BulletPointsummary of Solidarity and social justice in contemporary societies of Yerkes and Bal - 1st edition

Chapter 1: Why do the topics of solidarity and social justice still matter today?

• Solidarity and social justice are necessary but contested elements in social policies aimed at combatting social inequalities in contemporary societies. Moreover, they often play a central role in public debates on these issues.
• Social inequality refers to the uneven allocation of burdens and valued resources across members of society based on their group membership, in combination with the undervaluation of these members of society based on this same group membership. Solidarity refers to a common identity, suggesting a mutual attachment between individuals in society, both practically and normatively. Social justice refers to considerations of who is deserving of what and how this is to be achieved.
• Welfare states traditionally provide government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing and education.  
• Social dilemmas refer to situations in which short-term self-interests conflict with longer-term societal interests in such a way the individuals are better off if they do not act cooperatively, but everybody is better off if everyone cooperates compared to the situation in which no one cooperates. We distinguish is few different famous social dilemmas: resource dilemmas, public goods dilemma and the prisoner's dilemma.

Chapter 2: What is the social identity theory about?

• Social identities can give rise to intergroup animosity as a means of bolstering the in-group and protecting against intergroup threats. Out-group derogation often emerges as a reaction to social identity threat. It serves as a means of defending against out-group threat to the existence of the group and the perceived value and/or status of the in-group.
• This defensive reaction is particularly likely to occur when status differences between groups are unstable and/or group boundaries are permeable.
• Group norms that legitimate and promote intergroup animosity can form also in the absence of intergroup threat.
• Different types of identities, namely dual and politicized identities, can be harnessed to improve intergroup attitudes and increase people's willingness to fight for social change.

Chapter 3: What are triggers and barriers for in- and out-group solidarity?

• Solidarity is distinct from social justice. Both relate to meso-macro sociological and micro psychological processes. 
• Bayertz distinguishes human solidarity, social solidarity, political solidarity, and civic solidarity.
• Social justice concerns the distribution and allocation of resources for fulfilling needs of people who deserve support, and as such it is subject of contentious, and often political debate. In general, resources could be distributed according to rights, demands, claims or wants. Expectations about who should fulfill those needs and for whom differ across forms of solidarity. 
• The CARIN criteria define the conditionality of deservingness: control, need, identity, attitude and reciprocity.
• From a sociological perspective, there are several triggers and barriers to solidarity and processes of boundary drawing which affect social justice principles.
• At the level of civic solidarity, Knijn distinguishes three criteria that simultaneously represent arguments for boundary drawing between citizen and non-citizens; territorial affectedness, sedentariness, and national belonging.
• The Social Dominance Theory (SDT) explains the way in which both social discourse and individual and institutional behavior contribute to and are affected by a group-based social hierarchy, reflecting differences in power. This theory relates this to the 'profit' some groups have regarding their social and economic value.
• Solidarity is not only characterized by a political-economic structure, but also by a social-psychological structure. Triggers for social justice and solidarity ask for conscious commitment and are usually based on a shared interest or a shared trait.

Chapter 4: How does social justice relate to the justification of social inequalities?

• This chapter provides an overview of social scientific research and theorizing on social justice and on the justification of social inequalities. 
• Distributive justice focuses mainly on what can be considered just, procedural justice how these just outcomes can be best achieved, and justice as recognition is mostly concerned with the who-question. It is important to note that it is impossible to fully disentangle these different forms of justice.
• The differentiation of the various forms of justice is mostly a useful theoretical distinction.  
• A complicating factor in determining what is just in practice, is that unjust situations are oftentimes justified through processes of motivated reasoning. The just-world theory and system justification theory provide insight into two seminal theories that focus on the justification processes to explain why those people who are treated unjustly are, at times, blamed for their misfortune and why social inequalities can persist through the endorsement of negative and complementary stereotypes.

Chapter 5: How is solidarity integrated in the modern welfare state?

