Sociologists of inequality have long been interested in “opportunity hoarding.” The basic idea, attributed to Tilly’s book Durable Inequality, is that groups who have resources typically try to exclude others from accessing those resources. As Diamond and Lewis define it in a recent article, citing Tilly:
In contrast to exploitation, opportunity hoarding occurs when “members of a categorically bounded network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly” and exclude other groups from access to it (Tilly, 1999: p. 10). While exploitation is the purview of elite actors, opportunity hoarding is typically practiced by a wide range of actors who attempt to secure their relatively privileged social position through monopolizing scarce resources.
We can see opportunity hoarding in, for example, the heavy reliance on network hiring when coupled with racially homogenous social networks. This kind of mechanism informs DiTomaso’s argument that “favoritism or advantages that whites provide to other whites that is the primary mechanism by which racial inequality is reproduced in the post-civil rights period in the U.S.”
In line with these scholars, I agree opportunity hoarding is a tremendously useful framework for understanding the production and reproduction of durable, categorical (group-based) inequalities. But, I think that the focus on the hoarding of opportunities may have led scholars to downplay or miss an important complement: the shedding of liabilities. If opportunity hoarding is about controlling access to valuable resources, liability shedding is about the capacity for a group to avoid exposures to claims on group resources and other potential collective risks.
Continue reading “liability shedding as the complement of opportunity hoarding”
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