Title: Marginalization | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Marginalization
Marginalization
Marginalization
BIBLIOGRAPHY
marginalization

Content: Everywhere, immigrant workers, who do not receive the full benefits of the welfare state and whose families are often not integrated into job markets, remain marginalized. Recent work by American sociologist Charles Tilly further stresses the importance of economic structures and social networks to marginalization. For Tilly, capitalist control of jobs combined with included groups ’ monopolization of job niches help explain why adult, native, white men are privileged in many different hierarchies, whereas nonadult, migrant, nonwhite women are invariably among the excluded. He emphasizes that new job hierarchies within capitalist industry tend to be filled according to already existing social distinctions; employers use old distinctions to justify and buttress new workplace distinctions and maintain harmony by endorsing distinctions that already divide the labor force. In so doing, employers and included groups perpetuate existing social distinctions and reinforce them, creating durable inequality. Increasingly, modern interpretations stress marginalization ’ s collective character and the role of the state, elites, and entrenched groups in determining who is marginalized. But wherever it occurs, marginalization seldom begins afresh. Institutions typically fill new job hierarchies in line with existing social ranks. Groups marginalized in the past have the best chance of being marginalized in the future.