal and external - in ways that favor their reproduction, even their transmission to new members of the categories. How the forms of categorical inequality vary, change, and articulate with non-categorical inequality will occupy my final lecture.

4. Forms of Inequality

Ties between religious identity and political privilege have fluctuated enormously over the long run of European history. During the last millennium, Europe has witnessed everything from the Ottoman empire's ready (if unequal) absorption of Christians and Jews to the Nazis' programmed annihilation of those Jews they could track down. Broadly speaking, political exclusion on the basis of religious identity increased with violently vindictive pursuit of Muslims, Jews, and Christian heretics during the 15th century, reached a state of war through much of Central and Western Europe during the 16th century, stabilized in the same regions from 1648 to 1789 with the Westphalian doctrine of cujus regio ejus religio, then receded irregularly from the French Revolution onward through much of the continent.

Although religious prejudice and unofficial discrimination have persisted, sometimes even flourished as in 19th century pogroms and the Dreyfus Case, by the 20th century categorical religious exclusions from political rights such as those practiced by fascists became rare. Until recently, at least; whether the sharpening of state-identified religious divisions in the former Soviet Union, in disintegrated Yugoslavia, and potentially in France constitutes a reversal or a momentary aberration remains to be seen.

In Great Britain, the political program that eventually won the name Catholic Emancipation originated in wars, both civil and international. Struggles of 1688-89 toppled Roman Catholic James II from the British throne, established Protestant William of Orange as king, and restored a Protestant ruling class in colonized, largely Catholic, Ireland. The Glorious Revolution of 1689 barred Catholics from public office, capping their exclusion with an officeholder's oath that denied tenets of the Catholic religion and (in the case of MPs) explicitly rejected the pope's authority. Britain's and Ireland's Catholics fell under the double suspicion of subservience to a foreign authority, the pope, and collaboration with Britain's historic enemy, France. Although non-Anglican Protestants also suffered political disabilities under the settlement of 1689, in practice subsequent regimes shut Catholics out of parliament and public life much more effectively.

Oaths of abjuration individualized membership in the category "Catholic" and made it seem centrally a matter of belief. Certainly Catholicism had implications for individual characteristics and behavior in the United Kingdom as it did elsewhere. But to be Catholic in the sense that was relevant for citizenship between 1689 and 1829 consisted of involvement in crucial social relations: relations to priests and the church hierarchy, relations to a publicly-identified community of Catholic believers, most of all relations - largely negative - to an Anglican establishment. Just as the category "worker" conveniently signals a bundle of personal characteristics but finally depends on distinction from and relation to the category "employer", the category "Catholic" finally designates a boundary and a distinctive set of social relations across that boundary. Distinctions between Catholic and non-Catholic obviously existed before 1689 and after 1829; between the two dates, however, they coincided with relations between fuller and lesser citizens. As time went on, that coincidence came under increasing challenge.

Catholic exclusion had serious political consequences. When the British won Québec from France in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), the British empire not only gained jurisdiction over an almost unanimously Catholic population but also pacified resistance to British control by large concessions to Québecois, hence to Catholic, self-rule. That settlement inserted a twin to Ireland into the British realm, but granted its Catholics more favorable conditions than their Irish coreligionists enjoyed. To the extent that the British incorporated Catholic Ireland into their economy and polity, furthermore, the Irish Protestant establishment became a less effective instrument of indirect rule, and the demands of Catholic Irish on both sides of the Irish Sea for either autonomy or representation swelled. Enlargement of armed forces during the American war, finally, rendered military recruiters increasingly eager to enroll Irish warriors, already reputed as mercenaries elsewhere in Europe, but barred from British military service by the required anti-Catholic oath.

