Content area
Full text
Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System, by Douglas S. Massey. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007. 319pp. $32.50 cloth. ISBN: 9780871545855.
In Categorically Unequal (CU), Douglas Massey undertakes a systematic analysis of the production of inequality in the United States and delivers a treatise on the social-psychological and institutional mechanisms that generate durable inequalities across the traditional axes of difference-race, class, and gender. Stratification researchers and interested laypeople alike will find CU tremendously informative as Massey marshals disparate literatures from economics, history, psychology, and sociology to provide a fairly convincing and very accessible account of the institutional practices that distribute resources differentially. Indeed, CUs major strengths are its breadth, accessibility, and informa tiveness.
Some of these, however, may also be the source of CUs major weaknesses, detracting from its overall objective to elucidate the mechanisms through which these inequalities are produced and maintained. First, although Massey tends to provide an excellent overview of current knowledge of psychological and social processes, at times he muddies the conceptual waters in ways that may actually do a disservice to our understanding of how and why stratification happens. For instance, Massey begins CU by drawing from research in social cognition and social neuroscience to explain that humans have a natural tendency to think in categorical terms. This natural tendency, Massey argues, is what makes stratification not only possible, but also likely. But Massey's laudable effort to locate institutional mechanisms, at least in part in the psychology of social classification,...