Реферат: Social stratification and social inequality

· lower-middle class comprises lower-paid professionals, but not manual labourers, for instance, police officers, non-management office workers, small business owners;

· upper-lower class, also known as the “working class” comprises blue-collar workers and manual labourers;

· lower-lower class is represented by the homeless and permanently unemployed, as well as the “working poor.”

To W. Warner, American social class was based more on shared attitudes than on the actual amount of money an individual has made. Such attitudes are income, prestige of job, education and ethnicity. For example, the richest people in the United States belong to the lower-upper class like Bill Gates, but members of the upper-upper class tend to be more respected, as a simple survey of US presidents may demonstrate (for instance, the Roosevelts; John Kennedy; the Bushes).

Another observation concerns members of the upper-lower class who might make more than members of the lower-middle class, for instance, a well-salaried mechanic versus a secretarial worker, but the class difference is based on the type of work they perform.

There are also stratification theories developed by modern Russian sociologists. For instance, G.V. Osipov, V.V. Radaev, O.I. Shkaratan distinguished between essential and additional criteria of a social stratum. The essential criteria are people’s economic position (private property, size of income, level of material wealth), division of labour (area of activities, character of labour, level of education and qualification), size of authority (types and forms of governance) and social prestige (impact, roles); the additional criteria are gender, age, ethnic qualities, religion, character of family relations, kinship relations and place of living.

At the same time a modern French theorist A. Touraine considers those criteria out-dated. His stratum model is based on the access to information: those who have an access to more information occupy dominant positions in the society.

Thus, elaborators of stratification conceptions do not postulate social equality. Moreover, they consider social inequality as a natural state of the society. Despite people’s everlasting strive for equality that lead to revolutions and wars (for example, the October revolution and Civil war in Russia), a desired equality is impossible to achieve. Inequality did, does and will exist. The point is how to make inequality less painful to the members of the society. Here of importance are various social programmes aimed at supporting the population with low income. Such programmes are gaining more significance in a transitive society because stabilizing the standards of living and struggle against poverty are indispensable factors of success of political and socio-economic reforms in the society.

An aggregated socio-economic status

As various stratification models show, numbers of criteria to grouping people in each may vary. But their authors share the opinion that such parameters as income, power, education and prestige must be enlisted as the basic ones.

Income as an economic status is an amount of money a person or family makes for a definite period of time (month or year). Income is spent to satisfy needs but if it is high, it is accumulated and turns to wealth.

Wealth is accumulated income in the form of cash or materialized money. The later can be movable property (car, yacht, securities) and real estate (house, masterpieces of art). Wealth can be inherited. It differs from income in the way that wealth can be inherited by those who work and who don’t, and income is earned only by those who work. Pensioners and unemployed have income but rags – don’t. The rich either can or cannot work as they are owners of wealth. Accumulated property is the parameter used to differentiate the high class from middle and low classes who live on income.

Wealth and income are distributed unequally and means economic inequality. Sociologists interpret economic inequality to show unequal chances of different groups of the population. Those who have more money have better food, live in more comfortable houses, prefer going by private car to public transport, can afford an expensive holiday etc. Besides having economic advantages, the rich possess a number of hidden privileges: they live longer than the poor even if the latter use the same medical achievements, children from poor families are less educated even if they go to the same public schools as children from wealthy families etc.

Power is a possibility to impose one’s will or decision on others regardless of their desire. It is measured by a number of people who have to follow one’s will or decision. Decisions made by the President or Prime-Minister of the country should be accepted by the whole population of the given country, and decisions by a sole proprietor – by his employees only.

In a highly stratified society power is guarded by law and tradition, it means privileges, a wider access to social wealth, and possibility to make decisions which are most essential to the society, laws for the benefit of the higher class being among them. People possessing power (political, economic or religious) constitute the elite of the society.

Education is measured by a number of years studied in state or private school, university etc. For instance, a professor has studied for more than 20 years (11 years at school, 5 – university, 3 – post-graduate courses, 3 – doctorate courses), a low qualified worker – not more than 11. A weak point of the criterion is that quality of education is not taken into account. Establishments of learning located in the capital of the country are likely to provide better quality than those located on the periphery. Another distinction is character of knowledge – theoretic, fundamental or branch, applied – that a person can get.

Income, power and education are objective parameters, and they have units of measure, correspondingly local currency, people, years; unlike them prestige is of subjective character.

Prestige is respect that public opinion gives to a certain job, profession or occupation. No doubt, the profession of a banker is more prestigious than that of a cleaner or plumber. All professions, occupations and jobs existing in the society can be ranked from top to bottom according to their prestige. Although professional prestige is very often defined by intuition, approximately, in some countries, for instance in the USA sociologists measure it with special methods.

Income, power, education and prestige combined together define an aggregated socio-economic status , or position and place of a person in the society. In its sense the status is a generalized parameter of stratification. An ascribed status characterizes a strictly fixed system of stratification or closed society where transition from one stratum to another is practically forbidden. Examples of a closed society are caste and slave-owning systems. An achieved status characterizes a mobile system of stratification, or open society with people’s free ascending and descending on the social ladder. An example is a capitalist society with its class differentiation. A feudal society is an intermediate type as it belongs to a relatively closed system: transitions are formally forbidden but in practice they are not excluded. Such are the historic types of stratification.

Stratification profile

Four parameters of stratification are made use of to create analytical models and instruments which can be applied to define not only the status of separate individuals but groups as well, i.e. dynamics and structure of the society in general.

Sociologists distinguish the stratification profile which enables to apply a deeper consideration of the problem of status incompatibility. Status incompatibility is a contradiction between statuses in the person’s set or between status characteristics in his status set. If some parameters of a definite status set go beyond the boundaries of a class, status incompatibility turns to stratification incompatibility .

Here is an example. As practice shows, in transitive societies like those on the post-soviet area a professor belongs to the lower class according to his income, and to the upper one – according to his prestige. It means a large dispersion of parameters extending the boundaries of the middle class to which a professor belongs in developed societies and testifies about stratification incompatibility. There are two ways to liquidate it and make status characteristics more or less equal: either to raise a professor’s salary to the level of the middle class or to decrease the level of education. Both things can hardly be done in a transitive society: the first one – due to economic reasons, the second one – due professional reasons.

Stratification incompatibility may entail a feeling of social discomfort which may turn to frustration, the latter – to dissatisfaction with one’s place in the society. That’s why the fewer are the cases of status and stratification incompatibility in the society the more stable and sustainable is the society. Russia of 1995-2000 is a typical example of a transitive society characterized by both status and stratification incompatibility.

As far as the society is concerned, its stratification profile, or a profile of social inequality, should be distinguished. A stratification profile is defined as structural distribution of wealth and income. As a rule, it shows a ratio of the upper, middle and lower classes in the country’s population, or the level of social inequality in the given society. If the ratio is in interest, the table is made up.

The stratification profile is also easily viewed graphically. It can have three forms – that of a rhombus or diamond, and a pyramid with either broad or narrow footing. For instance, in modern highly developed countries the profile is a rhombus.

Types of stratification profile

Upper class
Middle class
Lower class

a) b) c)