Social Stratification Notes

Jarrett's Story

• Jarrett's story exemplifies the quest for the American Dream, highlighting challenges faced by first-generation college students.
• He overcame obstacles like age, initial academic struggles, and family challenges to earn a Bachelor's degree.
• His success underscores the importance of perseverance and support systems.

Social Stratification

• Social stratification is a system that ranks people based on wealth, income, education, family background, and power.
• It creates uneven distribution of resources, with society's layers representing different levels of access.
• An individual's socioeconomic status (SES) reflects their position within this stratification.
• While equality is a professed value, sociologists recognize social stratification makes inequalities apparent.

Factors Defining Stratification

• Stratification is often an economic system based on wealth and income.
• Prestige and cultural beliefs also influence social standing.
• Parents pass on social position, cultural norms, values, and beliefs.
• Occupational structure and cultural attitudes perpetuate inequalities.

Systems of Stratification

• Closed systems (e.g., caste) allow little change in social position.
• Open systems (e.g., class) allow movement and interaction between layers.
• Meritocracy is a hypothetical system where social standing is based on personal effort and merit, but no society is based entirely on merit.

Caste System

• Caste systems are closed stratification systems determined by birth, limiting social mobility.
• They dictate occupations, marriage partners, and housing.
• Cultural values reinforce the system, promoting beliefs in fate and destiny.

Class System

• Class system is open, based on social factors and individual achievement.
• Class is a group sharing similar status based on wealth, income, education, family background and occupation.

Meritocracy

• Meritocracy: social stratification determined by personal effort and merit.
• It is hypothetical ideal because other factors (socialization, economic inequalities) influence social standing.

Social Class in the United States

• Social class categorization is fluid, with three levels: upper, middle, and lower class.
• Wealth is significant for class distinction because it can be transferred to children.
• Pew Center defines classes based on the median household income:
  • Lower class: income is two-thirds of the national median.
  • Middle class: income is between two-thirds and twice the median.
    • Upper class: income is above twice the national median.

Status Consistency

• Status consistency describes the consistency of an individual’s rank across factors determining stratification.
• Caste systems correlate with high status consistency.
• Class systems demonstrate lower status consistency.
• Low status consistency correlates with more choices and opportunities.

Upper Class

• The upper class holds significant power and influence.
• They include corporate leaders, media owners, philanthropists, and political contributors.
• Distinction between “old money” (inherited wealth) and “new money” (earned wealth).

Middle Class

• Many people consider themselves middle class, irrespective of income.
• Upper-middle-class pursues careers, owns homes, and values education.
• Lower-middle-class holds technical/administrative jobs, struggles to maintain lifestyle and build savings.

Lower Class

• The lower class includes the working class, working poor, and underclass.
• Working-class holds steady, physically demanding jobs.
• Working-poor has unskilled, low-paying employment without benefits.
• Underclass resides in inner cities, relies on welfare, and faces frequent crises.
• $Federal Minimum Wage$: $7.25$ per hour
• $Living Wage$: variable amount necessary to meet minimum standards

Class Traits

• Class traits, or class markers, are behaviors, customs, and norms defining each class.
• These reflect access to culture, resources, hobbies, vacations, and leisure activities.
• Factory worker could be skilled French cook, billionaire might dress in ripped jeans, a low-income student might own designer shoes

Social Mobility

• Social mobility: the ability of individuals to change positions within a social stratification system.
• Upward mobility: movement to a higher socioeconomic class.
• Downward mobility: movement to a lower socioeconomic class.
  Intergenerational mobility: change in social class between different generations of a family.
• Intragenerational mobility: change in social mobility over the course of one person's lifetime.
• Structural mobility: societal changes enable a whole group to move up or down the social class ladder.

Standard of Living

• Standard of living: level of wealth available to maintain a specific lifestyle.
• It's based on income, employment, class, literacy rates, mortality rates, poverty rates, and housing affordability.
• The US middle class is shrinking causing issues for the U.S.'s relatively high standard of living.

Global Stratification

• Global stratification: compares wealth, status, power and economic stability of countries across the world.
• It highlights worldwide patterns of social inequality.
• Absolute poverty:
  $1.90$ U.S. dollars a day
• Relative poverty:
  50% income average median income

Social Welfare Programs in the US

• Provide food, medical, and cash assistance.
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Industrial Revolution's Impact on Global Stratification

• Created wealth in Europe and North America.
• Led to vast inequalities between industrialized and non-industrialized nations.

Models of Global Stratification

• Gross national product (GNP).
• Gross domestic product (GDP).
• Traditional models ("first world", "second world," and "third world") are outdated because they are too vague.
• A better model separates countries into more developed and less developed.

Functionalism

• Davis-Moore thesis: the greater the functional importance of a social role, the greater must be the reward.
• The theory supports stratification, inequality, and the unequal distribution of wealth.

Conflict Theory

• Rooted in the work of Karl Marx, stratification results from people’s relationship to production.
• Social stratification benefits only some people, not all of society.
• Bourgeois capitalists own high-producing businesses, factories, and land, while working-class proletariats earned skimpy wages and struggled to survive.

Symbolic Interactionism

• Symbolic interactionism examines stratification from a micro-level perspective and everyday interactions to explain society as a whole.
• People tend to live, work, and associate with others who share their income, education, class traits, and tastes.
• People often engage in conspicuous consumption: the purchase and use of certain products to make a statement about status.

Measuring the Financial Resource of the World's Richest People

• To compare the ratio of income of the richest 10 percent to the income of the poorest 10 percent.
• The Human Development Index expresses the capabilities of people's potential achievement with data regarding people's lifespan, education, and income.
• the Gini Coefficient indicates the level of poverty within a nation or region by calculating the percentage of the population living beneath various poverty thresholds. \A common measure is to consider the percentage of a nation's population living on less than $1.90$ per day, which is known as the International Poverty Line.

Inequality in the US

• Global stratification in the United States refers to the unequal distribution of resources among individuals.
• Social inequality is just as harmful as economic discrepancies.

Global Classification

• Cold War terminology: divided the world into first world, second world, and third world nations.
• Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1979) world systems approach uses an economic basis to understand global inequality.
• Core nations are dominant capitalist countries, highly industrialized, technological, and urbanized.
• Peripheral nations have very little industrialization and economically dependent on core nations for jobs and aid.
  While The World Bank is a common source for global economic data:

Capital flight

• capital from one nation to another

Deindustrialization

• no new companies open to replace jobs lost to foreign nations

Low Income Nations

• Low-income countries or economies are primarily found in Asia and Africa (World Bank 2021), where most of the world’s population lives.
• Women are disproportionately affected by poverty (in a trend toward a global feminization of poverty).
• Much of the population lives in absolute poverty