In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.
Stratification and Global Inequality
by
Charles Lamson
The Meaning of Stratification
Numerous social scientific Studies have demonstrated that all human societis produce some form of inequality (Bendix & Lipset, 1966, Class, Status, and Power; Harris, 1980, Culture, People, Nature; Murdock, 1949, Social Structure; Sen, 1992, Inequality Reexamined). In the simplest societies this inequality may exist because one family's fields produce more than another's do, because one family has accumulated a greater herd than others have, or because one family has produced more brave warriors and thus has received more esteem from the other families in the tribe. In other societies, periods of scarcity caused by droughts, famines, or changes in the migration patterns of game animals may allow some clans or large families who were already relatively well-off to become wealthier and more powerful. These advantages may then be passed on to the next generation and become part of the society's social structure (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993, Eds., The Quality of Life; Timken, 1993, Inequality). But as societies become increasingly complex, encompassing ever larger populations and more elaborate divisions of labor, these simple forms of inequality are replaced by more clearly defined systems for distributing rewards among members of the society. And those systems result in the classification of families and other social groups into rather well-defined layers, or strata. In each society the various strata are defined by how much wealth people have, the kinds of work they do, whom they marry, and many other aspects of life.
In this post we will see how inequality in societies results in systems of social stratification that are a major feature of every society's social structure. Stratification is non-random in that each infant is born into a family that already has a particular place in that societies system of inequality, although some societies provide more opportunities than others for that same infant to move upward in the hierarchies of wealth, power, and honor (prestige). We will also see that while issues of poverty are especially important in the study of stratification, many other values besides wealth and poverty are distributed unequally in societies.
Social stratification is a society's system for ranking people and distributing rewards according to such attributes as income, wealth, power, prestige, age, sex, ethnicity, race, religion, and even celebrity. These ranking systems correspond to actual social structures, such as castes or classes, and they account for a great deal of what people experience in life---their pleasures and pains, their patterns of health and illness, their level of education, and much more. In this post we will deal primarily with stratification by wealth, power, and prestige. The following post is devoted to global stratification, with an emphasis on global poverty.
Caste, Class, and Social Mobility
In every society people are grouped into different categories according to how they earn their living. This produces an imaginary set of horizontal social layers, or strata that are more or less closed to entry by people from outside any given layer. Societies that maintain rigid boundaries between social strata are said to have closed stratification system; societies in which the boundaries are easily crossed are said to have open stratification systems.
In open societies it is possible for some individuals and their families, and even entire communities, to move from one stratum to another; such movement is termed social mobility. A couple whose parents were unskilled workers may become educated, learn advanced job skills, and be able to afford a private house instead of renting a modest apartment as their parents did. Such a couple is said to experienced upward mobility. If they have enough wealth to make their parents comfortable and to help other family members, the entire family may enjoy upward social mobility. If everyone with the same education and skills and the same occupation experiences greater prosperity and prestige, the entire occupational community is said to be upwardly mobile. But in an open society fortunes can also decline. People with advanced skills in engineering or higher education, for example, may find that there are too many of them around. They may not be able to afford the kind of housing, medical care, education for their children, and other benefits that they have come to expect. When this occurs they are said to experience downward mobility.
The best examples of closed societies are found in caste societies. Castes are social strata into which people are born and in which they remain for life. Membership in a cast is an ascribed status (a status acquired at birth) rather than an achieved status (one based on the efforts of the individual). Members of a particular caste cannot hope to leave that cast. Slaves and plantation owners formed a caste society in the United States before the Civil War. The slaves were captives; runaway slaves were pursued and returned to their masters. Their children were born into slavery. plantation owners, on the other hand, had amassed great wealth, especially in the form of land, and this wealth was passed on to their children. On occasion a plantation family might lose its wealth, or another family might acquire a plantation and the wealth and prestige that went with it, but this form of social mobility was rather infrequent and did not alter the caste nature of the plantation system.
Today much of modern India remains influenced buy caste-based inequalities. South Africa, on the other hand, is an example of a society that is moving away from a rigid caste system. Under apartheid, blacks in South Africa were a racially defined cast that was kept at the bottom-most rung of the stratification order by violent repression and laws mandating racial segregation. Although this situation has been changing since the remarkable transition to majority African rule, the extreme poverty of the black population indicates that most aspects of the caste system are far from ended.
During the Persian Gulf War in 1991 many Americans discovered that Kuwait and other nations of the Middle East have strong ruling casts. In Kuwait the ruling caste is composed mainly of members of a single large, immensely wealthy family---the Al-Sabahs---many of whom live on the Italian and French Riviera for much of the year. The Al-Sabahs rule Kuwait as a closed leadership cast, and after the Gulf War they were careful to reimpose their rule and forestall any democratic movement that could challenge their authority.
In India the caste system remains extremely strong, but it is changing. The lowest castes are defined by the types of work they are assigned, usually work that is thought of as particularly unclean or shameful, like preparing the dead for cremation or cleaning toilets. Formerly known as the untouchables, these castes are now termed "scheduled" castes to signify their rights to affirmative action under the Indian constitution. In the more egalitarian and open society India is trying to establish, the scheduled castes are to gain rights and opportunities previously denied to them, but in the old India that persists in thousands of rural villages and even in the cities, the old notions of untouchability remains strong (De Zwart, 2000, The Logic of Affirmative Action. Acta Sociologica; Deshpande, 2000, Recasting Economic Inequality).
Classes, like castes are social strata, but they are based primarily on economic criteria such as occupation, and income, as well. England is famous for its social classes and for the extent to which social class defines how people are thought of and how they think of themselves. George Orwell, the author Animal Farm and 1984 also wrote about the English class system earlier in the 20th century, when he lived among the homeless and the migrant workers at the very bottom of the class system, and among miners whose lives were sacrificed to the dangers and diseases of the coal mines. In the following passage, he described how class affected his own life:
All my notions---of good or evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful---are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche half way up the social hierarchy. (quoted in Campbell, 1984, Wigan Pier Revisited)
Classes are generally open to entry by newcomers, at least to some extent, and in modern societies there tends to be a good deal of mobility between classes. Moreover, the classes of modern societies are not homogeneous---their members do not all share the same social rank. Within economically defined social classes there are wide variations in social status---that is, in how much prestige individuals or groups are accorded in the wider society. Among very rich people, for example, one can identify different status groups such as the Kennedys, organized crime families, and the families of film stars or professional athletes.
The concept of status groups is illustrated by "high society." The nobility of England is one of the world's most prestigious status groups, despite the well-publicized marital troubles of the royal family. In the United States, people with names like Rockefeller, du Pont, Lowell, Roosevelt, Harriman, and many others who are of Western European Protestant descent, often have more prestige than people with just as much wealth who are of Italian or Jewish or African-American descent.
Life Chances
Rankings from high to low are only one aspect of social stratification. The way people live (often referred to as their lifestyle), the work they do, the quality of their food and housing, the education they can provide for their children, and the way they use their leisure time are all shaped by their place in the stratification system.
The way people are grouped with respect to access to scarce resources determines their life chances---that is, the opportunities they will have or be denied throughout life: the kind of education and health care they will receive, the occupations that will be open to them, how they will spend their retirement years---even where they will be buried. The place in a society's stratification system into which a person is born (be it a comfortable home, with access to good schools, doctors, and places to relax, or a home that suffers from the grinding stress of poverty) has an enormous impact on what he or she does and becomes throughout life. A poor child may overcome poverty and succeed, but the experience of struggling out of poverty will leave a permanent mark on his or her personality. And most people who are born poor will not attain affluence and leisure even in the most open society.
*MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 310-312*
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