Peter Saunders covers theories of social class as well as evidence on class inequalities in the Social Class and Stratification Society now: Tavistock Publ .
Table of contents
As Ingold points out: The counter-argument to Marxist's conflict theory is the theory of structural functionalism, argued by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore , which states that social inequality places a vital role in the smooth operation of a society. The Davis—Moore hypothesis argues that a position does not bring power and prestige because it draws a high income; rather, it draws a high income because it is functionally important and the available personnel is for one reason or another scarce. Most high-income jobs are difficult and require a high level of education to perform, and their compensation is a motivator in society for people to strive to achieve more.
Max Weber was strongly influenced by Marx's ideas but rejected the possibility of effective communism, arguing that it would require an even greater level of detrimental social control and bureaucratization than capitalist society. Moreover, Weber criticized the dialectical presumption of a proletariat revolt, maintaining it to be unlikely. Weber held there are more class divisions than Marx suggested, taking different concepts from both functionalist and Marxist theories to create his own system. He emphasizes the difference between class, status and power, and treats these as separate but related sources of power, each with different effects on social action.
Working half a century later than Marx, Weber claims there to be four main social classes: Weber's theory more-closely resembles contemporary Western class structures, although economic status does not currently seem to depend strictly on earnings in the way Weber envisioned. Weber derives many of his key concepts on social stratification by examining the social structure of Germany.
He notes that, contrary to Marx's theories, stratification is based on more than simple ownership of capital. Weber examines how many members of the aristocracy lacked economic wealth yet had strong political power. Many wealthy families lacked prestige and power, for example, because they were Jewish.
Weber introduced three independent factors that form his theory of stratification hierarchy, which are; class, status, and power:. Wright Mills , drawing from the theories of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca , contends that the imbalance of power in society derives from the complete absence of countervailing powers against corporate leaders of the Power elite.
While he shared Marx's recognition of a dominant wealthy and powerful class, Mills believed that the source for that power lay not only in the economic realm but also in the political and military arenas. Mills explains that the power elite embody a privileged class whose members are able to recognize their high position within society. These memberships in turn pave the way to the prominent social clubs located in all major cities and serving as sites for important business contacts.
Bush and John Kerry. Throughout the years, the Skull and Bones club has included presidents , cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices, spies, captains of industry, and often their sons and daughters join the exclusive club, creating a social and political network like none ever seen before. The upper class individuals who receive elite educations typically have the essential background and contacts to enter into the three branches of the power elite: The political leadership, the military circle, and the corporate elite.
- Types of Social Classes of People;
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Mills shows that the power elite has an "inner-core" made up of individuals who are able to move from one position of institutional power to another; for example, a prominent military officer who becomes a political adviser or a powerful politician who becomes a corporate executive. Prominent bankers and financiers, who Mills considered 'almost professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs,' are also members of the elite's inner core.
Some anthropologists dispute the "universal" nature of social stratification, holding that it is not the standard among all societies. John Gowdy writes, "Assumptions about human behaviour that members of market societies believe to be universal, that humans are naturally competitive and acquisitive, and that social stratification is natural, do not apply to many hunter-gatherer peoples.
Anthropologists identify egalitarian cultures as " kinship -oriented," because they appear to value social harmony more than wealth or status. These cultures are contrasted with economically oriented cultures including states in which status and material wealth are prized, and stratification, competition, and conflict are common. Kinship-oriented cultures actively work to prevent social hierarchies from developing because they believe that such stratification could lead to conflict and instability.
A good example is given by Richard Borshay Lee in his account of the Khoisan , who practice "insulting the meat. The meat itself is then distributed evenly among the entire social group, rather than kept by the hunter.
The level of teasing is proportional to the size of the kill. Lee found this out when he purchased an entire cow as a gift for the group he was living with, and was teased for weeks afterward about it since obtaining that much meat could be interpreted as showing off. Another example is the Indigenous Australians of Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island , off the coast of Arnhem Land , who have arranged their entire society—spiritually and economically—around a kind of gift economy called renunciation.
