Chapter 9. Social Inequality
Learning Objectives
9.1. What Is Social Inequality?
- Analyze social differentiation and social stratification as components of social inequality.
- Define the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of condition.
- Compare caste and class systems.
- Distinguish between Marx and Weber’s approaches to class and status.
9.2. Social Inequality in Canada
- Distinguish between relative and absolute poverty.
- Analyze trends of inequality in wealth and income in Canada.
- Describe characteristics of social classes and social mobility in Canada.
9.4. Theoretical Perspectives on Social Inequality
- Understand and apply functionalist, critical sociological, and interpretive perspectives to social inequality.
Habitus
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) defined habitus as the deeply-seated schemas, habits, feelings, dispositions, and forms of practical know-how that people hold as a result of living in a specific social milieu or context (Bourdieu, 1990). It is the way a person of a particular background perceives and reacts to the world. More technically, it is “the way society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel, and act in determinate ways, which then guide them in their creative responses to the constraints and solicitations of their extant milieu” (Wacquant, 2004). Bourdieu referred to it as one’s “feel for the game,” to use a sports metaphor. Choices are perhaps always “free” in some formal sense, but they are also always situated within one’s habitus.
As Bourdieu pointed out, habitus is so deeply ingrained that people take its reality as natural rather than as a product of social circumstances. This false sense of universality has the unfortunate effect of justifying social inequalities. It allows people to believe that the Ted Rogers of the world are uniquely gifted and predisposed for success, when in fact it is success itself that is “predisposed” by underlying structures of power and privilege.
Content Change
September 24, 2025 – Introduction to Social Inequality in Canada section removed. All references connected to the stories contained in the introduction section have also been removed.
Media Attributions
- Figure 9.1 Tesla Chairman Elon Musk by kqedquest, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY-NC 2.0 licence.
