Social stratification describes inequalities between individuals and groups in societies. There are four basic systems of stratification: slavery, caste, estates, and class. Class stratification is based on large groupings that share economic resources which shape lifestyles. Theories of class include Marx who saw two main groups based on ownership of capital or labor, and Weber who saw class as one dimension alongside status and party, with life chances dependent on skills and qualifications as well as economic position. Debates continue around the sources and persistence of social stratification, and whether it benefits society or primarily serves the interests of elites.

1. Social stratification and divisions
WEEK 12
January 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=dOOTKA0aGI0

2. Ask your partner
• What does stratification mean?
• Where do social divisions come from?
• Who benefits from divisions?
• How do social divisions persist in societies?

3. Today
• Relationship to last week (Poverty and Welfare)
• Approaches to stratification:
– Theories of class
– Measuring class
• Contemporary patterns of inequality:
– Class and gender
– The values of both within a broader framework
• Studying social mobility:
– The dynamic aspect of class mobility

4. Systems of Stratification
Social stratification describes inequalities that exist
between individuals and groups in societies
All systems of social stratification share the
following characteristics:
1. The rankings apply to social categories of people
who share a common characteristic without
necessarily interacting or identifying with each
other
2. People’s life experiences and opportunities
depend heavily on how their social category is
ranked
3. The ranks of different social categories tend to
change very slowly over time

5. Four Basic Systems of Stratification
• Slavery: certain people are owned as property by others
– Bales (2000) ‘Expendable People: Modern Slavery in the age of
globalization’. Slavery still exists in the forms of: forced labour and debt
bondage ; prostitution; servile marriage
• Caste: Closed system in which social status is given for life
– Sharma (1999) Development and Democracy in India
– Apartheid
• Estates: Feudal estates were strata with differing rights
and obligations towards each other. Localised in Europe
• Class: Large-scale groupings who share common
economic resources; these in turn shape their possible
lifestyles

6. South Africa: from apartheid to class
stratification
• Apartheid was made law in 1948. Black people :
– Denied national citizenship and denied land ownership
– Performed menial, low-paid jobs
• White people defended apartheid:
– Black people threaten white cultural traditions and they are
inferior
• Political resistance grew:
– 1980s limited political rights to mixed race people; 1990 Nelson
Mandela released; 1994 first national election; Truth and
Reconciliation Commission 1995
• Today:
– 1/3 black South Africans unemployed and no running water
– Seekings and Natrass 2006: a shift from race to class

7. What’s different about class?
• More fluid? Social boundaries breakdown due to
immigration, urbanisation (Lipset & Bendix 1967)
• Achieved rather than ascribed in part
• Dependent on economic differentials
• More impersonal
What is common is that your position to a large degree
determines your life chances and degree of material comfort…

8. Life expectancy
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmhealth/286/286.p
df p6

9. Cigarette smoking
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmhealth/286/286.p
df p22

10. How can you measure
class?
• Complex concept to ‘operationalize’: usually
through occupational structure
• People’s ‘slots’ within the occupational
division of labour to a large degree determine
their life chances and degree of material
comfort
• Schemes can be descriptive hierarchies or
more theoretically grounded, e.g. relational as
in the Goldthorpe scheme

11. Goldthorpe’s class scheme
• Is class simply your job? If you change job, does
your class change?
• Goldthorpe tries to look for relational class
schemes
• Neo-Weberian (market situation; work situation)?
(we’ll come back to this)
• Evaluated jobs based on in their market/work
situations + CASMIN project (Comparative
Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Societies)
- 8 classes

12. Simplified Goldthorpe classes
Service Class
Professionals and
managers;
administrators and
officials
Service
relationship
Intermediate Class
Routine clerical,
sales and service;
the self-employed
Mixed employment
relationships
Working Class
Supervisors of
manual workers;
skilled and
unskilled manual
workers
Labour contracts

13. Share Of The Wealth
1% of population owns 21% of wealth

14. Criticisms of Goldthorpe’s classes
• Occupational class schemes are difficult to apply to
economically inactive:
– Children
– Students
– Pensioners
– Unemployed
• Unable to reflect property ownership and wealth
• Westergaard (1995: 127) We cannot exclude the rich: ‘It is
the intense concentration of power and privilege in so few
hands that makes these people top. Their socio-structural
weight overall, immensely disproportionate to their small
numbers, makes the society they top a class society,
whatever may be the pattern of divisions beneath them’

15. The Death of Class (Pakulski & Waters
1996)
• Status- based consumption is now the main form of
stratification in modern societies, rather than class
• Status conventionalism:
– Inequalities are the result of status/ prestige
– Property ownership is now less restricted
– Where inequality remains, it is failure of group not to
achieve a high status, not class position (position in a
division of labour)
– Explained as being a result of globalization; new
international division of labour, importance of family as site
of class reproduction is less important.

