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Ethnic Stratification and Social Unrest in Contemporary Eastern Europe and America1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Robert F. Hill
Affiliation:
Department of Human Ecology, Medical Center, The University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73190
Howard F. Stein
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Community Mental Health Center, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee 37208

Extract

The crucial question in the analysis of social unrest is why it occurs at a particular moment in history. Whether one refers to the new militant movements in the United States (“Black Power,” “Red Power,” “Ethnic Power”), Ukrainian nationalism in the Soviet Ukraine, Great Russian revitalization, or the recent World Slovak Congress held in New York; it is clear that traditional systems of social stratification in the United States and Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe are now being severely strained. As Shibutani and Kwan have emphasized, in stable stratified societies the inequality of prerogatives goes unquestioned, even by the subjugated who willingly support it. Only in periods of instability is the differential access to opportunity questioned. And dissatisfaction arises only when alternatives to the status quo are perceived. This insight is the core of the “theory of relative deprivation.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe, 1972 

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References

Notes

1. This paper was stimulated and supported by the Maurice Falk Medical Fund under which we have conducted research as Maurice Falk Fellows in Racism, Ethnicity, and Mental Health. We wish specifically to acknowledge the invitation of James F. Clarke to participate in the Annual Meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies at which this paper was originally presented, and those many Slavic-Americans who gave countless hours of their time to explain to us what was already obvious to them.Google Scholar

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