• Advanced welfare states provide universal access to health care and education, and institutionalize social security in case of unemployment and sickness. In normative terms, the modern welfare state is based on the image of a social contract; which is a political agreement among citizens on the terms of social cooperation, rights and obligations, involving claims on equality, equity, inclusion and inter- en intragenerational solidarity. 
• Marshall saw the introduction of social rights as a final stage in a long evolutionary and mutually reinforcing process of emancipatory democratization. 
• Rawls proposed the thought experiment of the original position in which individuals are formally free and equal to deliberate and make decisions behind a veil of ignorance that deprives them of all knowledge of their personal traits, abilities and social circumstances. Rawls' rather stringent understanding of social solidarity is premised on the thesis that the distribution of natural endowments and talents is essentially undeserved and that, therefore, they should be regarded as common societal assets. His theory is in tune with the normative foundations of the mixed-economy. 
• Sen's capability approach shifts the focus from resource constraints to capabilities; understood as a person's freedom to achieve certain functioning in light of the different personal and environmental factors. Sen's theory reflects both the flexibility and multi-purpose nature of the capability approach as well as a worrisome lack of a systematic conception of justice as the one envisaged by Rawls. 
• Barr distinguishes between two principles of solidarity upholding the modern welfare states: Robin Hood and Piggy Bank solidarity.

Chapter 6: What are the important insights from welfare deservingness theory?

• This chapter focuses on the 'who should get what and why' question that is omnipresent in ongoing debates about solidarity and social justice in the welfare state.
• It does so from a citizen's perspective, by providing a thick description of the welfare deservingness model, one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in the welfare attitudes literature.
• The CARIN criteria define the conditionality of deservingness: control, need, identity, attitude and reciprocity.
• The relative importance of the CARIN criteria is stretched between two extreme positions. At one end, there is the idea of a law-like hierarchy of deservingness criteria that is the same for everyone, always and everywhere. In this view, some of the criteria are simply more important than others. At the other end of the debate, there is the view that a universal, fixed rank order of deservingness criteria does not exist, because their relative important is target-specific, person-specific, and context-specific.
• Deservingness theory needs to be translated and adapted to the specificities of the new research topic and research field it is being applied to.

Chapter 7: What are gender stereotypes and how do they relate to social inequality?

• This chapter evidences how gender stereotypes reinforce inequalities: They restrict women's career opportunities and men's caregiving opportunities, and they provide overly high standards for women in care and men in pair work.
• To promote gender equality, people can be trained and supported to cope with stereotypes.
• More crucially, societal and organizational changes can reduce (the impact of) gender stereotypes.

Chapter 8: How do perceptions of fairness and justice relate to gender inequality?

• There are clearly significant and persistent gender inequalities between men and women in relation to paid work, housework and care. Applying a social justice framework to these inequalities can be useful to understand their tenacity. 
• Outcome values differ between men and women, What people value is embedded in gendered notions of what we expect form mothers and fathers around the birth of a child.
• Our sense of fairness varies by the gendered ways in which we use comparison referents. Within-gender comparisons in highly feminized occupations can lead to a sense of fairness, whereas between-gender comparisons or an absence of comparison referents in male-dominated occupations can lead to a sense of unfairness or uncertainty about fairness.
• While distributive justice frameworks may be useful for explaining the persistence of inequality in care and household tasks, we find that interactional justice principles, alongside distributive justice principles, are crucial for explaining the persistence of inequality in paid work.

Chapter 9: What does modern day ageism look like?

• This chapter highlights the presence and attributes of modern ageism and age-related stereotyping, discussing both the mechanisms by which these issues persist and how they have potential to be remediated. 
•  Although generationalism is convenient, familiar and comfortable, it has pernicious consequences.
• To counter it, we will need to move toward recognition of nuance and individuality across the lifespan, and away from deterministic and well-worn claims about youth and old age. 

Chapter 10: Is the intergenerational social contract under pressure?

• The social contract that spans generations is under pressure, and some allege an 'age war' in Europe. 
• However, scientific evidence for such conflict between the generations is limited and mostly questions the viability of the idea of strong welfare distributional conflicts between generations. 
• A study suggest that an 'age war' is not really present in European countries concerning two of the most exemplary forms of intergenerational solidarity: support for elderly welfare programs and childcare services.

Chapter 11: How do we study socioeconomic inequalities in health?

• Socioeconomic position (SEP) is a major fault line in contemporary Western societies. It is a highly defining social identity that largely determines with whom people interact. SEP has far-reaching consequences for the health state of people.
• This is a complex process that may have varying causes and involve many interrelated factors.
• Public health policy-makers try to battle socioeconomic inequalities in health have to deal with stereotypes that may impede the acceptance of politicies aimed at changing structural factors, both by policy-makers in other domains as well as society.

Chapter 12: How does deservingness relate to socio-economic cleavages?

