Social Stratification Lecture Notes

  • Social stratification: Systematic study of structured social
    inequalities at the heart of sociology.
  • Aims:
    • Introduce social stratification.
    • Introduce theoretical perspectives and empirical studies.
    • Teach social inequality as a sociological problem.
    • Familiarize with key concepts and theoretical perspectives.
    • Examine key axes of stratification (caste, class, gender, ethnicity, race) and their intersections.
    • Familiarize with key processes (social mobility and social reproduction).
    • Appraise multiple operations of social inequalities.
  • Learning Outcomes:
    • Recognize social inequalities as a multifarious and culturally specific social reality.
    • Define concepts, theories, debates in social stratification.
    • Appreciate sociological knowledge of social stratification for public discourse and research projects.
  • Outline Syllabus:
    • Unit I: Understanding Social Stratification (16 Hours)
    • Unit II: Social Stratification: Axes and Issues (44 Hours)
    • Caste
    • Class
    • Gender
    • Race
    • Ethnicity
    • Social Mobility and Social Reproduction
  • Mathematical Symbol: (
    $\sqrt{9} = 3)

Social Stratification (Mills Article)

  • Social Stratification: The ranking of people in society based on valued things and experiences.
  • Classification Basis: Observing the 24-hour cycle, the 12-month cycle and the life-long biography to classify people based on social distribution.
  • Ranking: In any society, some people seem to get most values, some least, and others in between.
  • Objective: Understanding such ranking and finding out why ranks differ.
  • Strata Definition: A stratum includes people with similar chances to gain valued things and experiences.
  • Life Chances: Belonging to a stratum means sharing similar chances to receive values like cars, money, respect, education and kind treatment.
  • Dimensions of Stratification: Four factors explaining differing chances to obtain values:
    • Occupation
    • Class
    • Status
    • Power
Occupation
  • Definition: A set of activities pursued regularly as a major income source.
  • Individual Standpoint: Marketable skills range widely in compensation.
  • Societal Standpoint: Occupations are classified into industrial groups based on functions fulfilling goods and services.
  • Occupations Entail:
    • Various types and levels of skill
    • Fulfilling certain functions within industrial division of labor
  • Contemporary USA: Occupations are the most obvious way into understanding stratification monopolize waking hours and dictate affordability.
  • Occupations connected with class, status and power as well as to skill and function; to understand the occupations composing any social stratum, we must consider them in terms of each of these interrelated dimensions.
  • Occupational Shift: The most decisive occupational shift in the twentieth century has been the decline of the independent entrepreneurs ("the old middle class" of businessmen, farmers, and fee professionals) and the rise of the salaried employees ("the new middle class" of managers and salaried professionals, of office people and sales employees).
  • Statistics: The old middle class has bounded from 6 to 25 per cent, while the wage workers as a whole have levelled off, in fact declining from 61 to 55 per cent
Class Situation
  • Simple Definition: Amount and source of income.
  • Class Definition: Set of people sharing similar life choices due to similar class situations.
  • Occupation vs. Property: Occupation determines class-chances of over 4/5 of Americans.
  • Working for Others: Working for someone else on someone else's property is a vital difference of entrepreneurial property.
  • Propertyless Bottom: Wage-workers depend on equipment owned by others and earn wages for time spent at work.
  • White-Collar Position: White-collar people are dependent on large properties for job security and do not "own things".
  • Amount of Income: Variety of modern class positions requires amount of income consideration.
  • Income Scale: In the middle thirties entrepreneurs, white-collar, and wage workers formed a distinct scale with respect to median family income: white-collar employees had a median income of $2,008; entrepreneurs, $1,665; urban wage-workers, $1,175.
  • Income Distribution Shift: The wartime spread occurred mainly among urban entrepreneurs, and the old middle class income is becoming less graded and more a collection of strata.
  • Statistics: In the late forties 1948 the income of all white-collar workers was $$4,058, that of all urban wage workers $3,317; the lower white-collar people earned almost the same as skilled workers and foremen, but more than semiskilled urban wage-workers.
  • Purchasing Power: Unequal distribution of ability to purchase may lead to less production.
  • Underpinning Class Structure: Ranges from the chance to stay alive the first year after birth to completing higher education all influenced by class.
  • Class Structure Probabilities: Varying factual probabilities of the class structure does not mean all people in similar positions become conscious of a class or a struggle.
Prestige

  • Prestige Requires Two Persons: One to claim and another to bestow prestige.

  • Bases of Prestige Claims: Property, birth, occupation, education, income, power or anything distinguishing one person from another.

  • Status System Organization: Claims organized as rules regulating who claims and bestows prestige, from whom, how and why.

