Rapidly diversifying societies, rising inequalities plus the increasing significance of social differences are concurrent processes calling for a reexamination plus reworking of certain conceptual plus theoretical tools within the social sciences. Here, bringing together a range of theories plus findings from various disciplines, a conceptual type is offered to facilitate analyses of such intertwined social processes. The type highlights mutually conditioning relationships between the fundamental conceptual domains of: social structures (here described as configurations), social categories (or representations) plus social interactions (or encounters). The connections between these domains produce plus reproduce, differentially in distinct times, scales plus contexts, what can be called “the social organization of difference”.
Now is a berarti time to study diversity plus social change. Multiple kinds of diversification are deeply transforming societies, economies plus polities (see for instance Bean Citation2018; Frey Citation2018; Tach et al. Citation2019). Indeed by this point in the twenty-first century, “The international is much more diverse on multiple dimensions plus at many levels, typified by the salience of differences plus their dynamic intersections” (Jones plus Dovidio Citation2018, 45). At the same time – especially since the financial crisis of 2008, the Covid19 pandemic, growing White nationalism plus the Black Lives Matter movement – there is more academic plus public attention to the implications of difference in terms of social stratification, discrepant institutional experiences, plus unequal political, health plus economic outcomes.
This article is an exercise in reviewing plus regrouping, from across the social sciences, a large number of insights on difference plus social change. Rather than proposing any kind of new, unified theory, its aim is modestly to provide a condensed type plus terminology to integrate more easily a breadth of literature concerning pertinent approaches, concepts plus findings. The literature in question concerns three fundamental fields of social scientific theory or abstraction. These are: grup categorizations, social interactions, plus social stratification. The combined, mutually conditioning dynamics of these three abstract domains produce what I call “the social organization of difference”. Greater attention to the three-way working of these, I argue, will lead to better understanding of how social changes related to difference take place plus generate various outcomes.