Book excerpt: Through the overarching lens of the concepts of social advantage and disadvantage, this new and original edited volume - with contributions by 14 distinguished authors - provides an overview of a variety of conceptual frameworks and a spectrum of social inequalities, processes and divisions. It discusses poverty, social exclusion, capability deprivation, rights violations, social immobility, and human or social capital deficiency. From a global, European and UKperspective, it addresses the origins and effects of advantage and disadvantage in relation to family and childhood, education, work, and old age and the implications of divisions based on gender,'race', ethnicity, migration, religion, neighbourhood, and the experience of crime.