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:
Slavery:
When one individual is owned as property by another.
Ct. those forms in ancient Greece and Rome with the 19th century.
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:
From the Portuguese, casta, race, pure, lineage, stock.
Brahmins, the highest, most elevated status of purity;
untouchables, lowest, worst degree of purity.
Physical separation and segregation, even though its particular
forms vary.
Estates:
Differing obligations and rights define each group and bind them
to the others.
Nobility, gentry, aristocracy through clergy to third estate
(commoners, serfs, free peasants, merchants, artisans).
Relatively more mobile than the caste system.
Class:
Not established by legal or religious decree.
Not based on inherited titles.
More mobility; intermarriage not disallowed by law.
Partly (and ideally) based on individual merit and not on birth.
Classes depend on economic differences: in possession, control of
resources. (Ct. non-economic differences, e.g. religion, or blood.)
Sets of obligations and duties define and govern personal
relationships in other types of stratifications; whereas class
differentiations are impersonal: pay, working conditions, etc.
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.
Theories of class:
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.)
Prior to industrialization, the means of production
were land and instruments to tend crops or animals.
Owners of land (aristocrats), Workers of
land (serfs, slaves, free peasants).
Industrial societies: factory, capital, wealth is more
important.
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.
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).
The difference is taken as profit by the employers.
o The key insight is the recognition of objectively structured
economic inequalities.
Weber:
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.
Beside class, there are “status” and “party” as aspects of
stratification.
o Status (Stand, status, estate):
Social honor, prestige accorded by one group on
others. (recall that time when teacher asks about
your parents’ occupation in grade school.)
May be positive or negative.
Independent of class divisions.
Cf. genteel poverty, new money (nouveaux riches).
Depends on people’s subjective evaluations of
social differences. Not property or wages, but
lifestyle as predominant.
o Party:
A group of individuals who work together because
they have common background, aims, interests.
May cut across class differences: religious
affiliations, national or ethnic identity, etc.
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:
Britain: top 1 percent of population own 17 percent of wealth.
The most wealthy 10 percent of the population own about half the total
wealth.
Top 1 percent own 75 percent of shares.
Top 20 percent in US received 50 percent of total income in 1994.
The bottom 20 percent receive 4.4 percent.
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