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Over the past century, there have been shifts in how scholars theorize and study segregation. For example, the classical framework of human ecology that guided early work focused on the sorting and shifting that occurs when groups compete for scarce resources. By contrast, contemporary approaches view segregation as resulting from discrimination, stratification, and inequality, and as an important impediment to social justice and societal well-being.

The principle of homophily is a powerful motivator for many individuals to seek out similar people with whom to live and socialize. Voluntary choices that create “in- groups” for protection or affiliation often, however, go hand in hand with exclusionary behaviors that involuntarily create and maintain “out-groups.” Because groups in society are stratified by ethno-racial and economic characteristics, these processes play an important role in segregation, and in the resulting inequality and poor life chances that marginalized groups face in life.

Segregation can have significant effects on the well-being and life chances of residents. Even if segregation occurs in only one aspect of our lives, it can have a ripple effect on other aspects, with subsequent economic, social, and psychological implications. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement as well as greater clarity about the negative effects of segregation shifted the framing of segregation to focus on it being undesirable and unacceptable. New scholars also shifted to embrace the possibility of reducing segregation. Views that group differences and prejudice were immutable gave way to hypotheses that social contact could reduce prejudice and forge social integration between groups. This optimistic project in multicultural societies has led to concrete efforts to address segregation (e.g. public housing and urban planning reforms), as well as new efforts to “unpack” what segregation is and how it impedes social integration. For example, understanding the “hard” and “soft” boundaries of segregation that maintain physical and social distance between groups reveals opportunities for addressing the impediments to social integration.

In subsequent chapters, we will examine segregation in different contexts. In addition to a large body of work exploring residential segregation, the concept of segregation has been applied to social relations in different institutions, such as schools and occupational groups. All these studies are important because they provide information about how group relations vary across society and what their consequences are.