16. Theories of Social Class I
Karl Marx
• A group of people who stand in a common
relationship to the means of production
• Two main groups: those who own capital and
those who own only their labour (proletariat)
• Exploitative relationship: ‘surplus value’
– Comparison to agrarian societies (inevitably poor)
• Ongoing process leading to ‘pauperization’ of
those at the bottom

17. Theories of Social Class II
Max Weber 1864-1920
• Still based on conflicts over power and
resources, but more multi-dimensional
• Class is accompanied by status and party
• Market position is a crucial concept
• Life chances depend not just on the means of
production but on skills & qualifications

18. Theories of Social Class II - Weber (1864-1920)
• Three dimensions of inequality:
– Class:
• Market position (type of job)
– Status (honour or prestige)
• Lifestyles
• Shared sense of identity
• Varies independently of class
– Party (a basis of power)
• A group working together towards a common goal
• Could be based on religion (Protestants/Catholics)
• Marx: inequality could be eliminated by abolishing private
ownership of productive property.
• Weber doubted this: the significance of power based on
organisational position would only increase (relate this to
uprisings in Eastern Europe/ former SU countries)

19. Weber and the source of power
Traditional
• Emerges out of the position of clan
chief- we accept the position of
leader/king precisely because they
are leader.
Legal Rational
• Modern states –we accept the legal
and power structure because it is
bureaucratic and effective
Charismatic
• Radical leader who by virtue of their
own ability acquire followers and can
create new religions or states.

20. Theories of Social Class III – Erik Olin
Wright: 3 Dimensions of Control
• Olin Wright tries uses aspects of both Weber and Marx
• Three dimensions of control over economic resources:
– Control over investments or money capital
– Control over the physical means of production (land, factories, offices)
– Control over labour power (85%-90% of population)
• Relationship to authority
• Skills or expertise
• Obviously, capitalist classes have control over all three, whereas
the lower class have none
• Contradictory class positions
– Have some influence over some production aspects, but not others
– E.g. white collar workers have to sell labour power to their employers
(wage labour), but compared to labourers have much more control over
the work setting
– Share features with both the capitalists and the manual workers

21. Critical thinking
• How then, do societies persist without
redistributing their resources more equally?
• How is it possible that people believe that we
should be privileged or poor because of the
accident of birth?
• Think about your country: what are the social
stratifications that exist there?

22. Why does stratification exist?
Theoretical approaches
• Stratification exists in all societies
• Which theoretical strand you believe will
affect your policies:
– Functionalist theories
– Conflict theories

23. Functionalist
• Davis and Moore (1945)
– Benefits
– Division of jobs: responsibility, skill
– The more the functional importance, the more
rewards a society will attach to a position
– By unequal distribution, motivation is given to work
better, harder, longer
– If society was egalitarian, productive efficiency would
be reduced: meritocracy

24. Critical Perspectives
• Davis and Moore don’t explain why stratification
varies
• Don’t express what reward should be attached to
an occupation
• The Davis-Moore thesis exaggerates social
stratification’s role in developing talent
• Social inequality promotes conflict, and
revolution
• Tumin (1953) Some Principles of Stratification: A
Critical Analysis

25. Marxist/ Neo-Marxist
Capitalist society reproduces the
class structure in each new generation because:
• The capitalists make profit
• Opportunity and wealth are passed down from
generation to generation
• The legal systems defends this through inheritance
laws
• Exclusive schools bring the children of elite
together: encouraging them to form social ties that
benefit them throughout life

26. Criticism of Marxist theory
• Denies central tenet of Davis – Moore thesis
– Motivating people requires some form of unequal
rewards.
– Separating rewards from performance is one of
the reasons why the Soviet Union was so
unproductive
• Clark (1991) defends Marx; humanity is social
rather than selfish. Individual monetary
rewards are not the only way to motivate
people

