Chapter 8- Social Stratification
Social Stratification: a society’s way of organizing its citizens into hierarchal groups based on economic status, social standing, and others. effects how resources (monetary and not) are distributed.
Three dimensions: class, status, and power
Social Class: one’s economic position, including one’s occupation
Means of Production: the resources necessary for production to take place.
Capitalists own the resources, Proletariats did the producing
Status: the prestige attached to a person’s position within society
Status is determined by factors outside of one’s wealth.
Power: the ability to get others to do what you want them to do, even if it is against their will.
President> Voters/Ordinary Citizens> Felons, Immigrants
“Breadwinner wives” were the sole providers for their families, “Alpha wives” earn more than their husbands
Typically, the more someone makes the more power they are given. But for women, they are usually forced to have less power than or share power with their husbands even if they make more, or all of, the household income.
Status Consistency/Crystalization Status: state of being someone who ranks similarly across each dimension
Status Inconsistency: status is very different across each dimension. Ex: celebrities who earn a lot of money are high in status and social class, but usually don’t have much power.
Barter economy: where people exchange goods or services for things instead of money
Symbolic Exchange: where anything can be exchanged but the process is mainly valued for the human connection it fosters
Income is the amount of money a person makes or earns. Wealth is the total of a person’s assets and properties minus the debt they owe. wealth = net worth
Reasons for growing income inequality:
deindustrialization: decline in industrialization as led to the loss of many high paying industry jobs that gave people upper middle class status, and now they have jobs that align more with the upper lower class to lower middle class
decline of labor unions: less industry led to less unions even for still standing industries. these unions helped obtain fair wages for many job fields
technological advances: many higher paying jobs created recently are in the tech field, and most Americans do not have the education or skill to obtain these positions
political climate: politics used to be concerned with, and made up of, people from varying socieconmis classes, and now it is mostly upper-class people who do not care or do not understand the needs of the lower and middle class.