• Deservingness is a complex phenomenon that is linked to among others, context and institutional settings, group identity and individual characteristics.
• A case study was conducted towards deservingness perceptions in Slovenia and Germany. Even though participants in both countries emphasized criteria of control and need, their deservingness ranking differed.
• They judged the deservingness of an unemployed benefit recipient vary low in Germany and very high in Slovenia, due to contextual differences in the unemployment and economic situation in both countries, as well as potentially different stereotypical and media representations of the unemployed. 
• Furthermore, interesting differences arose when observing the distinctions in which criteria were applied and the perceptions of deservingness between the participants with higher versus lower SEP backgrounds. One of the most striking disparities was the attitude towards immigrants: those with a lower socio-economic background placed this group much lower in the deservingness scale. This can be explained by self-interest theory linked to the welfare chauvinism literature, which indicates an important part of deservingness perceptions are driven by fears of losing jobs and welfare state benefits and services to immigrants.
• We also saw that the identity criterion was stronger among lower socio-economic groups, while need was emphasized in higher socio-economic groups, showing different deservingness valuations due to SEP. These differences can also be interpreted in the context of class and social identity theories.

Chapter 13: What are different public perceptions of immigrants and their consequences for solidarity?

• This chapter focuses on the main theories and research on stereotypes and threat perceptions in response to immigration.
• This literature primarily focuses on negative outcomes such as prejudice, discrimination and other forms of exclusion, which ultimately stand in the way of achieving solidarity and social justice.
• Some stereotype contents can motivate people to engage in helping behavior and that threat perceptions can be an obstacle for long-term acceptance of immigrants but are less detrimental when it comes to short-term reactions, such as the provision of humanitarian assistance.
• In trying to achieve solidarity and social justice in the context of immigration, it is important to consider the content of the stereotypes and the type of threat elicited by specific immigrant groups.

Chapter 14: What does welfare chauvinism entail?

• The neoliberal multiculturalism model is a national model in which policies stimulate mobility and relative openness towards immigrants, but with low levels of welfare state arrangements and welfare generosity. 
• The welfare chauvinism model is a national model in which policies restrict migration, combined with high levels of generous welfare state arrangements to which newcomers have limited access. 
• An attitude expressing this wish to exclude immigrants from welfare state benefits and arrangements and never giving them access to these benefits is labelled as hard welfare chauvinism. Soft welfare chauvinism refers to granting immigrants access to the welfare state, but under certain conditions. These conditions relate to, for example, the duration of residency within the country.
• To explain welfare chauvinism, theories address (1) general support for the welfare state, (2) attitudes towards immigrants and (3) egalitarian attitudes. 
• In most European countries, people hardly express welfare chauvinism, but soft welfare chauvinism is prevalent.

Chapter 15: What is the role of stigmatized sexual and gender identities and minority community solidarity in social inequalities in well-being?

• Sexual orientation is a social justice fault line associated with social inequalities in the health and well-being of LGB people. 
• Social activism is required to address sexual orientation-related health gaps, similar to social action on social inequalities in health-related to socio-economic position.
• Sexual orientation stigma in particular is a fundamental cause of social inequalities in health, which adversely affects LGB people through the additional stressors they face.
• Mitigating social stigma is an essential social policy goal to promote the health and well-being of LGB people, and a critical component of interventions to promote the least of LGB people that might otherwise be less effective. 

Chapter 16: How are perceptions of deservingness altered for same-sex families?

• In this chapter, cross-country differences in attitudes towards social and civil rights for same-sex versus different-sex couples were explored. 
• Citizenship rights are individual's right to have basic needs fulfilled as a right of citizenship, not charity. The portability of these citizenship rights from one member state of the EU to another is an important topic. There is a distinction between civil citizenship rights and social citizenship rights.
• Based on a study, cross-country differences were found, suggesting legislation supporting the civil rights of same-sex families matters for individual-level attitudes supporting a common European framework for civil partnership versus marriage. 

Chapter 17: How does climate change form a societal challenge for social justice and solidarity?

• In social scientific research, the term environmental justice has also been applied more broadly, to encompass a set of questions related to fairness and justice in climate change adaptation and mitigation.
• To date, the sociotechnical perspective dominates the conceptual understanding of sustainability transitions, a perspective where economic development, technological innovation, and policy change are considered critical factors in shaping sustainability transitions, the energy transition in particular.
• The Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory provides extensive insight into this 'human side' of the transition process. According to VBN theory, values, more sustainable-behavior-specific beliefs, and personal norms are key determinants of people's sustainability attitudes and behaviors. Four types of core values have been discerned: biospheric values and altruistic values, and egoistic and hedonistic values.
• The Capability-Opportunity-Motivation-Behavior (COM-B) model outlines why the transition to more sustainable behaviors is not equally achievable for everybody, and why being motivated to act sustainably is insufficient. Following this model, engagement in the sustainability transition is hoped not only by individuals motivation but also by their capabilities and opportunities.

