Sociological research on inequality has increasingly moved beyond the examination of inequalities as they
presumably exist to explore the generic narrative processes that perpetuate that inequality. Unfortunately,
however, this research remains concentrated on either individual or ideological grand narratives and
ignores the fact that the work narratives do, including the production and structuring of inequality, occurs
at multiple levels: cultural, structural, organizational, and personal, and never exclusively at just one of
these. In this study, we use Somali origin narratives to describe conceptually the ways in which narratives
produced at different personal and societal levels—cultural, institutional, organizational—dialectically
structure the generic processes that produce and perpetuate social inequality.