In a shift away from European Central Bank orthodoxy, a senior bank executive has argued that even though the ECB’s monetary policy led to a decrease in labour income inequality, its asset purchase programs would lead to wealth inequality.
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.
Liberal democracies are today confronted with a wave of popular distrust in their ability to serve the majority of their citizens and solve the multiple crises that threaten our future. This threatens to lead us into a world of dangerous populist policies exploiting the anger without addressing the real risks, ranging from climate change to unbearable inequalities, or major global conflicts. To avert major damages to humanity and the planet, we must urgently get to the root causes of people’s resentment.