  • Self Esteem: Level of self-esteem set by this status system.

  • Perspectives on Prestige: Six items – claimant's status, the claim and the basis; the bestowal, the way it is given and the basis.

  • Expressing Prestige: Claims made through mannerisms, conventions and ways of consumption.

  • Status Conventions: Includes the "things that are done" and "things that are just aren't done."

  • Status Markers: Dress, fashion, eating habits, elegance, person and modes of address and intermarriage.

  • Prestige Based on Birth: Race, nationality and "Old Families."

  • European Nobililities: rigid exclusion and minorities represent acme.

  • Wealth and Prestige: Upper-class position often carries prestige. Yet wealthy men from lower class finds it difficult to buy upper-status circles because often impoverished descendants of Old Families receive more deference.

  • Vocabulary: Nouveau riche and broken-down aristocrat are relevant.

  • Middle Strata Prestige: Occupation and education are crucially important.

  • Education Influence: Limits and impacts and is expressed.

  • Occupation Types: Some occupations are reserved while other are beneath higher status; idleness may bring prestige.

  • Income Impact: Property income may not always bring more prestige than work income amount, and usage are more important.

  • Occupation Prestige: Occupations that pay more, involves more mental activities and supervisions are higher; and power and position are not always esteemed.

  • Prestige is unstable. Americans enjoy prestige but it is often disturbed and uneasy.

  • USA white-collar groups are socially differentiated to claim and cash claims with wage workers and are seized as characteristically defined.

Power

  • Definition: Ability to realize one’s will, even against resistance.

  • Influence Factors: Class, status, and occupation.

  • Occupation Power: Occupations involve supervision, lend power and give privilege.

  • Class Power: Involve job and commodity markets and state power.

  • Political Power Specifics: Ability to influence or determine the policies and actions of the state.

  • Political Power Accumulation Triangle: Willful mentality, objective opportunity, and state of organization.

  • Mentality versus Position: Objective position and political content may be confused. It stated there are no classes because “psychology is of the essence.” Men are not class conscious at all times, this does not mean there are no classes America is a “sandheap” of middle individuals.

  • Class Inclusion Attributes: Social, political, and psychological attributes must not be used as criteria when exploring objective situations.

  • Stratification Task: Sort out dimensions of stratification in a systematic way with each aspect in relation.

Proletarianized

  • Definition: Shifts of “middle-class occupation” toward wage-workers in terms of income, property, skill, prestige or power.

  • Changes and Consciousness: Shifts irrespective people involved and people resist based on factors.

  • Expectations & Assumptions: The working class are acquiring certain consciousness, and rests on the assumption that the economic dimension, especially property is the key one.

  • Objectively Structural Position: Becoming similar to wage-workers is becoming more and more similar to the shifts in occupational and most important to the propertyless.

  • Theories Assumptions: Rise of society, Weber short shrift and “the ever-increasing indispensability”. Confuses power and indispensability.

  • Welfare State: Attempts to manage class chances redistribution of risk and chances in favor of most exposed class situations with bold means.

  • Dominate Political Scene: Labor union, farm bloc, and trade association and determines strata power where securities depend on power pressures. Pensions have an ideal to shape chances.

Race, Caste, and Other Invidious Distinctions in Social Stratification (Berreman Article)

  • Social Stratification Definition: Members of a society are divided into categories which are differentially powerful, esteemed, and rewarded.

  • Systems Vary: Ideologies, distinctiveness, the number and size of the ranked categories, the criteria by which inclusion is conferred and changed, the symbols by which such inclusion is displayed and recognized, in the degree to which there is consensus or awareness, in the disparity in rewards, and in mechanisms employed to maintain or change.

  • Study Bases: Achieved vs. ascribed.

  • Primary dimensions: Class, status, and power expressed as wealth, prestige, and ability to control lives.

  • Distinctions Examples: Brahmin and untouchable; Jew and Gentile, man and woman.
    Additions: vital affects opportunities, determined at birth, crucial to social identity and more.

  • New Element: Race (color), caste, ethnicity (religion, language, origin), or sex.

  • Pejorative Terms: Racism, casteism, communalism, and sexism.

    • Distinctions are made manifest with the fact that is independent of sources.
  1. the identity is regarded as being consequence of birth or ancestry and hence immutable
  2. identity confers upon its possessor a degree of socially defined and affirmed worth which is regarded as intrinsic to the individual.
  3. inherent worth:
    Those of different birth are inherently unequal and are accordingly adjudged superior or inferior, while those regarded as being of similar birth are innately equal. Everyone is sentenced for life within social cells.