Militarily-inspired exemptions of Catholic soldiers from oathtaking during the later 1770s raised strident objections among defenders of Anglican supremacy. Such exemptions directly incited formation of a nationwide Protestant Association to petition, agitate, and resist. Scottish Member of Parliament Lord George Gordon, whose vociferous opposition to Catholic claims brought him to headship of the Association in 1780, led an anti-Catholic campaign that concentrated on meetings and parliamentary petitions, but during June 1780 ramified into attacks on Catholic persons and (especially) property in London. A full 275 people died during those bloody struggles, chiefly at the hands of troops who were retaking control over London's streets. Among Britain's ruling classes, those so-called Gordon Riots gave popular anti-Catholicism an aura of violent unreason. By negation, advocacy of Catholics' political rights acquired the cachet of enlightenment.

From that time onward an important fusion occurred. Catholic Emancipation became a standard (although by no means universal) demand of reformers and radicals who campaigned for parliamentary reform. By "reform" its advocates generally meant something like elimination of parliamentary seats controlled by patrons, more uniform qualifications for voting across the country, enlargement of the electorate, and frequent parliamentary elections. (Demands for universal suffrage, for manhood suffrage, or even for equal individual-by-individual representation among the propertied rarely gained much of a following before well into the 19th century.) Catholic Emancipation dovetailed neatly with such proposals, since it likewise called for granting a more equal and effective voice in public affairs to currently-excluded people.

Both parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation surged, then collapsed, as national political issues in Great Britain several times between the 1780s and the 1820s. But Emancipation became more urgent during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when William Pitt the Younger sought to still the Irish revolutionary movement that was undermining the British state's titanic war effort against France. Pitt helped create a (dubiously) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, which meant dissolving the separate Irish parliament and incorporating 100 Irish Protestant members into what had been Britain's parliament. In the process, Pitt half-promised major political concessions to Catholics. King George III's hostility to compromising the Anglican establishment (and thereby a crown that was already suffering from the war-driven rise of parliamentary power) made that commitment impossible to keep. Pitt's consequent resignation by no means stifled Catholic demands. On the contrary, from 1801 to 1829 Catholic Emancipation remained one of the United Kingdom's thorniest political issues. The 1807 wartime resignation of the coalition "Ministry of All the Talents", for example, pivoted on the king's refusal to endorse admission of Catholics to high military ranks.

Much more than a king's attachment to Anglican privilege, however, made the issue contentious. Anti-Catholicism continued to enjoy wide popular appeal in Great Britain, the more so as Irish immigration (responding to industrial expansion in Britain and consequent industrial contraction in Ireland) accelerated. On the other side, Irish Catholic elites resisted the even greater separation from great decisions affecting their island's fate that had resulted from the transfer of the old Dublin parliament's powers - however Protestant it had been - to an English-dominated parliament in distant Westminster. Repeatedly during the 1820s two movements coincided: an increasingly popular campaign for Catholic political rights led by lawyers, priests, and other elites in Ireland, a coalition of radicals, reformers, and organized Catholics in support of Emancipation within Great Britain. Eventually a counter-movement of Protestant resistance to Catholic claims mobilized as well.

The interweaving movements reached their dénouement in 1829. During the previous six years Irish Catholic barrister Daniel O'Connell and his allies had organized successive versions of a mass-membership Catholic Association in Ireland, with some following in Great Britain. They prefected a form of organization (drawn initially and ironically from Methodist models) with which radicals and reformers had experimented during the great mobilizations of 1816 to 1819. The Association collected a monthly penny - the "Catholic rent" - from thousands of peasants and workers. With the proceeds it conducted an incessant, effective campaign of propaganda, coalition-formation, lobbying, and public claim-making. Each time the British government outlawed their Association, O'Connell and friends fashioned a slightly reorganized (and renamed) successor to replace it.

Efforts by Protestant supporters of Emancipation to get a bill through parliament failed in 1812, repeatedly from 1816 to 1822, and again in 1825. But in 1828 a related campaign to expand political rights of Protestant Dissenters (e.g. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) by repealing the 17th century Test and Corporation Acts gained parliamentary and royal assent. Although it had the effect of removing important allies from the same side of the barricade, on balance such an opening made the moment auspicious for Catholic Emancipation. A regime that had defended Anglican supremacy by excluding non-Anglicans from office in principle (despite frequent exceptions in practice for Dissenters) lost some of its rationale for excluding Catholics.

