Marginalization, Outsiders (Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Edited by: George Ritzer,

eISBN: 9781405124331, Print publication date: 2007

Hartley Dean

Marginalization is a metaphor that refers to processes by which individuals or groups are

kept at or pushed beyond the edges of society. The term outsiders may be used to refer to
those individuals or groups who are marginalized.The expression marginalization appears
to have originated with Robert Park's (1928) concept of “marginal man,” a term he coined
to characterize the lot of impoverished minority ethnic immigrants to a predominantly
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant United States. It later became popular, particularly in Latin
America (e.g., Germani 1980), as a term that captured the supposed “backwardness,” not of
immigrants in developed countries, but of people in developing countries who fail or are
prevented from participating in the economic, political, and cultural transition to
modernity. Modernity, it is argued, constitutes as anomalous the subordinate status and
cultural differences of rural peoples and the urban poor who are not properly assimilated
to the formal economy or the political or social mainstream. More recently, the term
marginalization has been largely superseded by the term exclusion. Nonetheless,
marginalization often appears as a synonym for extreme poverty or for social exclusion and
it may sometimes be difficult to distinguish between the concepts other than in terms of
who is choosing to use them.

GORDON MARSHALL. "marginalization." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998.

Encyclopedia.com. (April 4, 2010). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-
marginalization.html

marginalization A process by which a group or individual is denied access to important

positions and symbols of economic, religious, or political power within any society. A
marginal group may actually constitute a numerical majority–as in the case of Blacks in
South Africa–and should perhaps be distinguished from a minority group, which may be
small in numbers, but has access to political or economic power.

Marginalization became a major topic of sociological research in the 1960s, largely in

response to the realization that while certain developing countries demonstrated rapid
economic growth, members of these societies were receiving increasingly unequal shares
of the rewards of success. The process by which this occurred became a major source of
study, particularly for those influenced by dependency, Marxist, and world-systems
theories, who argued that the phenomenon was related to the world capitalist order and
not just confined to particular societies.
Anthropologists, in particular, have tended to study marginal groups. This stems in part
from the idea that, by looking at what happens on the margins of a society, one can see how
that society defines itself and is defined in terms of other societies, and what constitute its
key cultural values.