• Part One


• 1: Hartley Dean: Poverty and Social Exclusion


• 2: Tania Burchardt and Rod Hicks: The Capability Approach to Advantage and Disadvantage


• 3: Polly Vizard: The Human Rights and Equality Agenda


• 4: Lucinda Platt: Class, Capitals, and Social Mobility


• Part Two


• 5: Kitty Stewart: The Family and Disadvantage


• 6: Sonia Exley: Education and Learning


• 7: Stephen P. Jenkins: The Distribution of Income in the UK: a Picture of Advantage and Disadvantage


• 8: John Hills and Jack Cunliffe: Accumulated Advantage and Disadvantage: the Role of Wealth


• 9: Hartley Dean: Divisions of Labour and Work


• 10: Emily Grundy: Ageing and Disadvantage


• Part Three


• 11: Margarita Léon: Gender and (Dis)advantage


• 12: Coretta Phillips and Lucinda Platt: 'Race' and Ethnicity


• 13: Isabel Shutes: Citizenship and Migration


• 14: Malcolm Torry: Religious Advantage and Disadvantage


• 15: Neil Lee: Social Disadvantage and Place


• 16: Tim Newburn: Social Disadvantage, Crime, and Punishment


• Part 4


• 17: Lucinda Platt and Hartley Dean: Conclusions

Hartley Dean is Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. Before his academic career he had been a welfare rights worker in one of London's most deprived multi-cultural neighbourhoods. His principal research interests stem from concerns with poverty and social justice. He is a past editor of the Journal of Social Policy and among his more recently published books are Social Policy (Polity, 2006 and 2012), Understanding Human Need (The Policy Press, 2010) and Social Rights and Human Welfare (Routledge, 2015).
Lucinda Platt is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining the LSE she worked at Essex University and at UCL Institute of Education, where she was Director of the Millennium Cohort Study. A quantitative sociologist, Lucinda's main research interests are in inequalities and social stratification, in particular child poverty, ethnicity, immigration and disability, and in longitudinal approaches to analysis of these issues. Her most recent book was Understanding Inequalities: Stratification and Difference (Polity, 2011), and she is co-author of Intergenerational Consequences of Migration (forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan).

This volume addresses the origin and effects of advantage and disadvantage from a global and UK perspective, and provides an overview of a variety of conceptual frameworks and a spectrum of social inequalities, processes, and divisions.