The House of Lords and the king presented larger obstacles than the Commons, which by the 1820s had on the whole reconciled itself to some expansion of Catholic rights. The Lords included, of course, not only peers of the realm but also bishops of the Anglican church, most of whom would not lightly sacrifice their organization's privileged political position. At their coronations, furthermore, British monarchs swore to defend Anglican primacy; in 1828, king George IV still feared that to approve Catholic Emancipation would violate his coronation oath. When the House of Lords again forestalled Emancipation in 1828, both Irish organizers and their British allies redoubled the Emancipation campaign, not only expanding the Catholic Association but also staging massive meetings, marches, and petition drives. The technically illegal election of Catholic O'Connell to parliament from a seat in County Clare during the fall of 1828 directly challenged national authorities, especially when O'Connell proposed to take his place in Westminster at the new parliament's operning early in 1829.

This formidable mobilization, in turn, stimulated a large counter-mobilization by defenders of what they called the Protestant Constitution. In Great Britain and to a lesser extent in Ireland itself opponents of Emancipation organized Brunswick Clubs to manufacture meetings, marches, petitions, propaganda, and solidarity on behalf of the royal house of Brunswick. That the Commons, the Lords, and the king finally conceded major political rights - although far from perfect equality - to Catholics during the spring of 1829 resulted from an otherwise unresolvable crisis in both Ireland and Great Britain. It by no means represented a general conversion of Britons to religious toleration. Jews, for example, did not receive similar concessions until 1858. Nor did unofficial discrimination against Jews or Irish Catholics ever disappear from British life. We are speaking here of legal exclusion from political rights on the basis of religious identity.

In 1689, Great Britain built categorical inequality by religion into the very structure of citizenship, with significant consequences for Catholics' conditions of life. In 1829, the United Kingdom eliminated most traces of that inequality from citizenship rights without by any means rendering Catholics and non-Catholics equal in regard to wealth, income, prestige, or power. As in cases of legal discrimination by race, a categorization that initially implemented unequal treatment eventually became an incentive for, and basis of, political mobilization against discrimination. Although the vast mobilization of Catholics and their supporters in Great Britain and Ireland succeeded in displacing major barriers to Catholic participation in the United Kingdom's public life, it also laid the ground for a nearly contradictory program: the demand for Irish autonomy and, eventually, independence under Catholic hegemony. In an age of politicized ethnicity and nationalism, politicized Irish Catholics represented themselves as yet another nation denied their own rightful state.

For all its particularities, the history of legally-sanctioned religious inequality in the British Isles shares causal structure with many other varieties of categorical inequality: not only South African racial categories and Balkan ethnicities, but also divisions built into American health care, immigrant niches, local communities, and the ordinary operation of capitalist firms. Whether the organization in question is a state, a firm, or something else, we find people who wield power within it responding to organizational problems by creating or incorporating categorical differences, elaborating and using interpersonal networks within categorical boundaries, crecting social markers at the boundaries, transmitting categorical memberships to new participants, giving multiple parties stakes in the categories' perpetuation, and drawing even persons disadvantaged by their categorical assignment into some forms of collaboration with the system. Although contempt, mistrust, and misunderstanding often characterize cross-boundary relations, negative feelings do not in themselves explain such systems of categorical inequality. Even people who do not hate generally collaborate with them.

