In accordance with structural theory and distributive justice theory, this study investigates if Americans' personal encounters with the opportunity structure and their existing reward conditions will influence their perceptions toward distribution outcomes in the U.S. I argue that higher-status individuals possessing various "attributes of structural privilege" will exhibit less support for regulating income inequality in society than lower-status individuals. Upward mobility should also be negatively related to support for restoring greater equality in allocation outcomes. However, the effect of mobility on justice perceptions should vary by class status, since class has been known to be a reliable predictor of these attitudes. The study employed a sample of 438 American adults from the GSS 2000 dataset, and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was applied in the analyses of the data. Two of the three above hypotheses received partial confirmation, that is, there were class, race, and gender differences in distributive justice perceptions. Class also interacted significantly with occupational mobility in altering distributive justice perceptions.

This study presents the major ideas of Mahatma Gandhi on social stratification and social inequality. The methodology consists of systematically reading and analyzing the literature through which the theoretical components of social stratification in Gandhi's writings become more explicit, and evaluating these theoretical components. A systematic statement of Gandhi's theory of social stratification included the following five components. First, social differentiation is inherent in human nature. Gandhi believed in the universality of social differentiations and was convinced that societies were organized into the divisions on the basis of vocations. Second, relations among strata imply that a division of labor is essential for the stability and organization of society. Gandhi also implied that this division of labor is necessary and functional. Third, normative patterns establish traditions of heredity. To Gandhi, the four divisions in society defined a person's "calling" which is essential for social organization. Fourth, the system of stratification is the universal law that everyone is obliged to follow. Gandhi tried to legitimize social stratification through moral and religious values of the society. Fifth, social stratification system defines duties only and does not confer any privileges. To Gandhi, the divisions of people into strata was the best possible adjustment of social stability and progress. While accepting some form of social stratification for the benefit of total funcioning of the society, Gandhi refused to accept that social inequality necessarily grows out of the process of social stratification. To maintain the hereditary law of social stratification and reduce the inequality, Gandhi suggested the abolition of the present caste system and the revival of four orders of social organization, the removal of the concept of untouchability, the regulation of trusteeship, decentralization of power, the increase of women's status, and vocational education for all.

Economic growth is often linked to service economy. Sustainable economic growth is based upon economic, environmental and social sustainability. Some argue that economic and environmental sustainability has its foundation on social sustainability. By analysing the effects of service economy on society, one can identify potential threats to social sustainability. Theoretical analysis is supported by historical events from around the world focusing on highlighting threats that service economy countries are exposed to.Findings were that while on short term post-industrial economies boost development and sustainability, on long term countries are facing challenges in terms of ageing population, sustainable communities and access to social equity. Furthermore, depending on local policies, in some cases a trade-off is needed among factors in order to reach the highest level of social sustainability.

Background: Studies have shown that racial and ethnic Minorities have poorer access to medical care when compared to Whites. Much of the research regarding Minority access to care issues reflects national data that has made it difficult to extrapolate findings to accurately reveal disparities that exist within a particular community. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was an association between race and access to medical care in the state of Virginia.Objectives: To determine if there is an association between race/ethnicity and access to medical care when comparing different Minority populations to the White population; assess any differences between Minority populations with regards to access to medical care, and identify other risk factors that may modify the association between race/ethnicity and access to medical care. Methods: Data was collected from the 2002 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) for N= 4,392 Virginian respondents. Descriptive statistics and prevalences were done to assess the sample based on unweighted data. The weighted sample was then applied for univariate and multivariate analyses with 95% confidence intervals (CI) to examine the risk estimates (odds ratios/ORs) and assess the relationship between race/ethnicity and access to medical care. Pearson chi-square analyses determined which variables to control for in the logistic regression model. SPSS 13.0 software was used for all analyses.Results: Blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be at risk for not having access to medical care (crude ORs = 1.20, 95% CI = 1.19-1.21 and 1.64, 95% CI = 1.61-1.66, respectively) when compared to Whites. Relative to Whites, Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans were more likely to have access to health care (crude ORs = 0.71, 95% CI = 0.70-0.73 and 0.90, 95% CI = 0.84-0.93, respectively). After adjustment for confounders, there was a significant inverse association found between Minority populations and not having access to medical care when compared to Whites. Adjusted ORs for Blacks = 0.71, 95%CI = 0.70-0.72, for Asian/Pacific Islanders 0.80, 95%CI = 0.75-0.80, for Native Americans = 0.74, 95%CI = 0.70-0.78, and Hispanics = 0.59, 95%CI = 0.58-0.60. With regard to the adjusted ORs, there were no notable differences found between the different Minority populations. The relationship between race/ethnicity and access to care appeared to be modified by other predictors in the model. Specifically, female gender, being young or of middle age, no insurance status, poor health status, and little or no income, became stronger predictors for determining those groups who were more at risk for not receiving access to medical care in Virginia as oppose to race. Conclusion: The study strongly recommends that continued surveillance is needed to monitor access to care for Minority populations in the state of Virginia. Further research would be needed to assess these populations access over time, determine how interactions between race and other risk factors affect access, and design interventions that will succeed in teaching us more about the causal pathways that lead to such racial inequalities in access to medical care.