According to David H. Turner , in this arrangement, every person is expected to give everything of any resource they have to any other person who needs or lacks it at the time. This has the benefit of largely eliminating social problems like theft and relative poverty. The social status variables underlying social stratification are based in social perceptions and attitudes about various characteristics of persons and peoples. While many such variables cut across time and place, the relative weight placed on each variable and specific combinations of these variables will differ from place to place over time.
One task of research is to identify accurate mathematical models that explain how these many variables combine to produce stratification in a given society. Grusky provides a good overview of the historical development of sociological theories of social stratification and a summary of contemporary theories and research in this field. In general, sociologists recognize that there are no "pure" economic variables, as social factors are integral to economic value.
However, the variables posited to affect social stratification can be loosely divided into economic and other social factors. Strictly quantitative economic variables are more useful to describing social stratification than explaining how social stratification is constituted or maintained. Income is the most common variable used to describe stratification and associated economic inequality in a society.
Social variables, both quantitative and qualitative , typically provide the most explanatory power in causal research regarding social stratification, either as independent variables or as intervening variables. Three important social variables include gender , race , and ethnicity , which, at the least, have an intervening effect on social status and stratification in most places throughout the world.
Social stratification
Some of these variables may have both causal and intervening effects on social status and stratification. For example, absolute age may cause a low income if one is too young or too old to perform productive work. The social perception of age and its role in the workplace, which may lead to ageism , typically has an intervening effect on employment and income.
Social scientists are sometimes interested in quantifying the degree of economic stratification between different social categories, such as men and women, or workers with different levels of education. An index of stratification has been recently proposed by Zhou for this purpose. Gender is one of the most pervasive and prevalent social characteristics which people use to make social distinctions between individuals.
Gender distinctions are found in economic-, kinship- and caste-based stratification systems. Entire societies may be classified by social scientists according to the rights and privileges afforded to men or women, especially those associated with ownership and inheritance of property. Sex- and gender-based division of labor is historically found in the annals of most societies and such divisions increased with the advent of industrialization.
Other differences in employment between men and women lead to an overall gender-based pay-gap in many societies, where women as a category earn less than men due to the types of jobs which women are offered and take, as well as to differences in the number of hours worked by women. Racism consists of both prejudice and discrimination based in social perceptions of observable biological differences between peoples. It often takes the form of social actions , practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are perceived to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities.
In a given society, those who share racial characteristics socially perceived as undesirable are typically under-represented in positions of social power, i. Minority members in such a society are often subjected to discriminatory actions resulting from majority policies, including assimilation , exclusion , oppression , expulsion , and extermination. For example, members associated with a particular race may be assigned a slave status , a form of oppression in which the majority refuses to grant basic rights to a minority that are granted to other members of the society.
More covert racism , such as that which many scholars posit is practiced in more contemporary societies, is socially hidden and less easily detectable. Covert racism often feeds into stratification systems as an intervening variable affecting income, educational opportunities, and housing. Both overt and covert racism can take the form of structural inequality in a society in which racism has become institutionalized. Ethnic prejudice and discrimination operate much the same as do racial prejudice and discrimination in society. In fact, only recently have scholars begun to differentiate race and ethnicity; historically, the two were considered to be identical or closely related.
With the scientific development of genetics and the human genome as fields of study, most scholars now recognize that race is socially defined on the basis of biologically determined characteristics that can be observed within a society while ethnicity is defined on the basis of culturally learned behavior. Ethnic identification can include shared cultural heritage such as language and dialect , symbolic systems , religion , mythology and cuisine. As with race, ethnic categories of persons may be socially defined as minority categories whose members are under-represented in positions of social power.
As such, ethnic categories of persons can be subject to the same types of majority policies. Whether ethnicity feeds into a stratification system as a direct, causal factor or as an intervening variable may depend on the level of ethnocentrism within each of the various ethnic populations in a society, the amount of conflict over scarce resources, and the relative social power held within each ethnic category.
The world and the pace of social change today are very different than in the time of Karl Marx, Max Weber, or even C. Globalizing forces lead to rapid international integration arising from the interchange of world views , products, ideas, and other aspects of culture. Like a stratified class system within a nation, looking at the world economy one can see class positions in the unequal distribution of capital and other resources between nations.
Rather than having separate national economies, nations are considered as participating in this world economy.