Birth Ascribed and Structure:
Specific question motivating the present discussion: is social ranking by race absolutely distinctive, not significantly distinctive at all, or is race one criterion among others upon which significantly similar systems of social ranking may be based?
Based on what one means entirely by ‘race’ and by ‘distinctive’, and what one wishes to accomplish by the inquiry.

  • Ruanda, India, Swat, Japan, and the United States cited.
Models for Analysis
  • Stratification: A common feature of systems of shared social inequality.
    • traditional definitions of innate social equivalence and difference
    • concept of differential intrinsic worth
    • rationalized by a myth of the origin, effect, and legitimacy of the system
    • differential power wielded by the high and the low
    • expressed in differential behavior required and differential rewards accorded them
    • experienced by them as differential access to goods, services, livelihood, respect, self-determination, peace of mind, pleasure, and other valued things

Louis Dumont argues Sociological notion of stratification is misleading when applied to South Asia.

  • Response to this:
    First, caste hierarchy is stratification, for the latter refers to social structure and social relations instead of ideological bases
    Second, few low caste people would recognize society or believe with those of superiours.
  • Focuses attention on the ranking of two categories of people.
  • Misleading when applied to birth ranking.
  • While many are not, all systems of birth-ascribed ranking are systems of social stratification, and any theory of social stratification must encompass them.
Ethnic Stratification
  • Recent, Neutral, Non-Specific Term: An ethnic group is a distinct category of the population in a larger society whose culture is usually different from its own and members are bound together by common race, nationality or culture.
  • Emphasis: Mode of recruitment, encompassing a wide variety of bases for ascription determine what group traits and implications manifest.
  • In Western Culture:
    • appearance
    • intelligence
    • personality
    • morality
  • Also entails
    • capability
    • purity
    • honor
    • custom
    • speech
    • religion
  • Often holds responsible and uniformity from groups.

Van den Berghes Maintains:
'Ethnic' should be distinguished because of van den Berghe's citations and more. over race and caste entail the kinds of cultural distinctions.
Racism: Color Bar exists of what makes for the differences diversity in American literature
Approximating Birth Ascription: Systems of ethnic stratification are based on ancestry which is inherent, unalterable, and cannot be changed or renounced once it's been given.

Caste
  • Widely applied and frequently contested model deriving from the example of Jati which are rank-groups.

India Example:
Interdependent, hierarchical rank and manifest association, associated with occupations, grouped by varna, justified religious and philosophical upon ritual.
Notions of: Dharma as the code of conduct Karma as conduct in the end.
Doubt of the Rationalization: Explanation and interpretation is doubted by those oppresses by the system.
Tanquility and notion does not obtain any more by any instance of birth ascription

-If one concedes that caste can be defined cross-culturally beyond Hindu India, then the systems are describable as caste systems.

Definition to Systems under: Birth-ascribed groups are hierarchically ordered in interdependence.

A caste system as one which is held together by power and the ability of the people within it to predict fairly accurately one another’s behavior that hold almost together with all these systems in place.
If system requires endogamy: Restriction of caste system, structure would exclude some Hindus even though they are called caste for organization and stability emerged as a response and from a minimal state during stage.

Muslim Indians and Swat: both share criteria as does the United States because belief and variety create valid assumptions.
Is is all in how one uses and conveys with it’s own concise language:
Race: Physical attributes described, shared with society, commonly used bases of importance.
This is more a social definition than in a genetic sense.
Whos in this community? Europeans on the color of whom they colonize. Those who use this model base it is based on the negative importance of Europeans and darker colors. This can be associated by racism, is there more importance with respect by the acme, and invalid with another comparison criteria, The base of origin is not comparable for all kinds, race the study be used with scientific.

To use a point would seem superfluous if it were not for the fact that it is continually ignored or contested by some influential scholars and politicians, as well as the lay racists who abound in many societies. It cannot work without being a social phenomena with base, and it should never impact phenotype to phenotype alone. One must state by this one.
Societies frequently dramatize :Totemic differences with species or descent and more. Just as much. They’re social.
Race and caste as one: is is biological differences to inequality.

  • Race Emphasizes: Common physical characteristics
  • Caste Emphasizes: Rank and specialization or endogamy and corporateness
  • Ethnic Stratification Emphasizes: Cultural distinctiveness

'Caste Versus Race Controvery Surrounding origins in relation:
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Western Social Experts insist status can be accepted and are striving among oppressors
Has long history as the imaginary of all

Elaboratereligios rationale? Questionable color of caste in India or the west is a result.
B: Endogamy is based on rules the former are not the same there is. NO Race in the comparison.

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Race as outgrowth in Western
Colonialism is not one of relation.
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