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.
In this introduction, the author contextualises the research into social stratification
in Serbia as a long-term project on the transformation of class structure in that country. The
researchers in this project have established how the systemic transformation in Serbia unfold-
ed, doubly conditioned by the more general European processes of postsocialist transforma-
tion and the specific conditions in Serbia. The surveys on representative samples of the adult
population in the whole of Serbia were conducted in 2003/2004,
2012 and 2018. The author lays out the methodological basis and
the contents of the studies included in the special issue
Diferenciranje društvenih grupa prema glavnim vrsta
ma podele rada odvija se u sprezi s diferenciranjem njihovih
položaja u strukturi odnosa političke, statusne, »pasivne-« i
ekonomske moći. Kako su izvori glavnih oblika društvene
moći relativno autonomni i između političke, profesionalne
i ekonomske dimenzije socijalne stratifikacije nema potpune
podudarnosti. Usled toga nema ni asimetričnog proizvođe
nja životnih prilika (šansi) po jedinstvenoj frontalnoj osi
socijalne strukture, koje bi vodilo klasnoj polarizaciji. Duž
glavnih linija podele rada, oblikuju se četiri osnovna društ
vena sloja — politička elita, srednji sloj, radništvo i se
ljaštvo — koji su i sami horizontalno fragmentirani i verti
kalno diferencirani. Sociološki profil ovih heterogenih druš
tvenih oblika više upućuje na postojanje elitističkog, nego
klasnog obrasca socijalne strukture.