Chapter 18: How does the digitalization of public service form a challenge to social justice?

• In education, the development of information and communication technology (ICT) has created excitement about its power to enhance access and improve learning results, prompting policy efforts to integrate digital technology into education. In elder care services, technologies have been conceptualized as a potential solution to limited budgets.
• While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this aspiration, individuals' capacities to become digital citizens are mediated by a range of factors. Becker argues that the term digital citizen not only includes digital competences and skills, but also a critical awareness of the digital environment's power to influence and shape the individual.
• The term digital divide refers to inequalities in access to or use of ICT. Scholars have suggested that when thinking about inequalities and digitalization, a shift is needed from a focus on access and use to costumes of ICT such as unequal technological capital.
• Social justice is understood as 'requiring some form equality' between individuals and groups. Baker proposed a five-dimensional framework to examine equality; incorporating inequalities of respect and recognition, inequalities of resources, inequalities of power, inequalities of love, care and solidarity, and inequalities of working and learning. These five dimensions potentially overlap and intersect with each other as well as with the different forms of justice.

Chapter 19: What societal challenges did the COVID-19 pandemic cause to solidarity and social justice?

• The COVID-19 pandemic is considered the most challenging global crisis in recent history. This is due in large part to its severe negative health consequences, but is also stems from the high demand on limited health care capacity and the resulting delay of planned health care. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic also had serious adverse economic and social consequences related to the prevention measures imposed globally to reduce the spread of the virus.
• The pandemic presented a systemic shock to societies worldwide and raised many questions regarding solidarity and social justice.
•  Initially, the pandemic was hailed by some journalists as 'the great equalizer': The idea was that COVID-19, as a virus, doe snot discriminate and affects individuals and societies in similar ways.
• Crucially, the social inequalities emerging from and amplified by the pandemic are visible along many of the societal fault lines. 
• COVID-19 related morbidity and mortality are socially stratified. Specifically, ethnic minority groups and socio-economically disadvantaged groups bear a disproportionate share of the disease burden. This trend was observed around the world. There are several reasons for these social inequalities related to the impact of COVID-19. 
• Various prevention measures are implemented worldwide to curb the spread of the virus, to protect the most vulnerable, and to ensure the need for hospitalization of people with COVID-19 does not exceed the availability of health care services. Yet, these prevention measures, especially those that promote social distancing, also affect people in multiple intrusive ways, including people who are more likely to be affected by COVID-19 related health impacts.

Chapter 20: What barriers to solidarity and social justice still remain in contemporary society?

• Solidarity is dynamic and shifting within and across groups, within and beyond welfare state borders. Our perspectives on what is just in society are similarly fluid, influenced by processes of identification in ever-changing societies, which affects our perceptions of what is fair and who is deserving of help from the welfare state. 
• Just as stereotypes shape what we expect of men, women or other genders, age-based stereotypes shape what we believe about younger and older cohorts. The inevitable process of ageing makes age-based stereotypes pernicious and persistent. Despite strong presence of age-based stereotypes in our society, often used by political parties to suggest an 'age war' is taking place. However, it was found that there is little empirical support for such a claim.
• Potentially one of the largest societal fault lines in contemporary societies is socio-economic position. Socio-economic position captures the complex interaction of income, educational level, and occupational differences in society that crucially shape multiple life outcomes. Health inequalities along socio-economic lines are some of the most despairing inequalities.
• Our willingness to share resources with other groups is further challenged by processes of migration in contemporary societies and subsequent ethnic diversity. Ethnic stereotypes are associated with prejudice, discrimination and other forms of exclusion. 
• Another societal fault line explored in this book is sexual orientation, a multidimensional concept shared by history and culture. Negative effects of sexual orientation-based stereotypes lead to stigma and significant health and well-being consequences for sexual minorities.
• Global challenges, such as climate change and the continued rapid expansion of digitalization in social service, require us to consider new scopes of justice and potentially new questions of justice to create and sustain a shared sense of solidarity needed to address these issues.