To be sure, differences begin right there: differences between states and other organizations; between asymmetrical, coercive imposition of categories and their slow emergence from unequal social interaction; between creation of new categories and insertion of existing categories into new settings; between life-shaping categorical inequalities and narrow ones. Common features result from general properties of categorical work, which brings with it a visible boundary, defined relations across that boundary, mechanisms for placing new persons and social relations with respect to the boundary, and segregated social structures attaching life on one side of the boundary or the other to larger webs of social relations. Systematic variation in categorical work results chiefly from differences in the kinds of organizations involved, the scope of boundaries in quesiton, implication of categories in social relations outside the organization, and configurations of interested parties.

According to such an argument, gender, class, ethnicity, race, citizenship, and other pervasive categorical systems do not operate sui generis, but share many causal properties. I will not, of course, deny the meanings, memories, social networks, and practices that accumulate separately within each of these containers. Those distinctive accumulations, indeed, play significant parts in the effectiveness of categorical relations, saving participants the effort of constructing and imposing novel conventions. The installation of a gender distinction at an otherwise crucial organizational boundary increases the likelihood of sexual play and predation across that boundary, while the installation of a racial distinction at a similar organizational location increases the likelihood of segregated social relations outside the organization. Yet over and above such important differences, categorical inequalities operate and change in similar ways.

How and why? Humans have devised a limited number of organizational forms that work effectively in a very wide range of situations. One form is hierarchy, another the network built up of relatively homogeneous triads, a third the long-stranded network, a fourth the bounded association having some concentration of authority. Yet another is the location of paired, unequal categories at a well-defined boundary.

None of these organizational forms does good or evil in itself; each at various times does the work of saints, sinners, or ordinary bumblers. But almost all human beings learn to detect, join, connect, transfer, and even create these forms early in life. All have structurally predictable yet often unforeseen consequences: unanticipated but frequent encounters among connected people, recurrent myths among occupants of high-ranking positions about occupants of low-ranking positions and vice versa, concentration of intimacy, marriage, and other relations of trust within triad-dominated networks, exclusions of qualified but unconnected persons from categorically-concentrated rewards, and so on. Categorical inequality results from the institution of a general, powerful, problem-solving organizational form in a location that commands substantial rewards and/or punishments; it is pernicious to the extent that it causes harm to the excluded and produces a net underuse of potentially life-enhancing talent.

What sorts of organizational problems does categorical inequality solve? We enter dangerous terrain, where in the absence of accumulated research moral indignation and teleological reasoning easily slide us into quicksand. Within the world of organized work and labor markets alone, I have already suggested that nine distinguishable processes promote categorical inequality in work's rewards: differences in job qualifications, employer discrimination, differences in job preferences, bounding, ranking, linking, categorical designation of jobs, segregation of networks, and differential distribution of categories among firms and nonfirm worksites; to encompass categorical inequalities with respect to states, communities, and other organizations, we would only have to lengthen our list. Looking for a simple link between categorical inequality and organizational problems resembles seeking a single explanation for other multiple-use human inventions such as language, cities, and ideology.

Still, some organizational circumstances seem to favor the building in of categorical inequality. Let us review four sets of favorable circumstances: elite exploitation of labor-demanding resources, non-elite hoarding of opportunities, diffusion of organizational models, and elaboration of valued social relations around existing divisions.

First comes elite exploitation of labor-demanding resources: the situation in which some well-connected group of actors controls a valuable resoruce but can only exploit it by harnessing the effort of others whom they seek to exclude from the full value added by their effort. Here categorical boundaries separate major beneficiaries - we could call them exploiters, profiteers, or rent-seekers - from other contributors.

Although neoclassical doctrine declares that workers generally receive the equivalent of their labor's marginal product, exclusion from full value added marks the general condition of labor under capitalism. The labor theory of value grew up within 18th- and 19th-century crafts as a hierarchy of masters, journeymen, and apprentices with significant possibilities of movement upward gave way to an almost-unbridgeable gap between capitalists and workers; organized capitalists excluded workers from full value added, and workers cast that exclusion in the labor theory of value. Systems of slavery operate on similar principles, but with even sharper divisions between included and excluded persons. South African racial categorization and professionalization of American physicians likewise conform to the inclusion-exclusion principle.

