Social stratification facts for kids
Social stratification is how societies put people into different groups based on things like their wealth, income, education, gender, or job. Think of it like layers in a cake, where some layers are higher or have more "privileges" than others. It's about where people stand in a social group or community.
In many modern countries, people often talk about three main social groups: the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class. Each of these can even be split into smaller groups. Sometimes, these groups are also based on family connections, tribes, or caste systems.
This way of grouping people is clearest in big, organized societies, like kingdoms or countries with many different parts. It's still debated when social stratification first started – was it with early hunter-gatherers, or did it begin when people started farming and trading a lot? The more complex a society becomes, the more social stratification usually exists.
Sometimes, this grouping can lead to unfair situations. For example, if neighborhoods are separated by wealth or race, it can make it harder for some people to get things like home loans.
Contents
Understanding Social Layers
What is Social Stratification?
"Social stratification" is a term used in social studies to describe how people are ranked in a group, area, or society. It comes from a Latin word meaning "layers." It's about how a society sorts its people into different levels based on things like wealth, income, social status, occupation, and power.
In many Western societies, these layers are often seen as three main social classes: the upper class, middle class, and lower class. These can be broken down even further. Sometimes, social layers are also based on family ties or caste systems, where your group is set from birth.
Some thinkers believe that social stratification helps keep social order in developed societies. Others, like those who follow Marxism, argue that it makes it hard for people to move up in society and that the rich often use their power to take advantage of the working classes.
Four Key Ideas About Social Layers
There are four main ideas that help us understand social stratification:
- First, it's a feature of society as a whole, not just about individuals.
- Second, these social layers often continue from one generation to the next.
- Third, social stratification happens in every society, but it looks different in different places and times.
- Fourth, it's not just about how much money people have. It also involves beliefs and attitudes about social status.
How Complex Societies Have Layers
Even though stratification isn't only in complex societies, all complex societies have it. In these societies, valuable things like income, power, and other resources are not shared equally. The most privileged people and families get a much larger share.
A "stratification system" refers to the complex ways that these inequalities are created. Key parts of these systems include:
- How society decides what is valuable.
- The rules for giving out goods and resources to different jobs (like a doctor or a farmer).
- How people move into these different jobs, which then leads to unequal control over resources.
Moving Up or Down: Social Mobility
Social mobility is when individuals or groups move between these social layers. This can happen within one person's lifetime (like getting a better job) or across generations (like children doing better than their parents).
Societies are sometimes called "open" if they allow a lot of movement between layers, often based on what a person achieves. Societies with the most movement are considered the most open. "Closed" systems have little to no movement. For example, in caste systems, your social position is set at birth and usually stays the same your whole life.
Karl Marx's Ideas on Class
Karl Marx believed that in modern societies, there are two main economic groups:
- The owners of the "means of production" (like factories or land).
- Those who sell their labor to the owners.
Marx thought that the ruling class, like the wealthy factory owners in his time, used their power to control society's ideas and beliefs. He predicted that the working class would eventually rise up and create more equal, communist societies.
Marx also talked about two other groups:
- The petite bourgeoisie: Small business owners who don't get rich enough to join the main owning class.
- The lumpenproletariat: The very bottom layer of society, like beggars or the homeless, who have little to no social status.
A different idea, called structural functionalism, by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, says that social inequality is actually important for society to work well. They argued that difficult jobs that require a lot of education get paid more because they are important and few people can do them. This higher pay motivates people to work hard and achieve more.
Max Weber's View on Social Layers
Max Weber was influenced by Marx but thought that communism wouldn't work well. He believed there were more ways to divide classes than Marx suggested. Weber focused on three separate but connected sources of power:
- Class: Your economic position in society, based on birth and what you achieve. Weber noted that even people who don't own companies (like top executives) can have high incomes and power.
- Status: Your prestige, honor, or popularity. Weber pointed out that people like poets or saints can have a lot of influence even without much money.
- Power: Your ability to get what you want, even if others resist. For example, someone in a government job might not be rich or famous but can still have a lot of social power.
C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite
C. Wright Mills believed that power in society is unbalanced because there's no real challenge to the leaders of the "power elite." He agreed with Marx that there's a powerful, wealthy class, but Mills thought their power came from not just money, but also from politics and the military.
Mills said that the power elite is a privileged group whose members know they are at the top. To stay there, they often marry each other, understand each other, and work together. Education is key for them. Young upper-class people go to special schools that lead to elite universities and exclusive clubs. These connections then open doors to important business contacts.
The power elite has an "inner core" of people who can move between different powerful positions, like a military leader becoming a political advisor or a politician becoming a company executive.
