Social Stratification
What is Social Stratification?
Caste and Class Systems
Stratification
Marx
Weber
Stratification and Technology: A Global
Perspective
What is Social Stratification?
• For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in
small hunting and gathering societies. These
bands of people show little signs of inequality. As
societies became more complex, major changes
came about, these changes elevated certain
categories of the population by giving them more
power, money, and prestige.
• Social Stratification- a system by which a society
ranks categories of people in a hierarchy.
• 1. Social stratification is a trait of society, not
simply a reflection of individual differences.
• Children born into wealthy families are more
likely than children born in poverty to experience
good healthy, achieve academically, succeed in
life’s work and live a long life.
• 2. Social stratification persists over generations.
• To see stratification as a trait of society rather than
one of individuals, we need to only look at how
inequality persists along generations. In all
societies, parents pass their social position on to
their children.
• Social Mobility- change in one’s position in the
social hierarchy.
• 3. Social stratification is universal but variable.
• In some societies, inequality is mostly a matter of
prestige; in others, wealth or power is the key
dimension of difference. More importantly some
societies display more inequality than others.
• 4. Social stratification involves not just inequality
but beliefs.
• Any system of inequality gives some people more
than others and the society also defines the
arrangements as fair.
Caste and Class Systems
• A Caste System- is a social system based on
ascription, or birth.
• A pure caste system is closed because birth alone
determines one’s destiny, with little or no
opportunity for social mobility based on effort.
• First, traditional caste groups have specific
occupations, so generations of a family perform
the same type of work.
• Second, maintaining a rigid social hierarchy
depends on people marrying within their own
categories; “mixed” marriages would blur the
ranking of children.
• Endogamy- marriage between people of the same
social category.
• Third, caste norms guide people to stay in the
company of “their own kind.”
• Fourth, caste systems rest on powerful cultural
beliefs.
• Caste systems exist in agrarian societies because
life long routines of agriculture depend on a rigid
sense of duty and discipline.
The Class System
• Class System- social stratification based on both
birth and individual achievement.
• The class system categorizes people according to
their color, sex, or social background comes to be
seen as wrong in industrial and post-industrial
societies, and all people gain political rights and
roughly equal standing before the law.
• Meritocracy- social stratification based on
personal merit.
• People in industrial societies develop a broad
range of capabilities, stratification is based on
“merit,” which is the job one does and how well
one does it.
• Why do industrial and postindustrial societies
keep castelike qualities?
• Because a pure meritocracy diminishes the
importance of families and other social groupings.
Economic performance is not everything after all.
Would we want to evaluate our family members
solely on their jobs? Probably not. Therefore,
class systems in high-income nations move toward
meritocracy to promote productivity and
efficiency but retain caste elements to maintain
order and social cohesion.
• Status consistency- the degree of consistency in a
person’s social standing across various dimensions
of social inequality.
The Functions of Social Stratification
• The structural-functional paradigm- social
inequality plays a vital part in the operation of
society.
• Davis-Moore thesis- Social stratification has
beneficial consequences of the operation of a
society.
• According to the Davis-Moore thesis, the greater
the functional importance of a position, the more
rewards a society attaches to it. This strategy
promotes productivity and efficiency because
rewarding important work with income, prestige,
power, and leisure encourages people to do these
jobs and to work better longer and harder.
Unequal rewards benefit some individuals, then,
and a system of unequal rewards benefits society
as a whole.
Stratification and Conflict
• Social-Conflict analysis argues that rather than
benefiting society as a whole, social stratification
provides some people with advantages over
others. This analysis draws heavily on the ideas of
Karl Marx, with contributions from Max Weber.
• Marx saw great inequality in wealth and power
arising from capitalism, which, he argued, made
class conflict inevitable. In time, he believed,
oppression and misery would drive the working
majority to organize and ultimately overthrow
capitalism.
• Marx explained the through the family,
opportunity and wealth are passed down from
generation to generation. Moreover, the legal
system defends private property and inheritance.
Finally, elite children mix at exclusive schools,
forging social ties that will benefit them
throughout their lives. Capitalist society
reproduces the class structure in each new
generation.
Why No Marxist Revolution?
• 1. The fragmentation of the capitalist class.
• Day-to-day operations of large corporations are
now in the hands of a managerial class, whose
members may or may not be major stockholders.
• 2. A higher standard of living.
• A century ago most workers were in factories or
on farms performing blue-collar occupations,
lower-prestige work that involves mostly manual
labor. Today, most workers hold white-collar
occupations, higher-prestige work that involves
mostly mental activity. Most of today’s whitecollar workers do not think of themselves as an
“industrial proletariat.”
• 3. More worker organizations.
• Workers today have organizational clout that they
lacked a century ago. Worker management
disputes are settled without threatening the
capitalist system.
• 4. More extensive legal protections.
• During the twentieth century, the government
passed laws to make the workplace safer and
developed programs such as unemployment
insurance, disability protection and Social
Security.
Max Weber: Class, Status, and Power
• Weber saw Marx’s two-class model simplistic.
• Instead, he thought social stratification involves
three distinct dimensions of inequality.
• The first dimension is economic inequality—the
issue so vital to Marx—which Weber called class
position. Weber did not think of “classes” as
crude categories but as a continuum ranging from
high to low. Weber’s second dimension of social
stratification is status, or social prestige, and the
third is power.
• Weber’s view of social stratification in industrial
societies as a multidimensional ranking rather than
a hierarchy of clearly defined classes.
• Socioeconomic status (SES)-a composite ranking
based on various dimensions of social inequality.
• Social stratification according to Weber is variable
and complex.
Inequalities in History:
• Weber points out that each of his three dimensions
of social inequality stands out at different points in
the evolution of human societies. Agrarian
societies emphasize status or social prestige,
typically in the form of honor.
Hunting and Gathering Societies
• With simple technology, hunters and gathers
produce only what is necessary for day-to-day
living. Some people may produce more than
others, but the group’s survival depends on all
sharing what they have. Thus, no categories of
people emerge as better off than others.
Horticultural, Pastoral, and Agrarian
Societies
• As technology advances create a surplus, social
inequality increases. In horticultural and pastoral
societies, a small elite controls most of the surplus.
Large-scale agriculture is more productive still,
and marked inequality—as great as any time in
human history—means that various categories of
people lead strikingly different lives. Agrarian
nobility typically exercises godlike power over the
masses.
Industrial Societies
• Industrialization turns the tide, lessening
inequality. Prompted by the need to develop
individual talents, meritocracy takes hold and
erodes the power of traditional elites.
• The specialized work performed in industrial
societies demands schooling for all, sharply
reducing illiteracy. A literate population, in turn,
presses for a greater voice in political decision
making, further diminishing social inequality and
lessening men’s domination over women.