Introduction

Power and inequality are perennial social and sociological concerns that continue to be a major point of discussion and debate in the social sciences. In this chapter, we centrally consider how Elias and other process sociologists have examined such issues through an engagement with how differences in power chances and inequality develop across time and space in tandem with other wider social processes. Here, processes of ‘functional democratisation’ and related shifting balances of power between different social groups form the principal foci of our concern. Our central argument is that these ‘figurational’ approaches to power and inequality offer particular utility for apprehending an apparent paradox of contemporary societies: how it is that inequalities between certain groups (chiefly those associated with a social class) are increasing, while inequalities between other groups (principally those associated with gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, formerly colonised and former colonisers, Western states and the ‘rest’ of the world) appear to be reducing.

The ostensible reduction in such inequalities can be seen to relate to a broadening array of ‘equalisation conflicts’ such as those that find expression in the hard-won expansion of legal rights for women and associated rise of feminist movements over the past two centuries, including most recently the #MeToo movement; the succession of movements relating to the rights of non-white groups, including the Civil Rights movement in the United States and, more latterly, Black Lives Matter; the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century; and the integration struggles of a range of marginalised groups, especially those associated with LGBTQ+ groups. Such processes, it should be noted from the outset, are here approached as entailing overall shifts in the character and degree of inequalities between historically hegemonic and subjugated groups, but are understood as shifts that by no means mark the end or eradication of inequalities, nor as processes that are securely guaranteed to continue. Moreover, as we have suggested, our concern is with how these shifts towards reductions in inequality in relation to some axes of social differentiation have arisen in tandem with growing inequalities in relation to others.

We commence this chapter with a brief outline of the ‘paradox of inequalities’ alluded to above through a consideration of global trends data from the UN.