Groups preserve advantage by monopolising access to valuable positions, credentials, networks and property, rather than by outperforming others in open competition.
Tilly's Durable Inequality in 1998 argued that persistent inequality between categories is produced by a small number of organisational mechanisms, of which hoarding is central: a network secures a resource, restricts entry to members, and the categorical boundary outlives everyone who drew it. The inequality is then maintained by ordinary administration rather than by anyone's animus.
In practice
- A firm recruiting by referral has an access rule, not a hiring policy, and its demographics are the output of that rule.
- A catchment area drawn round an expensive neighbourhood has allocated a school without anyone being refused.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change