Social Stratification and Social Mobility

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OTA 105878/Xenia Jones
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Social Stratification

Society is built upon the individual. The individual belongs to primary and social groups - primary being intimate and necessary for personal socialization (i.e. one's family where one 'learns' firsthand about culture & skills and one's peer group in school or work that offers a sense of protection & belonging), secondary being larger and made up of smaller groups that tend to be organized in a particular hierarchy (schools, colleges, workplaces, communities) and the special groups that one chooses to belong to for the purpose of referencing one's identity - a book club, a sports club, a gym, a hobby group, etc. Now, the groups and the individual members make up social institutions - agencies that make the social world happen - schools, churches, economic organizations, the government, etc. As an individual, one belongs to a family that has a certain 'place' in society in a political, social and economic sense. So while society is organized in groups, one's 'place' in society is according to where one fits in the social strata. Social stratification is hierarchal in nature and delineates the divisions of castes, groups and social classes in society. Social stratification is never intended to be discriminative, it is just a sociological and anthropological concept that helps to identify the players in society and how power is distributed and wielded.

Class

When we talk about social class, we talk about economic capability and social standing. Economically, we assign the following - marginal/poor class, lower Class, lower middle class, upper middle class, lower upper class, Upper Class and the Affluent Class. Sometimes it is just boils down to this: poor, lower class, middle class and upper class. Max Weber and Karl Marx had both observed that power is ...