Research agenda

We see a fundamental issue as lying in the nature of changing economic inequalities: how and why is the share of value added going to labour falling in many countries across the world? Why should the relationship between productivity and earnings have changed? How are these economic inequalities shaped by both social and political systems? Our aspiration, therefore, is to build up an integrated social and political economy of inequality through the pursuit of interlinked research projects.

The mechanisms involved in producing inequality have fundamental implications for social and political systems. There has been a profound reconfiguration of the ‘advanced’ societies over the last quarter century, radically changing the nature of and interrelations between economic, social and political systems. While this has taken different forms in different countries (in say Sweden or Denmark compared with the UK or the US), there have been similar basic changes. Rising economic and social inequality is affecting the configuration of classes; fragmenting the ‘old’ pattern of political involvement via stable parties with high trust in politicians, and participation through voting and party membership, as well as civic culture; and leading to low participation, low party membership, as well as populist (‘radical right’ and ‘radical left’) parties, and low trust in political systems. These developments have been prompted in large part by technological change which has caused the collapse of stable employment in key sectors and which has brought with it a generation of winners and losers, shaped by differential access to higher education and other avenues towards skill-acquisition as well as by broader vectors of power and social norms. The polarisation between winners and losers has in turn prompted a reconfiguration of class affiliations and a realignment of political preferences, leading to a reconfiguration in many countries of party politics and new forms of democratic organisation and participation.

Our work will advance the existing scholarship on advanced countries, while also asking what the advanced democracies can learn from scholarship on developing countries of the global South. Here, analogous changes have been felt in economies such as Brazil, South Africa and Taiwan, while global geo-political and technological forces underlying the growth in inequalities in the advanced democracies have been shaped by distinctive institutional and political dynamics, with consequences for inequalities both within and between countries. Our work will also examine the role that new inequalities in the resources, skills and connections related to fast-changing media and information infrastructures play in reproducing or potentially challenging deep-seated inequalities.

Economic inequalities and their production also have to be understood in terms of the experience of both winners and losers; how do material inequalities affect status inequalities, and vice versa? People’s lived experiences of inequality – whether socio-economic, gender, ethnicity or other forms of inequality – have implications for their experiences, incentives, motivations and sense of self. And these implications have far-reaching effects upon social, political and economic life. Our research agenda will encompass ethnographic and other studies which seek to understand the changing impact of inequalities on lived experience in different parts of the world. Current projects include the impact of time inequalities in India and the impact of economic, ethnic and spatial inequalities on levels of violence and social disorganisation/fragmentation in both the US and South America.

Our final question is whether inequality is inevitable, and what might mitigate or curtail it? We pose this question mindful of the significance of the kind of wealth and inheritance effects which Thomas Piketty has emphasised will generate increasing levels of inequality as those with most wealth will tend to disproportionately accumulate more in the future. We are also mindful of the way that cultural and social capital can re-inforce the inheritance of economic inequalities, possibly reinforced by new forms of social and economic differentiation based on automated data collection and data processing. Information technologies with zero marginal costs and huge returns to scale, along with robotisation, is likely to drive trends into the future, with possible implications in rewards to different kinds of skills, and the generation of huge geographical differences between economies in different parts of the globe. We see geographical reinforcement processes also tending towards the reproduction of inequality.

Our research in this area will have a strong comparative and international focus, examining why it is that some systems appear to produce higher levels of inequality; asking why high levels of inequality appear to be so readily tolerated in many areas; and analysing the implications of this understanding for the possibilities for countering inequality in particular contexts, through coalition-building of various kinds and the development of policy instruments such as taxation, wage regulation and the instantiation of rights.