It's an extensively treated paradigm in sociology. With sociology being a "soft" science and not having access to a methodology as rigorous as physics, it's certainly contestable and there are of course many sociologists who have made arguments against it or that simply don't consider it convincing, but it's not just some casual insight and certainly not someone's "joke".
The reason I mentioned it, in any case, was to relate it to previous commentor's supposition that unions were excluded from their "rule" (which was a casual insight). You needn't take either this perspective nor theirs as true yourself, but there's not much case to exempt unions if you're going to start looking through the world from that lens in the first place.
Maybe in some pop sociology books, but actual real sociology as a science does not treat it as an established truth at all. The sociology being "soft" does not mean you can cherry pick what suits you and pretend there is consensus about your cherry pick.
In that sense, not even physics is like physics.
Also, the actual sociology, if anything, tend to be very nuanced where majority of the claims are packed into conditionals and probabilities. As a science, it super rarely makes simplistic claims like this.
It's an extensively treated paradigm in sociology. With sociology being a "soft" science and not having access to a methodology as rigorous as physics, it's certainly contestable and there are of course many sociologists who have made arguments against it or that simply don't consider it convincing, but it's not just some casual insight and certainly not someone's "joke".
The reason I mentioned it, in any case, was to relate it to previous commentor's supposition that unions were excluded from their "rule" (which was a casual insight). You needn't take either this perspective nor theirs as true yourself, but there's not much case to exempt unions if you're going to start looking through the world from that lens in the first place.