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Imagine two people.
Two extremely wealthy people.
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One of them inherited their money, acquiring it
through the luck that comes with being born to owners
of immense amounts of property and wealth.
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And the other person worked for what they
have.
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They started at the bottom, and through
years of hard work and clever dealing, they built
a business empire.
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Now: which one would you say deserves their
wealth?
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Sociologically, the interesting thing here
isn't your answer, not really.
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It's the fact that different societies in
different times and places have different
answers to this question.
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Because the question of what it means to
deserve wealth, or success, or power, is a matter
of social stratification.
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[Theme Music]
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Social stratification is what we’re talking
about, when we talk about inequality.
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It's a system by which society categorizes
people, and ranks them in a hierarchy.
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Everything from social status and prestige, to the
kind of job you can hold, to your chances of living
in poverty, are affected by social stratification.
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That’s because, one of the first principles
of social stratification is that it’s universal,
but variable.
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It shows up in every society on the planet,
but what exactly it looks like –
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how it divides and categorizes people, and the
advantages or disadvantages that come with that
division – vary from society to society.
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Realizing that social stratification exists
in every society brings us to another principle:
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that stratification is a characteristic of
society, and not a matter of individual differences.
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People are obviously all different from each other,
so we might assume that stratification is just a kind
of natural outcome of those differences, but it's not.
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We know this because we can see the effects
of social stratification on people, independent
of their personal choices or traits:
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For example, children of wealthy families are more likely to live longer and be healthier, to attend college, and to excel in school than children born into poverty.
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And they’re also more likely to be wealthy
themselves when they grow up.
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And this highlights another key principle
of social stratification:
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It persists across generations.
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So, stratification serves to categorize and
rank members of society, resulting in different
life chances.
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But generally, society allows some degree
of social mobility, or changes in position
within the social hierarchy.
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People sometimes move upward or downward
in social class, and this is what we usually think of
when we talk about social mobility.
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But more common in the United States is horizontal
mobility, changing positions without changing
your standing in the social hierarchy.
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This generally happens when a person moves
between jobs that pay about the same and have
about the same occupational prestige.
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Like stratification itself, social mobility
isn't just a matter of individual achievement;
there are structural factors at play, too.
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In fact, we can talk specifically about
structural social mobility:
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when a large number of people move around
the hierarchy because of larger societal changes.
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When a recession hits, and thousands of people
lose their jobs and are suddenly downwardly
mobile, that's structural mobility.
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But stratification isn't just a matter of
economic forces and job changes.
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Which brings us to another aspect of social
stratification:
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It isn't just about economic and social inequalities;
it’s also about beliefs.
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A society’s cultural beliefs tell us how to categorize people, and they also define the inequalities of a stratification system as being normal, even fair.
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Put simply: if people didn't believe that
the system was right, it wouldn’t last.
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Beliefs are what make systems of
social stratification work.
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And it’s these beliefs about social
stratification that inform what it means to
deserve wealth, or success, or power.
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These four principles give us a better understanding
of what social stratification is, but they still haven't told
us much about what it looks like in the real world.
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So, sociologists classify stratification systems
as being either closed or open.
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Closed systems tend to be extremely rigid
and allow for little social mobility.
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In these systems, social position is based
on ascribed status, or the social position
you inherit at birth.
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On the other hand, open systems of
stratification allow for much more social mobility,
both upward and downward.
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Social position tends to be achieved, not
ascribed.
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Now, these terms are pretty theoretical, so let’s look
at some examples of more closed or open systems,
as well as societies that fall in the middle.
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The archetypal closed system is a caste system.
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Of these, India's caste system is probably
one of the best known.
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And while it’s a social system of decreasing
importance, it still holds sway in parts of rural India,
and it has a strong legacy across the country.
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Let’s go to the Thought Bubble:
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The traditional caste system contains four
large divisions, called varnas: Brahman, Kshatriya,
Vaishya, and Sudra.
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Together these varnas encompass hundreds of
smaller groups called jatis at the local level.
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The caste system in its traditional form is
a clear example of an extremely rigid, closed,
and unequal system.
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Caste position not only determined what jobs
were acceptable, but it also strongly controlled its
members’ everyday lives and life outcomes.
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The system required endogamy, or marriage
within your own caste category.
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And in everyday life, the caste system
determined who you could interact with and how,
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with systems of social control restricting
contact between lower and higher castes.
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And this whole system was based on a set
of strong cultural and religious beliefs,
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establishing caste as a right of birth and
living within the strictures of your caste as a
moral and spiritual duty.
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Thanks Thought Bubble.
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We see a variation of the caste system in
feudal Europe with the division of society
into three orders or estates:
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the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners.
