12 - Discrimination

Summary

The concept of discrimination

Discrimination is a phenomenon that is widely referred to and talked about in everyday life, but its recognition and meanings have rarely been investigated by sociologists. Sociologists have analyzed discrimination for the most part as a variable that can be defined and measured objectively, and they have given little attention to accounts by either the discriminators or the discriminated. Until recent years discrimination was discussed by sociologists almost exclusively in the field of racial and ethnic relations, and the focus of many studies was on the relationships between prejudice and discrimination (see Feagin and Eckberg, 1980, for a review). In recent years the topic of discrimination has shifted somewhat to a focus on discrimination against women. Discrimination is occasionally mentioned although rarely studied with reference to other areas of differentiation (for example, in the cases of the aged or physically disabled), but it is perhaps significant that the term has hardly ever been employed in the literature on class stratification. Since discrimination is often defined in terms of an inappropriate ascriptive orientation, its absence from the class literature would be understandable if it was generally agreed among sociologists that achievement determined class position. There is, however, considerable emphasis among many sociologists on differential treatment based on class origins; examples include children from the lower strata receiving inferior formal education, and individuals from the upper strata receiving preferential treatment in entering certain occupations.