Citizenship commonly operates in a parallel manner, excluding non-citizens from state-controlled or state-enforced benefits to the advantage of some or all citizens. In Kuwait, Israel, Germany, the United States, and many other countries barriers between citizens and non-citizens have arisen in such circumstances. A well-drawn boundary between ins and outs facilitates and justifies unequal treatment; if the boundary corresponds to one that already prevails in the surrounding population, it costs less to install and maintain. An oligarchy's monopolization of resources becomes easier when a state can draw its revenues and their protection from a patron state or from easily-sequestered commodities and activities such as Renaissance Venice's long-distance trade, early 20th century Bolivia's tin, and contemporary Saudi Arabia's oil.

In all such circumstances, categorical inequality does two kinds of work for the powerful. It facilitates the extraction of effort from subordinate populations without full sharing of that effort's returns. But it also permits members of the superior category, which is usually much smaller, to distribute solidarity-generating benefits within their own number, thus assuring a command structure and orderly succession within an elite. Mancur Olson once denigrated such "distributional coalitions" as barriers to collective efficiency except when they approached coalitions of the whole, but the recognized their value for coalition members (Olson 1982).

A second general circumstance, non-elite hoarding of opportunities, complements the first. When members of a categorically-bounded network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network's modus operandi, network members regularly hoard their access to the resoruce, creating beliefs and practices that sustain their control. As Mamaroneck and New York City illustrate abundantly, immigrant niches provide strong instances of this second inequality-promoting circumstance. So, however, do trade diasporas, cults, criminal conspiracies, and homogeneously-recruited elite military units.

These last examples point to an important variant on the second class of circumstances. Initially heterogeneous cults, priesthoods, criminal conspiracies, and elite military units sometimes create exclusive inequality-sustaining categories in the process of exploiting resources that are valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network's modus operandi; they often enhance commitment to categories by means of intense socialization and segregation for entering cohorts. Military academy hazing offers a dramatic illustration of the process, not to mention insight into why old members and new recruits often conspire to organize categorically segregated recruitment into the elect.

An extreme variant of the pattern also exists. Where rewards such as statehood, military aid, or preferential access to land accrue to leaders who assert credibly that they represent unified, distinct, and worthy populations, political entrepreneurs have powerful incentives to create, fortify, and enforce exclusive inequality-sustaining categories while suppressing alternative categorizations and denigrating populations that lie across their category-defining boundaries. Although most such assertions fail, for the last two centuries several hundred of them have succeeded at an international scale, bringing recognition of sovereignty to putative nations that previously lacked political autonomy and sovereignty-linked rights to arm, tax, coerce, monitor, and exclude.

Those recurrent processes have built durable categorical inequality into the international system. Because the stakes are so high, furthermore, members of competing categories within the same polity have often killed each other over such demands. In fact, the frequency of genocide and politicide have increased dramatically in the world as a whole since World War II, precisely as the possibilities and advantages of a putative nation's controlling its own state and excluding others from its benefits have risen (Gurr 1994, Gurr & Harff 1994).

By extension, the two main circumstances favoring categorical inequality produce a third circumstance: the reproduction of organizational models that happen to include unequal categories. No functional necessity, it seems, requires all armies to maintain sharp distinctions between officers and enlisted men; most military organizations, indeed, compromise the boundary by creating warrant officers, high-ranking petty officers, and well-defined channels from enlisted to officer status. Yet any state producing a new military organization reproduces some version of a distinction established by centuries-old relations between landlords and tenants, between nobles and commoners, between knights and retainers.

Just so long as caste-divided militaries fight no less effectively than egalitarian guerrilleros or other forms their enemies may improvise we may expect one military organization to emulate its predecessors, reproducing the officer/enlisted division from one military service to the next. We can reasonably expect emulation because familiar forms transfer more cheaply than unfamiliar forms and ease articulation with other familiar organizational forms such as educational institutions and state bureaucracies. More generally, lower transaction costs favor the reproduction of existing organizational models, whatever their origins.

