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Stratification: structured inequalities between different groupings of people.
o What basis does inequality have? Physical prowess, intellectual skill, spiritual
superiority…?
o Cf. geological strata.
o Four types of stratification:
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Slavery:
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When one individual is owned as property by another.
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Ct. those forms in ancient Greece and Rome with the 19th century.
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Arguments against slavery as a form of labor: 1) human beings
have inalienable rights, b) economic incentives motivate better
than compulsion, c) costly, on account of the resistance it provokes
and the monitoring it requires.
Caste:
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From the Portuguese, casta, race, pure, lineage, stock.
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Brahmins, the highest, most elevated status of purity;
untouchables, lowest, worst degree of purity.
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Physical separation and segregation, even though its particular
forms vary.
Estates:
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Differing obligations and rights define each group and bind them
to the others.
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Nobility, gentry, aristocracy through clergy to third estate
(commoners, serfs, free peasants, merchants, artisans).
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Relatively more mobile than the caste system.
Class:
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Not established by legal or religious decree.
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Not based on inherited titles.
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More mobility; intermarriage not disallowed by law.
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Partly (and ideally) based on individual merit and not on birth.
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Classes depend on economic differences: in possession, control of
resources. (Ct. non-economic differences, e.g. religion, or blood.)
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Sets of obligations and duties define and govern personal
relationships in other types of stratifications; whereas class
differentiations are impersonal: pay, working conditions, etc.
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Class, then, is: a large-scale grouping of people who share
common economic resources. Economic differences, however,
determine lifestyle and other social behavioral patterns.
o Upper class: ownership and direct control of productive
resources.
o Middle class: white-collar workers, professionals.
o Working class: blue-collar and manual jobs.
o Peasants: diminished influence and existence in
industrialized countries.
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Theories of class:
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Marx:
o What defines a class is the group’s relationship to the
means of production. (i.e. to the means by which they earn
a living.)
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Prior to industrialization, the means of production
were land and instruments to tend crops or animals.
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Owners of land (aristocrats), Workers of
land (serfs, slaves, free peasants).
Industrial societies: factory, capital, wealth is more
important.
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Industrialists (owners of capital), those who
have to sell their labor (working class,
proletariat).
o One class stands in a relationship of exploitation to the
other.
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Under capitalism, the form which exploitation takes
is called “surplus value”: in a unit of time, the
workers produce more value than is needed by
employers to repay the cost of hiring them (their
wages).
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The difference is taken as profit by the employers.
o The key insight is the recognition of objectively structured
economic inequalities.
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Weber:
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Beside control over means of production, there are economic
differences which do not arise directly from property but which
nonetheless determine class.
o Skills, credentials, qualifications needed for types of jobs.
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Beside class, there are “status” and “party” as aspects of
stratification.
o Status (Stand, status, estate):
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Social honor, prestige accorded by one group on
others. (recall that time when teacher asks about
your parents’ occupation in grade school.)
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May be positive or negative.
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Independent of class divisions.
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Cf. genteel poverty, new money (nouveaux riches).
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Depends on people’s subjective evaluations of
social differences. Not property or wages, but
lifestyle as predominant.
o Party:
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A group of individuals who work together because
they have common background, aims, interests.
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May cut across class differences: religious
affiliations, national or ethnic identity, etc.

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E.g. Catholics and Protestants in Northern
Ireland.
Erik Olin Wright (contradictory class location), Frank Parkin
(dual closure): those in the middle aspire to acquire more of the
resources controlled by the top, but they also distinguish
themselves from those lower down.
o Exclusion/usurpation.
o Distribution of wealth:
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Britain: top 1 percent of population own 17 percent of wealth.
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The most wealthy 10 percent of the population own about half the total
wealth.
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Top 1 percent own 75 percent of shares.
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Top 20 percent in US received 50 percent of total income in 1994.
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The bottom 20 percent receive 4.4 percent.