This thesis explores the relationship between education and employment, particularly as it affects the socio-economic mobility of people from poor and marginalized communities in Nepal. I carry out a multi-sited, inter-generational analysis to investigate the aspirations, expectations, and experiences of young people. Based on ethnographic and participatory fieldwork in a village and a school in the outskirts of Lalitpur in 2012, this research grows organically to provide a detailed review of current schooling practices and their employment as well as wider implications in Nepal. Theoretically, this thesis investigates the experiences of the marginalized in terms of the relevance, level, and quality of their education. I examine the role of education as a socializing institution as well as its characteristics as a social and a positional good. I assess the outcomes of their education through internal measures (such as exam scores and pass rates) but also extend the analysis to include external ones (such as job opportunities and life trajectories). I focus on the deterministic life-stages model of transition to challenge the expectation that children go to school, acquire skills, obtain jobs, and become 'adults'. People have historically placed high hopes on education, but the potential for socio-economic mobility for the poor and marginalized are limited by the failures of the school system, sustained challenges to higher education access, limited relevance of education to employment opportunities, and continued prominence of social and cultural capital to secure jobs. Yet, their educational engagement has provided some benefits even as their expectations for gainful employment have not been met. Schooling has become an integral part of childhood, but foreign migration is emerging as a prominent alternative avenue for the aspirant youth. Further, the distinctions between children and adults are also blurred as students balance their transitions between school, work, and home to succeed within the system.

Les inégalités de revenu affectent-elles la fourniture des biens publics ? Warr a établi en1983 un théorème de neutralité : sous certaines conditions, une redistribution marginale des revenus entre agents n'affecte pas la quantité de bien public fournie par leurs contributions volontaires. Les généralisations de ce résultat par Bergstrom et al. (1986), ont permis de mieux comprendre ce phénomène : les redistributions neutres sont de " faible "amplitude de sorte que les agents dont le revenu a été amputé ont toujours la possibilité de maintenir leur dépense en biens privés, et les ajustements des contributions individuelles laissent inchangée la contribution agrégée au bien public. Itaya et al. (1997) se sont intéressés aux conséquences d'une redistribution non neutre sur le bien-être. Dans les deux premiers chapitres de cette thèse nous testons ces prédictions en laboratoire grâce à un jeu de bien public avec utilités quadratiques. Le premier chapitre considère une redistribution de " faible " amplitude qui ne devrait pas entrainer une modification de la quantité de bien public. En revanche dans le chapitre 2, la redistribution est d'une amplitude telle qu'elle affecte la quantité de bien public fournie et le bien-être de la société. Bien que nous retrouvions en laboratoire certaines prédictions théoriques, notamment au niveau de la modification ou non de la quantité de bien public produit et du bien-être, les prédictions concernant les comportements et les gains individuels sont rarement vérifiées. En particulier, nous observons que, suite à la modification de leur revenu, certains joueurs réduisent ou augmentent moins leur contribution que la théorie ne le prédit et que les agents pauvres sur-contribuent. Il semble enfin que l'émergence d'inégalités n'affecte pas de la même façon les comportements que lorsque ces inégalités préexistent et donc que le sens de la redistribution, selon qu'elle crée ou diminue les inégalités, importe. Dans le chapitre 3, nous étudions plus précisément une redistribution créatrice d'inégalités dans un jeu de bien public linéaire et nous regardons si les hommes et les femmes réagissent de la même façon à ce changement et quelles conséquences cela entraine sur la quantité de bien public fournie. Nous montrons que lorsque les femmes bénéficient de la redistribution,la quantité de bien public produit diminue. Il apparait aussi que les comportements sont modifiés lorsque les sujets connaissent le genre de ceux qui se sont enrichis. / Do income inequalities affect the provision of public goods? Warr established in 1983 a theorem of neutrality : under some conditions, a marginal redistribution of endowments among agents does not affect the amount of public good provided by their voluntary contributions. Generalizations of this result by Bergstrom et al. (1986), helped to better understand this phenomenon: neutral redistributions are those of "low" amplitude, so that agents whose income decreases can maintain their consumption of private goods, and adjustments of individual contributions leave unchanged the aggregate contribution to the public good. Itaya et al. (1997) have focused on the consequences of a non-neutral redistribution on welfare. In the first two chapters of this thesis we test these predictions in the laboratory using a public good game with quadratic utility functions. The first chapter considers a redistribution of a "low" amplitude that should not modify the amount of public good supplied. However in Chapter 2, we run a redistribution of a "high" magnitude so that it affects the amount of public good provided and the social welfare. Although some theoretical predictions are found in the laboratory, such as the modification or not of the amount of public good and of the welfare, predictions on individual behaviors and payoffs are rarely verified. In particular, we note that following a modification of their endowment, some subjects decrease or increase their contribution less than theory predicts and that poor agents over-contribute. It further appears that the emergence of inequalities does not affect behaviors in the same way than when these inequalities preexist and thus that the direction of the redistribution, depending on whether it creates or decreases inequalities, matters. In Chapter 3 we study more precisely a redistribution that creates inequalities in a linear public good game and we test wether men and women respond similarly to the modification of their endowment and what are the consequences on the supply of the public good. We show that when women become rich, the quantity of public good provided decreases. It also appears that behaviors are modified when the rich gender is common knowledge.