A fourth complementary set of circumstances keeps systems of categorical inequality in place despite playing little part in their creation: elaboration of valued social relations around existing divisions. In the absence of concerted resistance by members of subordinate categories and exogenous changes in the host organizaiton, all parties build multiple routines around the categorical boundary, and thus acquire interests in its maintenance. Assuming the continuity of existing divisions however much they resent those divisions, office workers elaborate time schedules, evasive practices, mythologies, jokes, epithets, alliances, and conspiracies that actually reinforce the structures within which they grow. Even slaves acquire interests in the predictability of masters' behavior and in the segregation that affords them opportunities for mutual aid, even hard-pressed enlisted men collaborate with their officers most of the time.

In short, elite exploitation of labor-demanding resources, non-elite hoarding of opportunities, diffusion of organizational models created by one of the first two processes, and elaboration of valued social relations around existing divisions promote the creation and maintenance of categorical inequality. None of these circumstances requires categories with closed perimeters, equally well-defined from every angle of approach. All they entail is a boundary separating two zones of unequal reward and their occupants plus stable definitions of relations across the boundary. Complete perimeters, as in the case of state-licensed medical professions or internationally-recognized states, only seem to form in the presence of multiple rivals or enemies and strong pressures for internal control. Neither multiple enemies nor high internal control figures in most cases of categorical inequality. Because most relevant categories consist of boundaries and relations across boundaries rather than closed perimeters, indeed, people commonly move easily from one unequal system to the next, or even participate simultaneously in more than one, performing as women, workers, and Italians in relation to men, bosses and, say, blacks - quite often different sets of persons - at the same moment.

For all these reasons, categorical inequality has a dual relation to change. On one side, in the absence of disturbance it tends to reproduce itself like ivy on a brick wall, conforming to local surfaces and drawing sustenance from its many connections to the surroundings. Yet a shift in the organization, resource base, or social relations of at least one or two major participants can change it rapidly, as witness alteration of many immigrant niches, resumption of non-lethal politics after some civil wars, entry of black workers into American public sector employment, tipping of jobs from male to female, rapid transition of nationalists from "terrorists" to recognized leaders of states, professionalization of medical specialities, or the startling contrast between half a century of tenacious resistance to Catholic Emancipation and the few months it took for Catholics to start participating in British national politics once legal barriers fell. Struggles by members of subordinate categories, furthermore, can obviously promote shifts in their unequal fortunes.

That such rapid switches sometimes occur in response to organizational change indicates that prevailing explanations of categorical inequality exaggerate the weight of individual dispositions and capacities. Two related questions arise. First, to what extent can we reduce all categorical differences to consequences of individual attributes, orientations, and performances? Second, do non-categorical inequalities respond to the same sorts of organizational processes as categorical inequalities? My honest answer to both must be "I don't know ... at least not yet."

Yet my reading of the evidence runs toward strong working hypotheses. We should find that once categories are fixed in place they greatly attenuate the effects of individual variation in knowledge, skill, attitude, and performance on either side of categorical divides. Even aside from such extreme genetic reductionism as The Bell Curve, differential rewards do not correspond closely to variation in individual attributes. We should also find that categorical organization helps produce individual differences as a consequence of structured differentials in contacts, experiences, opportunities, and assistance or resistance from others. Bonds, not essences, provide the bases of durable inequality.

If so, we might want to reverse the conventional procedure for analyzing discrimination: instead of treating it as the residual difference between categories once all possible sources of individual variation are taken into account, treat it as that portion of inequality that corresponds to locally-relevant categories, then see how much of the residual can be explained by variation in human capital, effort, and similar individual-level factors. The recurrent finding that job segregation according to race, ethnicity and, especially, gender rather than wage discrimination within jobs accounts for a large share of all wage differentials encourages such a reversal of reasoning.

