By Kenneth L. Robinson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Community Development Specialist
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Is the world flat? Visiting Cornell University lecturer Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue pondered that tricky question during a lecture at Clemson at April 19.
The popularity of Thomas Friedman’s book entitled “The World is Flat” and scholarly research on global convergence has recently propelled the issue of global inequality into the headlines. Using the question “Why can social scientists continue to disagree on the trends in global inequality” as his benchmark, Eloundou-Eneygue tactfully argued that a clear answer to the initial question (whether the world is flat) is not so “silly” after all.
“The persistent disagreements on the questions are not entirely explained by ideological partisanship nor are they simply a matter of simple differences in methods,” explained Eloundou-Eneygue. “Rather they arise in part because the evidence is mixed depending on the scope of analysis, substantive outcomes, or constituencies of interest. Although these differences are somewhat methodological, they also reflect different value judgments about what is worth measuring. The answer depends on outcomes and scope. In terms of scope, the pattern observed is a double movement where inequality is increasing or declining depending on whether one looks at within or between countries.”
Using four hypotheses (conceptual, ideological, methodological, and epistemological) to consider, Eloundou-Enyegue engaged the audience in a lively discussion to demonstrate the sociological measures by which we look at inequality and to assess whether and how these hypotheses contribute to the lack of scientific consensus about whether the world is flattening.
This point was illustrated by an interactive exercise where audience members were shown visuals that compared measures of inequality across countries and within countries. Eloundou-Enyegue asked audience members to guess which countries have the highest amount of inequality, and pointed out that consensus among audience members usually wanes as the comparisons become more complicated. Given the nature of the audience – who had a similar educational and socioeconomic background – he suggested that comparisons of mental representations like the dots often highlight “middle-class bias” as inequality is generally analyzed from the perspective of the middle class, not the poor.
Prior to the public lecture at the Strom Thurmond Institute, Eloundou-Enyegue met with a group of undergraduate and graduate students for an informative lunch discussion on how globalization and inequality are likely to impact future career opportunities.
This program is part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology’s Speaker Series and was co-sponsored by Pan African Studies and Policy Studies.
