Question

Define social class. Identify three criteria used to conceptualize social class placement.

Define social stratification and discuss the four systems of social stratification.

Answer 1

• Social class refers to a group of people with similar levels of wealth, influence, and status.
• The lower class is typified by poverty, homelessness, and unemployment. People of this class, few of whom have finished high school, suffer from lack of medical care, adequate housing and food, decent clothing, safety, and vocational training.
• The working class are those minimally educated people who engage in “manual labor” with little or no prestige. Unskilled workers in the class—dishwashers, cashiers, maids, and waitresses—usually are underpaid and have no opportunity for career advancement. They are often called the working poor. Skilled workers in this class—carpenters, plumbers, and electricians—are often called blue collar workers.
• The middle class are the “sandwich” class. These white collar workers have more money than those below them on the “social ladder,” but less than those above them. They divide into two levels according to wealth, education, and prestige.
• The lower middle class is often made up of less educated people with lower incomes, such as managers, small business owners, teachers, and secretaries.
• The upper middle class is often made up of highly educated business and professional people with high incomes, such as doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and CEOs.
• The lower?upper class includes those with “new money,” or money made from investments, business ventures, and so forth. The upper?upper class includes those aristocratic and “high?society” families with “old money” who have been rich for generations. These extremely wealthy people live off the income from their inherited riches. The upper?upper class is more prestigious than the lower?upper class.
• The three most common criteria used to measure social class include:-
  (1) Property, a person’s material possessions, comes in many forms, such as buildings, land, animals, machinery, cars, stocks, bonds, businesses, furniture, jewelry, and bank accounts. Property minus a person’s debt is wealth.
  (2) Power is the ability to make others do what you desire, even if they do not want to do it.
  (3) Prestige is usually the respect people have for a person because of their occupation.
• Social stratification refers to a society’s categorization of its people into rankings of socioeconomic tiers based on factors like wealth, income, race, education, and power.
• The distinct vertical layers found in rock, called stratification, are a good way to visualize social structure. Society’s layers are made of people, and society’s resources are distributed unevenly throughout the layers. The people who have more resources represent the top layer of the social structure of stratification. Other groups of people, with progressively fewer and fewer resources, represent the lower layers of our society.
• The major systems of stratification are slavery, estate systems, caste systems, and class systems.
• Slavery had economic basis. In slavery, every slave had his master to whom he was subjected. The master’s power over the slave was unlimited.The question of enjoyment of political rights by slaves does not naturally arise.
• Estate system of medieval Europe provides another system of stratification which gave much emphasis to birth as well as to wealth and possessions. Each estate had a state.
• Caste is a hereditary endogamous social group in which a person’s rank and its accompanying rights and obligations are ascribed on the basis of his birth into a particular group.
• Class-Stratification on the basis of class is dominant in modern society. In this, a person’s position depends to a very great extent upon achievement and his ability to use to advantage the inborn characteristics and wealth that he may possess.