A Brief Overview of Social Stratification

Social stratification describes the way groups of people in a society are differentiated between socioeconomic categories on the basis of income, occupation, wealth, and social status. According to the book Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, a stratification system’s key components include:

(1) the institutional processes that define certain types of goods as valuable and desirables; (2) the rules of allocation that distribute these goods across various jobs or occupations in the division of labor (e.g. doctor, farmer, ‘housewife’); and (3) the mobility mechanisms that link individuals to jobs, thereby generating unequal control over valued resources. (Grusky, 2014, p. 2)

In addition to these key components of stratification systems, sociologists have identified parameters of interest that discusses how resources are distributed among the different groups in a population. These parameters include the overall amount of inequality, the extent to which individuals are permanently locked into their positions, the extent to which socially designated traits assigned at birth are used for the purpose of allocation, and the degree to which the various dimensions of inequality are associated with each other. (Grusky, 2014, p. 2)

Social stratification systems, to some extent, are fundamentally based on the idea that in any society there are certain positions that are functionally more important than others and thus they require special skills. Of course, there are only a limited amount of people with the appropriate resources to become trained for these positions. For example, when access to an education depends on the ability to afford it, a large segment of the population is deprived of being trained to fulfill certain functionally important positions. Thus, some may conclude that, “…social inequality among different strata in the amounts of scarce and desired goods, and the amounts of prestige and esteem which they receive, is both positively functional and inevitable in any society.” (Tumin, 2014, p. 33)

Social inequality is based on this process in which stratification causes individuals from certain groups limited in their ability to discover their talents, distributes positive self-images unequally through the population, encourages hostility, suspicion and distrust among segments of the society limiting extensive social integration, and unequally distributes the sense of membership in a society resulting in unequal sense of loyalty and motivation to participate in society. [if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span>CITATION Tum14 \p 37 \l 1033 <span style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element: field-end'></span><![endif]

Historically, it may be suggested that social inequality increased as human access to resources and personal possession increased. In early hunting and gathering societies, personal material possessions were few in number and most of the goods in a population were collectively shared. The shift to agricultural societies changed this when humans went from a nomadic lifestyle to being able to settle in permanent villages and thus accumulate personal possessions, allowing for unequal distribution of resources and power. (Grusky & Weisshaar, A Compressed History of Inequality, 2014)

Grusky and Weisshaar’s Table 1.1 Types of Assets and Examples of Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups show how examples of asset groups and corresponding advantaged and disadvantaged groups. The different asset groups include economic, power, cultural, social, honorific, civil, human, and physical. (Grusky, Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, 2014)

Works Cited

Grusky, D. B. (2014). Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press.

Grusky, D. B., & Weisshaar, K. R. (2014). A Compressed History of Inequality. In D. B. Grusky, Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press.

Tumin, M. M. (2014). Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis. In D. B. Grusky, Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press.

#sociology #inequality