A clearer analysis of inequality's structural origins becomes more urgent as inequality in general sharpens. Richard Freeman has recently summed up trends over the last two decades in these terms:

An economic disaster has befallen low-skilled Americans, especially young men. Researchers using several data sources - including household survey data from the Current Population Survey, other households surveys, and establishment surveys - have documented that wage inequality and skill differentials in earnings and employment increased sharply in the United States from the mid-1970s through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The drop in the relative position of the less skilled shows up in a number of ways: greater earnings differentials between older and younger workers; greater differentials between high-skilled and low-skilled occupations; in a wider earnings distribution overall and within demographic and skill groups; and in less time worked by low-skill and low-paid workers (Freeman 1995: 17-18).

By now such findings have become drearily familiar. While we certainly should continue to grill the usual suspects - low-wage immigration, competition from offshore production, weakening of organized labor's political position, technological displacement of middle-level workers, short-term corporate profit-taking, and so on - my analysis suggests that alteration of categorical inequalities will turn out to be a key mechanism by which aggregate inequality has been increasing. The channeling of illegal Asian immigrants into segregated garment sweatshops constitutes one such mechanism, the concentration of black youngsters in high-turnover minimum-wage service jobs another.

This view of categorical inequality, if correct, has three strong implications for intervention. First, changes in attitudes will have weak and indirect effects on existing patterns of inequality; education for tolerance and understanding may ease the way, but it will not attack root causes of discrimination. Second, alteration of categorical differences in human capital through education, on-the-job training, or transformation of social environments will affect categorical inequality, but chiefly through their impact on the organization of opportunity rather than their improvement of individual capacities. Finally, reorganization of workplaces and other sites of differential rewards with respect to the location and character of categorical boundaries can produce rapid, far-reaching changes in categorical inequality.

As my tales of Catholic Emancipation and South African racism have indicated most directly, the extent of large-scale categorical inequality matters not only because of deprivation among members of subordinate categories but also because it affects the viability of democratic institutions. A polity is democratic, as I understand it, to the extent that it institutionalizes broad, relatively equal citizenship, protects citizens from arbitrary action by state agents, and gives citizens significant collective control over state personnel and policy. Widespread categorical inequality threatens democratic institutions twice: by giving members of powerful categories incentives and means to exclude others from full benefits, and by providing visible markers for inclusion and exclusion. Current American efforts to shrink state-mediated entitlements and tie benefits to employment strike me, despite their obfuscatory language of market rationalization, as embodying just such threats to democracy.

Caution: I do not consider it possible or even desirable to delete all categorical inequalities from social life; I appreciate the advantages, for example, of licensing professionals who make risky interventions in our bodies and of attaching special obligations-cum-rights to citizenship. The two require categorical distinctions from non-professionals and non-citizens. Nor do I think we can easily check the propensity of people who run large organizations to create segregated patron-client chains within them, then defend those patronage systems by means of category work. I am not certain either that we should block immigrant niche-making, so long as it imposes no net harm on persons outside the niche.

We can, nevertheless, envisage three crucial steps toward equality of opportunity: first, analyzing present-day organizational structures to detect the operation of unnecessary categorical inequalities within them; second, constructing verified counterfactuals, alternative paths by which inequality-sustaining organizations could do similar work without pernicious inequality; third, baffling routines by which extrinsic categories come to match differentially-rewarded intrinsic categories and thereby exclude members of subordinate categories from their shares of organizationally-distributed rewards. Guided by adequate understanding of categorical inequality and its consequences, familiar forms of organizational analysis and intervention could foster substantial, beneficial social change.

Here is a field of analysis and action worthy of social-scientific intelligence. Here is a chance to work seriously toward reduction in durable inequality. We must move away from, not toward, the gross inequalities of James Gillray's era. In the midst of 21st century abundance we should leave no place for bitter confrontations of the tall and the short, the fat and the thin, the overfed and the hungry.

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