Formula Narratives and the Making of Social Stratification and 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.