I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.
Stratification and Global Inequality (Part B)
by
Charles Lamson
Stratification and the Means of Existence
The principal forces that produce stratification are related to the ways in which people earn their living. In the nonindustrial world most people are small farmers or peasants. When they look up from their toil in the fields, they see members of higher social strata---the landlords, the moneylenders, the military chiefs, the religious leaders. Those groups control the peasants' means of existence: the land and the resources needed to make it produce. Even when farmers or peasants are citizens of a modern nation-state with the right to vote and to receive education, health care, and other benefits, when harvests are poor the landowners still take their full share while the peasants must make do with less. The system of stratification that determines their fate depends on how much the land can yield. In contrast, in the stratification systems of industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist, most people are urban wage workers (Figure 1) whose fates are determined by the managers of public or private firms. If the firms are no longer productive or consumers no longer desire their product urban workers may lose their job and suffer economic hardship.
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| FIGURE 1 Urban Wage Workers
The stratification systems of the United States and Canada, where less than one-twentieth of the population works the land, are most relevant to understanding people's life chances (Life chances is a social science theory of the opportunities each individual has to improve their quality of life.) in modern industrial societies. But to understand the conditions of life for most of the world's population we must study inequalities in rural villages, where more than two-thirds of the earth's people till the soil and fish the rivers and oceans.
Stratification in Rural Villages
Most impoverished people live in rural villages. Of course, not all rural agriculturalists are impoverished, but in most of the developing world their situation is extremely difficult. Approximately 3.4 billion people – or 45% of the world's population – live in rural areas. Roughly 2 billion people (26.7% of the world population) derive their livelihoods from agriculture. In 2016, an estimated 57% of people in Africa were living in rural areas.(Agriculture at a Crossroads. Globalagriculture.org). Social divisions in those villages are based largely on land ownership and agrarian labor. Yet even in rural villages inequalities of wealth and power are increasingly affected by world markets for agricultural goods and services. In peasant societies the farm family, which typically works a small plot of land, is the basic and most common productive group. Such families can be found in the villages of modern India. The Indian village reveals some important dimensions of stratification in third world societies. For example, women are assigned to hard work in the fields and are also expected to perform almost all of the household duties. This is true even in families that are well off. Men from the higher castes may be innovators, but women of all casts and male members of the backward castes do most of the productive work (Myrdal, 1965, Report from a Chinese Village; Redfield, 1947, The Folk Society. American Journal of Sociology, 52, 293-308)
In China before the Communist Revolution of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a feudal system of stratification organized the lives of peasants and gentry alike. Among the peasants there were four broad strata (Tawney, 1966/1932, Land and Labor in China). The rich peasants had enough land to meet their basic needs and to produce a surplus that could be converted into cash at local markets. They usually had one or more draft animals, and they often hired less fortunate villagers to help in the fields. The middle peasants where the second stratum of Chinese village life. They had a small plot of land, barely adequate shelter, and enough food and fuel to get through the winter. A small surplus in good years allowed them to own their own houses and even have a few animals to provide meat on feast days. Only a very few of these luxuries were available to the third stratum, the poor peasants, and virtually none to be had by the fourth and worst off, the tenants and hired laborers. Most Chinese peasants were in this impoverished stratum.
FIGURE 2 Prerevolutionary Chinese Peasants
At the top of the stratification system of prerevolutionary China (i.e., above the rich peasants) were the gentry, the class of landowners whose buildings were large enough to allow them to live in relative comfort and freedom from labor.
What made the lives of the gentry so enviable to the working peasants was the security they enjoyed from hunger and cold. They at least had a roof over their heads. They had warm clothes to wear. They had some silk finery for feast days, wedding celebrations, and funerals. . . . The true landlords among them did no manual labor either in the field or in the home. Hired laborers or tenants tilled the fields. Servant girls and domestic slaves cooked the meals, sewed, washed, and swept up. (Hinton, 1966, Fanshen, p. 37)
In rural villages the facts of daily life are determined largely by one's place in the local system of agricultural production. The poor peasant family, with little or no land, hovers on the edge of economic disaster. Work is endless for adults and children alike. Meals are meager; shelter is skimpy; there is not much time for play. Among the gentry, who have large landholdings and hired help to ease the burdens of work, there are "the finer things of life": education, ample food and shelter, music and games to pass the time. Of course, wealth brings additional responsibilities. Participation in village or regional politics takes time away from pleasure, at least for some. So does charity work. But the power that comes with such activities provides opportunities to amass still more wealth. Thus, with few exceptions, the poor remain poor while the rich and powerful usually become richer and more powerful. And between the rich and the poor there are other strata---the middle peasants, the middle caste with skills to sell whose members look longingly at the pleasures of the rich and console themselves with the fact that at least they are not as unfortunate as the humble poor in the strata below them.
How does the scheme of social stratification compare with that found in industrial societies? We will see that there is more mobility in industrial societies but that, just as in rural societies, to be born into the lower strata is to be disadvantaged compared with people who are born into higher strata.
Stratification in Industrial Societies
The Industrial Revolution profoundly altered the stratification systems of world societies. The mechanization of agriculture (as shown above, Figure 3) greatly decreased the number of people needed to work on the land, thereby largely eliminating the classes of peasants and farm laborers in some societies. This dimension of social social change is often called structural mobility: An entire class is eliminated as a result of changes in the means of existence. The Industrial Revolution transformed the United States from a nation in which almost 90% of the people worked in farming and related occupations into one in which less than 10% did so. Similar changes took place in England and most of the European nations and are now taking place in many other parts of the world.
But structural mobility did not end with the Industrial Revolution. Today automation, foreign competition, and technological advances are creating new patterns of structural mobility. Older smokestack industries like steel and rubber have been steadily losing factories and jobs; newer industries based on information and communication technologies have been creating plants and jobs, but the people who have become superfluous as a result of the closing of their plants are not always willing to move to new jobs and often are not trained to meet the demands of such jobs. Thus structural mobility often leads to demands for social policies like job training programs and unemployment insurance (Bluestone, 1992, Negotiating the Future).
A second major change brought on by the Industrial Revolution was a tremendous increase in spatial mobility (or geographic mobility). This term refers to the movement of individuals, families, and larger groups from one location or community to another. The increase in spacial mobility resulted from the declining importance of the rural village and the increase in the importance of city-centered institutions such as markets, corporations, and governments. Increasingly one's place of work became separate from one's place of residence; people's allegiance to local communities was weakened by their need to move, both within the city and to other parts of the nation; and as a result social strata began to span entire nations. Working class people created similar communities everywhere, as did the middle classes and the rich (Janowitz, 1978, The Last Half Century; Seligson & Passe-Smith, 1993, Development and Underdevelopment). 
FIGURE 4 Despite these immense changes, our relationship to the means of existence is still the main factor determining our position in our society's stratification system. We continue to define ourselves to one another first and foremost in terms of how we make a living: "I am a professor; she is a doctor; he is a steelworker." Once we have dealt with the essentials of our existence---essentials that say a great deal about the nature and the quality of our daily lives---we go on to talk about the things we like to do with our lives after work or after educating ourselves for future work.
*MAIN SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 312-315*
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