When does disadvantage not accumulate? : Toward a sociological conceptualization of resilience

Drawing from cumulative inequality theory, conditions under which inequality in status domains or health does not accumulate are identified and how resilience is important in this process of offsetting the disadvantages of poverty or poor health are explained.

Abstract

Sociologists have long been interested in the study of inequality, but systematic consideration of how inequality accumulates over the life course has drawn renewed attention in recent decades from scholars studying a variety of topics including stratification, aging, health, and criminology. Given sociological interest in recurring inequalities, scholars are intrigued by and seek to understand how inequality accumulates. The maxim that disadvantage accumulates has guided most of the empirical research and theoretical statements about cumulative inequality (Dannefer, 2003; DiPrete and Eirich, 2006; Ferraro et al., 2009). Sociologists anticipate that structural forces constrain life chances and that early disadvantage will result in additional disadvantage (although this is a limited conceptualization of cumulative inequality). While it is reasonable to expect that disadvantage will accumulate across the life course, how does one explain when it does not accumulate? We believe answering this question is critical to the development of theories of cumulative inequality and for empirical research on accumulation processes. Explanations for why disadvantage does not accumulate are varied but tend to center on discussions of counterbalancing effects of accumulating advantage (Ross and Wu 1996), compensatory mechanisms (Ferraro and Kelley-Moore, 2003), activation of resources (Link et al., 2008; Smith, 2005), divergent trajectories (Carstensen and Mikels, 2005), and resilience (Luthar et al., 2000). Although resilience is often used by psychologists to describe how people are able to effectively cope with stressors, we develop a sociological conceptualization of resilience that addresses other mechanisms for stopping or reversing the accumulation of disadvantage and incorporates both the individual and the social world. Drawing from cumulative inequality theory, we seek to (1) identify conditions under which inequality in status domains (e.g., wealth, occupational life chances) or health (e.g., functional ability) does not accumulate and (2) explicate how resilience is important in this process of offsetting the disadvantages of poverty or poor health. In doing so, we call attention to oversimplified interpretations of cumulative disadvantage and emphasize the role of human agency in theories that address cumulative inequality. Clearly, there are multiple potential reasons for why disadvantage may not accumulate in the life course, but our focus here is on resilience, the volitional, purposive set of responses undertaken by actors who perceive their condition to be undesirable. From the outset, it is important to be explicit that our emphasis is on how individuals recognize their conditions because resilience, as we construe it, is an agentic, purposive response to the structural realities of cumulative inequality. Indeed, we see resilience as an important intersection of agency and structure in a theory fairly comfortable with the latter but largely inattentive to the former. To be sure, there are ways to counteract the accumulation of disadvantage that do not stem from the agency of the actor (e.g., stare policies or resource flow through social networks). But as we shall discuss later in this paper, action undertaken by others to combat one’s adversity very often works in tandem with an individual’s own resilient responses.