Origins of Inequality in Human Societies by Bernd Baldus

Author:Bernd Baldus [Baldus, Bernd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317205968
Google: 62bADAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-28T04:30:03+00:00

The Long-Term Evolution of Inequality Structures: Path-Dependence and Indeterminate Outcomes

Uncertain environments and volatile choices turn the long-term evolution of inequality into a path-dependent process: innovation and external shocks constantly introduce variety whereas compounding effects, structural inertia or social control narrow the range of possible outcomes. The probability of changes in path direction is stochastic: it depends largely on specific events occurring close to or immediately prior to each change and allows therefore no reliable long-term prediction.

Research on path-dependence (Thelen 1999; Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2000; Streek and Thelen 2005; Vergne and Durand 2010) has focused on critical junctures where historical event sequences became locked into a particular course which participants eventually saw as a new logic of the system. Skocpol (1992), for instance, suggested that in the US the early fragmentation of state power favored the growth of shop unions and prevented the emergence of a unified labor movement and a comprehensive social insurance scheme. In countries like Germany, by contrast, the creation of a state-run social security system and the organization of unions by entire industrial sectors forced industry to accept both (Streek 1992). Other work (Arthur 1990, 1994; North 1990) has shown how the fortuitous adoption and subsequent lock-in of technologies and institutions led to prolonged market dominance in spite of later, better solutions. Basalla (1988) documents the cultural selection of widely divergent uses of similar technologies in Japan, China and Europe between AD 800 and 1600.

The critical junctures perspective showed the unpredictability of path-dependent processes, but treated narrowing options and lock-in, once begun, as a mechanical process from which there was no escape. Little was said about the contributions of actors to path-creation: what role they had in initiating change, and what made them stay in, or escape from, lock-in situations (Garud et al. 2010). To understand such decisions we must realize that what is now the past was once the future, a time when individuals faced multiple opportunities for action. Only then can history be treated not simply as what was or what had to be, but as actual choices by participants based on their understanding of obstacles, opportunities and alternative courses of actions. An evolutionary analysis of social inequality must therefore not only address the historically observable, but examine the counterfactual “objectively ‘possible’ or ‘probable’ response of individuals to actual or imagined potential actions of others” (Weber 1968: 114).

In path-dependent processes, past events can increase or lower the probability of subsequent change. An event path is absorbing if it diminishes the degrees of freedom for social actors and increases the likelihood of particular outcomes. In the evolution of inequality, absorbing pathways are usually caused by feedback and social control. Path segments can also be more of less independent of each other, producing a random walk which follows an irregular long-term pattern, and where the probability of a variety of outcomes is roughly equal. Finally, paths can be expanding and show an increasing probability to change direction or to branch. Such is the case in times of

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