Differences And Inequalities In The UK

Differences and inequalities are not given. Just like society, they are constantly being made and remade, and can be seen everywhere – on the street, in everyday activities, or simply by the way someone lives their life. Differences can be seen in the way someone looks like, their behaviour or what they like or prefer, however, the differences that social science focuses on are the ones between people - such as gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality. It is important to notice, that differences are not always inequalities, but they can also lead to or be associated with them. Inequalities, on the other side, are usually connected to the unequal access of people to economic resources, education and so on.

In the contemporary UK, ‘consumption

Consumption is the way of society to show their life chances about who they are and would like to be. However, consuming certain things gives a sense of where people stand in society, but the inability of others to consume these ‘certain things’ can tell about the limited life chances that exist in the contemporary UK. Foremost, in the previous century, the UK society was seen as an industrial society as everything was based on manufacturing, and on making things. Several years later, 1970s and 1980s, it changed to a post-industrial society, ‘after the working-class communities shrank, and new jobs were created in the services sector’ (Hetherington and Havard, 2014, p. 121). As years went by, society wasn’t characterised by what it produced, but by what it consumed, and that led to the arriving of consumer society. Figure 5.1 in Chapter 5 (ONS, 2012,

For example, social divisions of gender, ethnicity, race and disabilities have been a key feature in sport. A great example of struggle for equality were the Olympic Games, where women were not allowed to participate (1896), or black and people from other ethnic groups had their own separate ‘Anthropology Days’ (1904), and last but not least important the was fight of disabled people for inclusion in the games, that led to the Paralympics established in the year of 1947 (Woodward, 2014, p. 45). However, sport does not involve physical inequalities only. Some sports are highly associated with people from upper classes and affluence. Sports like golf, for example, require not only a membership, but also expensive equipment – something that mainly affluent people could afford. Sport is a world where connections are always being made and remade, but at the same time disconnections and inequalities are constantly created because of different social factors such as gender, ethnicity, class, and