27. Ideology
• Societies teach people to think stratification is
‘fair’ or ‘natural’ Plato (427-347 BC)
• Marx: capitalist law defines the right to own
property as a bedrock of society. Therefore,
inheritance laws...
• The capitalists control the ideas as well as the
means of production
• Aristotle (384-322BC) defends slavery under
ancient Greeks: some people with little
intelligence deserve to be ruled by ‘betters’
• Agrarian societies in the Middle Ages
Do you remember Dennis?! Religion, ‘natural’ order

28. Ideologies and gender stratification
• Harry Enfield - Women know your place
• Historical notions of a ‘woman’s place’ today seem
far from natural and are losing power
• However:
– contemporary class system still subjects women to
caste-like expectations that they perform traditional
tasks out of altruism while men get financially rewarded
– Perpetuation:
• Advertisements featuring gender stereotyping

30. Functionalism Paradigm vs Conflict
Paradigm (Stinchcombe: 1963:808)
• Stratification keeps society
working.
• Linking of rewards to
important social positions
benefits society as a whole
• Matching of talents to
appropriate positions
• Useful and inevitable
• Values and beliefs are widely
shared
• Supported by beliefs; stable
over time
• Stratification is result of
social conflict
• Differences in resources
serve some, harm others
• Much talent won’t be used
at all
• Useful to some; not
inevitable
• Values and beliefs are
ideological
• Reflect interests of part of
society; unstable over time

31. Where is the Revolution?
• Why hasn’t there been a Marxist revolution of
the proletariat?
• Dahrendorf (1959) Several complimentary
reasons
– Fragmentation of capitalist class
– White-collar work and rise in living standards
– More extensive worker organisation
– More extensive legal protections

32. 5 responses to Marx
• Wealth remains highly concentrated and
inequalities have increased
• Global system of capitalism
• Work remains degrading and dehumanising
• Labour activity has been weakened
• Law still favours the rich
Miliband,1969; Edwards, 1979; Giddens ,1982; Domhoff, 1983;
Stephens, 1986; Boswell and Dixon, 1993; Hout et al, 1993)

33. • Historically, technological advances have been
associated with more pronounced social
stratification (Lenski and Lenski 1995)
• However, this is reversed slightly in advanced
industrial societies...

34. Two challenges to class analysis
• Lifestyle
– Arguments about ‘the cultural turn’ (signification; Burberry)
– Symbols and markers based on consumption
– Bourdieu: forms of capital (Cultural capital; social capital)
– Forum homework: listening based on new class divisions which
use cultural capital
• Gender and Stratification
– Female class once driven by husbands and fathers
– Critiques:
• women’s work can influence household’s economic position
• Cross-class households
• Woman could be dominant earner

35. Social Mobility
• Fair amount of upward and downward mobility, and
concerned with both
– Intra-generational mobility (individuals’ own careers)
– Inter-generational mobility (children vs. parents)
• Absolute mobility is moving from one class to
another – real experience for someone!
• Relative mobility (sometimes ‘fluidity’) looks at
comparative chances for individuals in each class of
making it to a particular destination…

37. Class (Still) Matters
• Ongoing argument about access to various
desirable goods: educational achievement,
university admission, etc.
• Meritocracy: ability + effort = achievement
(Saunders – ‘unequal but fair’)
• Class membership continues to correlate with
inequalities of life expectancy, health
outcomes and lifetime income

38. INSTITUTES OF SOCIAL
DIVISIONS
PROCESSES OF SOCIAL
EXCLUSION
EXPERIENCES OF
INEQUALITIES
Class:
economic/social/cultural
/ symbolic capital
Opening/closing spaces
Increasing/decreasing
choices
empowerment/
disempowerment
Lack
Degradation
Defilement
Deprivations
Invisibility
Gender
Ethnicity
Sexuality
Marginalisation
Ghettoisation
Violence and terrorism
Enslavement
Aloneness
Fear
Low self-worth
Brutalisation
Age
Health and Disability
Global culture/ nation
Domination
Dehumanisation
Humiliation
Shame
Lack of respect
Insecurity

39. Independent study
• Cornell reading
• Prepare for seminar – see handout on Moodle
page
• Forum homework (Academic Engagement 5%;
revision)