Stratification and What Determines Social Class?

• System in which people are divided according to their relative power, property, and prestige
• Applies to all nations as well as people within a nation, society, or other group
• All societies stratify their members by gender, males are favored
• Why is there Stratification

Functionalism

• Stratification is normal and functional
• Societies must make certain that its positions are filed
• Some positions are more important than others
• More important positions are filled by the more qualified
• Motivation – class improvement and rewards

Conflict

• Competition for power
• Groups that get power then use it to maintain
• Use social institutions as agents of control and socialization
• Control information
• Maintain their ideology (democracy, Christianity, capitalism)
• There must be leader ship to organize, leadership means inequality in control, and human nature is self-centered (seize greater rewards for themselves)
• Some sociologist examine power struggles within classes

Conflict and Karl Marx

• Karl Marx argued people’s relationship to the means of production is the sole fact in determining class (owner vs. worker)
• Marx argued conflict will grow as wealthy get richer
• Once the false consciousness was replaced they would violently overthrow the capitalists (capitalism contains the seeds of it own destruction) and a classless society would form

Max Weber and Interactionist Perspective

• Marx to limiting
• Focuses on property (wealth), prestige, and power (ability to control others)
• Power of ownership and the power to control property
• Prestige is derived from property and positions
• Power to control others (Ronald Regan, Bill Clinton, Paris Hilton, Tom Cruz)

For major systems of social stratification

• Slavery, caste, estate, and class
• Gender stratification exists in all of the above
• Most are closed system; little vertical mobility; most horizontal

Slavery

• Based on debt, punishment for law violation, or defeat in battle
• Conditions varied (some slaves were slaves for life, powerless and poor while others could earn their freedom and accumulate property)
• Indentured servitude in the New world
• Colonists tried to enslave Native Americans (became problematic) initially but eventually turn to African Americans
• Many argue slavery actually caused racism
• Slavery continues today

Caste

• A system of stratification that involves permanently assigning a person’s social status at birth
• Prohibiting intermarriage kept caste system pure
• Best example: India and South American (apartheid)
• Slavery in American was replaced by a racial caste system, which endured strongly into the 20^th Century

Estate System

• Developed in Middle ages in Europe
• 3 groups (First, Second, and Third)
• First – Nobility which consisted of the wealthiest and most powerful families that ruled the land
• Second – Clergy with the Roman Catholic Church
• Third – Commoners or laborers who lacked titles and were locked in for life

Class

• Based upon material possession
• Relatively fluid boundaries
• Born into your class but there is class mobility (opportunity to move up or down in the class system)

Global Stratification

• Many different categories or classifications; blurry
• 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd World
• Most industrialized nations, industrializing nations, least industrialized
• 1^st (U.S., Most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand)
• 2^nd (Most of former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe)
• 3^rd (Remaining world); 49% of earth or 69% of the population; most is extreme poverty; less than $1,000 a year, no running water or indoor plumbing, no central water, no trained physician, high birth rates, etc.

How Did the World’s Nations Become Stratified

• Three theories: colonialism, world system theory, and the culture of poverty

Colonialism

• Countries invade weaker countries
• Turn nations into colonies
• Subjugated (dominate) their people
• Exploit their labor and natural resources
• Europe has colonized nearly all of Africa, India, and the Middle East
• U.S. has colonized most of South and Central American into “economic colonies”
• Economic Colonies - used of corporations to control the government and its resources

World System Theory

• Based on the economic and political connections that tie the world together
• 4 groups of interconnected nations
• 1) Core nations (countries that industrialized first)
• 2) Semi-periphery (depend on trade with the core nations and have become economically stagnant); Mediterranean countries
• 3) Periphery (Sell cash crops to core nations); Eastern Europe
• 4) External area (left out of capitalism); Africa and Asia

Poverty Theory

• Some nations are hampered by a culture of poverty
• Poverty has become a way of life-perpetuating from one generation to the next
• Little remove for error; population tends to focus on traditional ideas that foster fatalism
• Population accepts their lot in life; often as God’s will