New Forms of Inequality and the Structures of Glam-Capitalism
Journal Title: Social Evolution & History - Year 2016, Vol 15, Issue 2
Abstract
The long history of capitalism can be interpreted as an evolution driven by permanently mutating socioeconomic structures. The article is devoted to new forms of inequality that emerged during the postindustrial phase of the capitalism evolution and increase the structural complexity of contemporary societies. The spatial configuration of inequality transforms while globalization has resulted not in the ‘world society’ but rather in a transnational network of the globality enclaves: the largest cities connected by the flows of material, symbolic, and human resources. Compared to their countries as a whole, the metropolitan areas have no boundaries and are more successful with respect to economic growth although they are most unequal in terms of the Gini coefficient. The ‘onion-like’ stratification with dominant middle strata is substitutes with the ‘pear-like’ bimodal stratification. This new stratification results from the rise of the glam-capitalism. The glamour is transformed from an extravagant aesthetics into a new rationality of postindustrial capitalism. Now the value creation is more related to trends than to brands or products. The owners of trends and creators of trendy goods/services compose new status groups: glam-capitalists and glam-professionals who dominate over the shrinking middle class. The flows of people, money, goods, and information are structuring the social life under the glam-capitalism and involvement in these flows becomes a factor of social differentiation. The flow-structures make inequality temporal. Rising social significance of access to trendy goods creates new configuration of inequality as traditional quantitative gap between ‘having more’ and ‘having less’ is combined with the temporal lag between ‘having now’ and ‘having later’.
Authors and Affiliations
Dmitry Ivanov
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP265953
- DOI -
- Views 117
- Downloads 0
Predicting Political Systems Using Economic, Environmental, and Relational Variables
This article continues the elaboration of a multiple factor model for predicting the political systems that emerge in specific economic, environmental and relational contexts. While anthropologists have long sought to de...
The Emergence of Pristine States
In this article the emergence of the Pristine State will be considered. First, I will present an overview of the applied method. Then seven cases of – probable – Pristine States are described. This makes a comparative re...
The Early Stages of Globalization Evolution: Networks of Diffusion and Exchange of Domesticates, Technologies, and Luxury Goods
The paper looks into the evolution of globalization at its earliest stages (from the Neolithic Revolution to the Urban Revolution). Building on the approach by Frank, Chase-Dunn, and Hall to defining the age of the World...
Evidence for Direct Evolutionary Linkages of Agriculture with Other Customs
In a world sample of diverse societies, geographical and other variations can cause misleading low or high correlations be-tween two customs when measured by scores of individual societies. Evolutionary linkage of agricu...
Optimization Theories of the Transition from Foraging to Agriculture: A Critical Assessment and Proposed Alternatives
es, one in economics and the other in anthropology, explain the economic evolution of Neolithic societies, particularly their transit from foraging to agriculture. Both assume rational optimizing behavior. It is argued t...