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The world economy manifests a global division of labor with three overarching classes: Core nations primarily own and control the major means of production in the world and perform the higher-level production tasks and provide international financial services. Periphery nations own very little of the world's means of production even when factories are located in periphery nations and provide low to non-skilled labor. Semiperipheral nations are midway between the core and periphery. They tend to be countries moving towards industrialization and more diversified economies. Furthermore, core nations are usually able to purchase raw materials and other goods from noncore nations at low prices, while demanding higher prices for their exports to noncore nations.
Today we have the means to gather and analyze data from economies across the globe. Although many societies worldwide have made great strides toward more equality between differing geographic regions, in terms of the standard of living and life chances afforded to their peoples, we still find large gaps between the wealthiest and the poorest within a nation and between the wealthiest and poorest nations of the world. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Marxism , Historical materialism , and Base and superstructure.
Three-component theory of stratification and Tripartite classification of authority. Murray Michelle Rosaldo David M. Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship. World-systems theory and Dependency theory. Social Class and Stratification. In Ritzer, George and J.
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The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology. Retrieved 23 June The Encyclopedia of Sociology. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: Class consciousness is not simply an awareness of one's own class interest but is also a set of shared views regarding how society should be organized legally, culturally, socially and politically.
These class relations are reproduced through time. In Marxist theory , the class structure of the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the conflict between two main classes: This is the fundamental economic structure of work and property, a state of inequality that is normalized and reproduced through cultural ideology.
Marxists explain the history of "civilized" societies in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who produce the goods or services in society. In the Marxist view of capitalism , this is a conflict between capitalists bourgeoisie and wage-workers the proletariat. For Marxists, class antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production necessarily entails control over the class which produces goods—in capitalism this is the exploitation of workers by the bourgeoisie.
Furthermore, "in countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed". Marx makes the argument that, as the bourgeoisie reach a point of wealth accumulation, they hold enough power as the dominant class to shape political institutions and society according to their own interests.
Marx then goes on to claim that the non-elite class, owing to their large numbers, have the power to overthrow the elite and create an equal society. In The Communist Manifesto , Marx himself argued that it was the goal of the proletariat itself to displace the capitalist system with socialism , changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist society in which: This would mark the beginning of a classless society in which human needs rather than profit would be motive for production.
In a society with democratic control and production for use , there would be no class, no state and no need for financial and banking institutions and money. Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification that saw social class as emerging from an interplay between "class", "status" and "power". Weber believed that class position was determined by a person's relationship to the means of production, while status or "Stand" emerged from estimations of honor or prestige. Weber derived many of his key concepts on social stratification by examining the social structure of many countries.
He noted that contrary to Marx's theories, stratification was based on more than simply ownership of capital. Weber pointed out that some members of the aristocracy lack economic wealth yet might nevertheless have political power. Likewise in Europe, many wealthy Jewish families lacked prestige and honor because they were considered members of a "pariah group". On April 2, , the results of a survey [19] conducted by BBC Lab UK developed in collaboration with academic experts and slated to be published in the journal Sociology were published online.
Class was defined and measured according to the amount and kind of economic, cultural and social resources reported. Economic capital was defined as income and assets ; cultural capital as amount and type of cultural interests and activities; and social capital as the quantity and social status of their friends , family and personal and business contacts. Today, concepts of social class often assume three general categories: The upper class [25] is the social class composed of those who are rich , well-born, powerful, or a combination of those. They usually wield the greatest political power.
In some countries, wealth alone is sufficient to allow entry into the upper class. In others, only people who are born or marry into certain aristocratic bloodlines are considered members of the upper class and those who gain great wealth through commercial activity are looked down upon by the aristocracy as nouveau riche. Many aristocratic peerages or titles have seats attached to them, with the holder of the title e. Earl of Bristol and his family being the custodians of the house, but not the owners. Many of these require high expenditures, so wealth is typically needed. Many aristocratic peerages and their homes are parts of estates, owned and run by the title holder with moneys generated by the land, rents or other sources of wealth.
However, in the United States where there is no aristocracy or royalty, the upper class status belongs to the extremely wealthy, the so-called "super-rich", though there is some tendency even in the United States for those with old family wealth to look down on those who have earned their money in business, the struggle between New Money and Old Money. The upper class is generally contained within the richest one or two percent of the population. Members of the upper class are often born into it and are distinguished by immense wealth which is passed from generation to generation in the form of estates.
