Rethinking Inequality in a Cross-national Comparison - Methodological Matters in an Entropic Perspective

Abstract

Contemporary inequality is progressively shifting to a “classless” form of discrimination (Pakulsky and Waters, 1996; Wright, 2007), not only deriving from individual and collective differences in economic dimension, but more and more relying on multiple, hybrid and cross-cutting generators (social networks, education, gender, age, ethnicity), rather than on traditional class stratification structures. However, the social system still produces structural effects reflecting typical class advantages or disadvantages between individuals (Sørensen, 1996). Exploring such complexity, this article focuses both on methodological matters regarding the exploration of contemporary inequality and provides a cross-national comparison on such topics through the application of the Theil index as an entropic measure of inequality.