Anthropology's View: Not All Societies Have Layers
Many anthropologists disagree that social stratification is found in all societies. They argue that it's not standard everywhere. Some egalitarian societies, like certain hunter-gatherer groups, have very little or no idea of social hierarchy, status, or even permanent leaders.
Kinship-Oriented Societies
Anthropologists call these equal cultures "kinship-oriented" because they value social harmony more than wealth or status. These are different from "economically oriented" cultures (like most countries) where status and money are highly valued, and competition and conflict are common.
Kinship-oriented cultures actively try to stop social hierarchies from forming because they believe it could lead to conflict. For example, the Khoisan people practice "insulting the meat." When a hunter makes a big kill, they are playfully teased to keep them from becoming too proud. The meat is then shared equally among everyone, not just kept by the hunter.
Another example is the Australian Aboriginals of Groote Eylandt, who have a "gift economy" where everyone is expected to give anything they have to someone who needs it. This helps prevent problems like theft and poverty.
What Affects Social Layers?
The factors that create social stratification are based on how people view different characteristics. While many of these factors are common everywhere, how important each one is can change over time and in different places. Researchers try to figure out how these factors combine to create stratification in a society.
Sociologists know that economic factors are always tied to social factors. However, the factors that affect social stratification can be roughly divided into economic and other social factors.
Economic Factors
Economic factors are good for describing social stratification. Income is the most common way to describe inequality. But looking at how much wealth (like savings or property) individuals or families have tells us more about their well-being than just income alone. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person is sometimes used to describe economic inequality between countries.
Social Factors
Social factors often explain why social stratification happens. Three important social factors are gender, race, and ethnicity. These always affect social status and stratification in most places. Other factors include occupation, skill levels, age, education level, and where someone lives. Some of these can cause stratification directly or affect it in between. For example, being very young or old might lead to a low income because you can't work.
Gender
Gender is one of the most common ways people make social differences. Gender differences are found in economic, family, and caste systems. Societies can be grouped by the rights and privileges given to men or women, especially regarding property ownership. In patriarchal societies, men usually have more rights than women. In matriarchal societies, it's the opposite.
Historically, jobs were often divided by sex, and this increased with industrialization. In some societies, men are paid more than women for the same work. Other job differences lead to an overall pay gap where women earn less than men because of the types of jobs they get and the hours they work. These differences affect how income, wealth, and property are shared in a society.
Race
Racism involves prejudice and discrimination based on how people see biological differences between groups. It often means that some races are seen as better or worse than others. In a society, people with racial characteristics that are seen as undesirable often have less social power. They can face unfair actions, like being forced to fit in, being excluded, or even worse.
Open racism directly affects social status. For example, some races might be made into slaves. More hidden racism, which many scholars say exists today, is harder to spot. It affects things like income, education, and housing. Both open and hidden racism can become part of a society's structure, where racism is built into its institutions.
Ethnicity
Ethnic prejudice and discrimination work much like racial prejudice. Historically, race and ethnicity were often seen as the same. But now, with science, most scholars know that race is about visible biological traits, while ethnicity is about learned cultural behaviors. Ethnic identity can include shared language, religion, or food.
Like with race, ethnic groups can be seen as minorities who have less social power. They can face the same types of unfair treatment. Whether ethnicity directly causes stratification or just affects it depends on how much each ethnic group focuses on its own culture, how much conflict there is over resources, and how much social power each group has.
Global Stratification
Globalization means that countries are becoming more connected through sharing ideas, products, and cultures. Advances in transportation and telecommunications (like the Internet) are big reasons for this, making economies and cultures more dependent on each other.
Just like social classes within a country, the world economy also has different "class positions" based on how wealth and resources are shared unequally between nations. Countries are seen as part of this world economy, with three main classes: core countries, semi-periphery countries, and periphery countries.
- Core nations mostly own and control the main ways of production in the world. They do higher-level production tasks and provide international financial services.
- Periphery nations own very little of the world's production means and provide low-skilled labor.
- Semiperipheral nations are in between, often moving towards more industrialization.
Core nations get the biggest share of the world's wealth, and periphery nations get the least. Core nations can also buy raw materials cheaply from non-core nations and sell their own products back at higher prices. A global workforce means companies in core countries can use the cheapest labor for production.
Even though many societies have made progress towards more equality, there are still huge gaps between the richest and poorest people within a country, and between the richest and poorest nations. For example, a 2014 report showed that the 85 wealthiest people in the world had as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people combined!
More to Explore
- Age stratification
- Caste system
- Class stratification
- Egalitarianism (societies where everyone is equal)
- Elite theory
- Gender inequality
- Globalization
- Social class
- Social inequality
- Socioeconomic status