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Again, a person's birth determined his social
standing;
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commoners, for instance, paid the most taxes
and owed labor to their local lord.
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So they had little expectation that they’d
rise above their station.
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The whole social order was justified on the
belief that it was ordained by god, with the
nobility ruling by so-called divine right.
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Both caste systems use ancestry and lineage
as a main principle of social stratification,
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but race has also been used as the main
distinction in closed social systems.
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The South African system of apartheid, for instance,
maintained a legally enforced separation between
black people and white people for decades.
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Apartheid denied black people citizenship,
the ability to own land, and any say whatsoever
in the national government.
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The Jim Crow laws of the American South were
another example, as was slavery before that.
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In contrast with caste systems, class systems
are the archetypal open systems.
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They aren't based solely on ascribed status
at birth.
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Instead they combine ascribed status and
personal achievement in a way that allows for
some social mobility.
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Class is the system of stratification we have
in American society.
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The main difference between caste and class
systems is that class systems are open,
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and social mobility is not legally restricted
to certain people.
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There aren't formally defined categories in
the same way there are in the Traditional
Indian Caste system.
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Being in the “under-class” in the U.S.
is not equivalent to being an “untouchable”
from India.
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In class systems, the boundaries between
class categories are often blurred,
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and there’s greater opportunity for social
mobility into and out of class positions.
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The American system of stratification is founded
on this very idea, in fact:
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that it’s possible, through hard work and
perseverance, to move up the social hierarchy,
to achieve a higher class standing.
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And this points to another difference in
systems of stratification:
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Instead of ancestry, lineage, or race being
the key to social division,
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the American system has elements of a
meritocracy, a system in which social mobility is
based on personal merit and individual talents.
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The American dream is that anyone, no matter how
poor, can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps"
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and become upwardly class mobile,
through nothing but hard work and gumption.
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The American system is certainly more meritocratic
than feudal Europe or traditional India;
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but the idea of meritocracy is as much a justification
for inequality as it is an actual principle of stratification.
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In an open, class-based system of
stratification, it’s easy to believe that anyone who’s
not upwardly mobile deserves their poverty.
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Because a meritocratic class system is supposed
to be open, it’s easy to ignore the structural
factors that influence class standing.
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But just as the Indian caste system and feudal
estate system placed their limits on certain groups,
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the American class system limits just
how far hard work can take some people.
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The US class system tends to reproduce
existing class inequalities,
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because the advantages that you start with
have an incredibly powerful impact on where
you can end up.
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This is part of the reason that the US is
still stratified along race and gender lines.
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That said, these inequalities are no longer
explicitly enshrined in the law, which is an example
of the greater openness of class systems.
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Because of this openness, class systems also have
a greater likelihood of opportunity for individuals to
experience status inconsistency:
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a situation where a person’s social position
has both positive and negative influences on their
social status
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Stratification isn’t just a matter of one
thing after all.
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When we talk about socioeconomic status, for
instance, we’re including three things:
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income, education, and occupational prestige.
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An example of status inconsistency is an
adjunct professor who’s very well educated,
but earns a low income.
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There’s an inconsistency among these different
aspects of their social status;
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low income tends to decrease social status
while at the same time, a high level of education
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and the societal respect for the occupation
of college professor improves social status.
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All these comparisons between closed and
open systems might make it sound like they’re
totally different:
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a system is either one
or the other.
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But really they’re two poles on a spectrum.
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Not every society is strictly a caste system
or a class system.
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Modern Britain, for instance, is a good illustration
of a mixed system of stratification.
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It still maintains a limited caste system
of nobility as a legacy of the feudal system
of estates,
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which survives alongside, and helps
reinforce, a class system similar to what
we have in the U.S.
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And some systems of stratification even
claim that its citizens are entirely equal, as
the Soviet Union did.
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Following the Russian Revolution of 1917,
the USSR was established as a theoretically
classless society.
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But inequality is more than just economic.
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And Soviet society was stratified into four
groups, each of which held various amounts
of political power and prestige:
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apparatchiks or government officials, intelligentsia,
industrial workers, and the rural peasantry.
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So, like I mentioned before, stratification
is universal, but variable.
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If you want to study a society, one of the things
that you need to look at is that way that it’s stratified,
and whether, and how, social mobility occurs.
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Today we learned about social stratification.
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We talked about four basic principles of a
sociological understanding of stratification.
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We discussed open and closed
systems of stratification,
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and finally we talked about examples of
different kinds of stratification systems, including
caste systems and class systems.
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Next time we'll talk more about the why and
how of stratification by looking at different
sociological theories of stratification.
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Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and
00:10:04
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00:10:06
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