The middle class is the most contested of the three categories, the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the lower and upper classes. Middle-class workers are sometimes called " white-collar workers ". Theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf have noted the tendency toward an enlarged middle class in modern Western societies, particularly in relation to the necessity of an educated work force in technological economies.
Lower class occasionally described as working class are those employed in low-paying wage jobs with very little economic security. The term "lower class" also refers to persons with low income. The latter is analogous to the Marxist term " lumpenproletariat ". A person's socioeconomic class has wide-ranging effects.
It can impact the schools they are able to attend, their health, the jobs open to them, who they may marry and their treatment by police and the courts. Angus Deaton and Anne Case have analyzed the mortality rates related to the group of white, middle-aged Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 and its relation to class. There has been a growing number of suicides and deaths by substance abuse in this particular group of middle-class Americans.
This group also has been recorded to have an increase in reports of chronic pain and poor general health. Deaton and Case came to the conclusion from these observation that because of the constant stress that these white, middle aged Americans feel fighting poverty and wavering between the lower and working class, these strains have taken a toll on these people and affected their whole bodies.
Social classifications can also determine the sporting activities that such classes take part in. It is suggested that those of an upper social class are more likely to take part in sporting activities, whereas those of a lower social background are less likely to participate in sport. However, upper-class people tend to not take part in certain sports that have been commonly known to be linked with the lower class. A person's social class has a significant impact on their educational opportunities.
Not only are upper-class parents able to send their children to exclusive schools that are perceived to be better, but in many places state-supported schools for children of the upper class are of a much higher quality than those the state provides for children of the lower classes. In , British cultural theorist Paul Willis published a study titled "Learning to Labour" in which he investigated the connection between social class and education. In his study, he found that a group of working-class schoolchildren had developed an antipathy towards the acquisition of knowledge as being outside their class and therefore undesirable, perpetuating their presence in the working class.
A person's social class has a significant impact on their physical health, their ability to receive adequate medical care and nutrition and their life expectancy. Lower-class people experience a wide array of health problems as a result of their economic status. Lower-class families have higher rates of infant mortality , cancer , cardiovascular disease and disabling physical injuries. Additionally, poor people tend to work in much more hazardous conditions, yet generally have much less if any health insurance provided for them, as compared to middle- and upper-class workers.
The conditions at a person's job vary greatly depending on class. Those in the upper-middle class and middle class enjoy greater freedoms in their occupations. They are usually more respected, enjoy more diversity and are able to exhibit some authority. The physical conditions of the workplace differ greatly between classes. While middle-class workers may "suffer alienating conditions" or "lack of job satisfaction", blue-collar workers are more apt to suffer alienating, often routine, work with obvious physical health hazards, injury and even death.
A recent United Kingdom government study has suggested that a "glass floor" exists in British society which prevents those who are less able, but whom come from wealthier backgrounds, from slipping down the social ladder. This is due to the fact that those from wealthier backgrounds have more opportunities available to them. Class conflict, frequently referred to as "class warfare" or "class struggle", is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests and desires between people of different classes.
For Marx, the history of class society was a history of class conflict. He pointed to the successful rise of the bourgeoisie and the necessity of revolutionary violence—a heightened form of class conflict—in securing the bourgeoisie rights that supported the capitalist economy. Marx believed that the exploitation and poverty inherent in capitalism were a pre-existing form of class conflict. Marx believed that wage labourers would need to revolt to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth and political power.
Distinctions of wealth , income , education , culture or social network might arise and would only be determined by individual experience and achievement in such a society. Race and other large-scale groupings can also influence class standing. The association of particular ethnic groups with class statuses is common in many societies.
As a result of conquest or internal ethnic differentiation, a ruling class is often ethnically homogenous and particular races or ethnic groups in some societies are legally or customarily restricted to occupying particular class positions. Which ethnicities are considered as belonging to high or low classes varies from society to society. In modern societies, strict legal links between ethnicity and class have been drawn, such as in apartheid , the caste system in Africa , the position of the Burakumin in Japanese society and the casta system in Latin America.
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