Diploma thesis "The Position of Woman in Judaism and Islam with Respect to Human Rights" deals with the status of woman in traditional religious communities. It points out the disparity between the status of woman and man, often inadequate concept of universal human rights. The work focuses on human rights itself, from the perspective of religion and from the perspective of the West. It shows their similarities and differences. Part of the work is devoted to the status of woman from ancient times until the present. A large part is devoted to the status of woman in traditional family and her obligations towards man. Mainly discusses marriage and divorce. Does not forget to even mention the current state of women's status in Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the dominant religious leaders. In this work are interpreted true testimony of women about their status. We will meet both responses, the positive and the negative.

in English In my diploma thesis I propose a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to describe economic inequality. The model combines two approaches that were traditionally used to model inequality - first, it features two classes of agents that differ in their ownership of capital and second, each class consists of heterogeneous agents who are subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks. This combination allows the two classes to behave in a fundamentally different way while maintaining the individual character of agents in the economy - a feature that has not been modeled before but which adequately describes the empirical reality. I show that the model with classical RBC structure and a single wage underestimates the observed inequality. When the wage differential is introduced through different taxation of the two classes, the model matches empirical inequality much better. Further I argue that the government can significantly reduce inequality at a relatively small cost in terms of output lost. Finally using Theil coefficient decomposition, I show how much of the total inequality is attributable to between-class and within-class inequalities.

This paper deals theoretically and empirically with the issue of traditional media openness towards Internet non-users and its perception among non-users themselves. The theoretical part of the work outlines the problem of inequality in the information society and how specific content of messages in selected traditional media can contribute to these inegualities. The second part examines through a pilot content analysis the nature of the media content in the traditional Czech mass media with regard to the possibility of interaction and participation with the media and the usage of links to the digital content. On this basis, semi-structured interviews examine perception and reflection of such phenomena on a selected group of elderly non-users. The conclusion of this work consists of the introduction of the scheme of factors influencing the extent of perceived discrimination among non-users of the Internet in relation to traditional mass media.

En mobilisant sociologie,anthropologie,démographie et histoire,on remarque que la mort,phénomènebiologique,fait de nature,et aussi un fait de culture devant lequel les hommes ne sont pas égaux. En dépit desprogrès de l’espérance de vie,la mort ne frappe pas tout le monde de la même façon. Après avoir finementanalysé les statistiques de mortalité en fonction de différentes variables (sexe,professions,niveaud’instruction,état matrimonial,habitat),nous insistons sur les conditions de vie–notamment les conditions detravail-susceptibles de retentir sur l’état physique, psychique des personnes. Les modes devie,l’habitat,l’environnement, la situation familiale ouvrant sur la vie sociale (affiliations) exercent aussi deseffets propres sur la longévité. Les catégories sociales défavorisées,fragilisées par leur condition,pouvantdifficilement se soustraire à nombre de facteurs de risques sont davantage soumises à tout un ensemble de causespouvant conduire à la pathologie. D’où une inégalité sociale face à la morbidité, une inégalité face à l’ensembledes facteurs débouchant potentiellement sur la maladie puis la mort. La mort inégale traduit en fait l'inégalité desconditions:les statistiques de la mortalité brossent le tableau de la somme cumulée des inégalitésvécues,incorporées. La surmortalité des classes dominées peut même être lue comme un produit de ladomination. L’approche socio-anthropologique permet de faire le pont entre une sociologie portant l’accent surles phénomènes de domination parcourant les rapports sociaux et les effecteurs biologiques des comportements,offrant ainsi une vision globale, proprement anthropologique du phénomène étudié. / If we look through sociology, anthropology, demography and history, one may notice that death, being abiological phenomenon, a natural fact, is also a cultural fact in front of which men are not equal. For, despitethe progress made throughout history regarding life expectancy, death does not strike everyone the same way.After having thoroughly analysed mortality statistics according to different variables (gender, employment,education, marriage settlement, housing), we insist on living conditions-mainly on working conditions-whichmay have consequences on a person's physical and psychological state. We show how way of life, housing, theenvironment or even affiliations can affect life expectancy. Disadvantaged backgrounds, made vulnerablebecause of their living conditions, since they cannot avoid some factors of risk, are even more subject to causesthat may lead to a pathology, sooner or later. In that respect, we can talk about a social inequality againstmorbidity, that is to say an inequality against all the various factors which may lead to disease, then to death.Thanks to our research, we learn that unequal death is a result of unequal social conditions. Mortality statisticsdepict the sum of the inequalities, lived and integrated. Eventually, the highest death rates of the dominatedclasses could be read as a product of domination. Indeed, the socio-anthropological approach tries to make alink between a social issue, emphasizing on phenomena of domination through social relationships, andbiological effectors of behaviours, giving an overall vision, in a proper anthropological way of the phenomenonstudied. Finally, death is culturally established.