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If you asked a medieval peasant whether they
liked working two days a week for their lord,
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while they barely made enough food for themselves,
they’d probably say no.
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And if you ask a factory worker today whether they
like making a tiny fraction of what their company’s
CEO makes, they’d probably have a similar answer.
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But, even though huge numbers of people
don’t want inequality, it still exists, and it has
for a long time.
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And the systems of stratification that we talked
about last week don’t really help explain this:
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They can tell us about how this inequality
happens, but they can’t tell us why.
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If we want to answer that question, we'll
have to return, once again, to our old friends
the three sociological paradigms:
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structural functionalism, social conflict theory,
and symbolic-interactionism.
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[Theme Music]
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Let’s start with clarifying something
pretty important about how sociologists
understand inequality:
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Even if the peasant and the factory worker
both dislike the inequality in their lives,
they might still believe that it’s fair.
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The peasant might say that it’s simply their place in
the world to toil for their lord, and the factory worker
might say that the CEO surely deserves his wealth.
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And this happens because of their
societies’ ideology.
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For our purposes, an ideology is a set of
cultural beliefs and values that justify a
particular way of organizing society.
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Ideology also includes strongly held beliefs
about a society’s patterns of inequality.
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Ideology can help explain why inequality never
goes away, but it doesn’t on its own explain why
we have unequal societies in the first place.
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For that, we have to turn to our three paradigms.
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From a structural functionalist perspective,
we have social stratification because...
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well, you know the basic story of structural
functionalism by now, so say it along with me:
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We have stratification because it's
functional for society.
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This is the basic argument of what’s known
as the Davis-Moore Thesis.
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Put forward in 1945 by Kingsley Davis
and Wilbert Moore,
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it argues that society assigns greater
economic and social rewards to those jobs
that are more important to society.
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This guarantees that difficult jobs will be
filled, the thinking goes, and will draw people
away from easier and less important work.
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So, the more important a job is for the proper
functioning of society, the more a society rewards it,
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which promotes the effective functioning of that
society – and also a system of social stratification.
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Davis and Moore basically argue that, without unequal rewards, few people would want the jobs that require the years of training or personal sacrifice that typically come with long work hours.
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Think medical doctor.
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Without the unequal rewards to motivate people,
we’d have a lot of lifeguards sunning themselves
on the beach and not very many ER docs.
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But there are some serious problems with this
idea.
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To begin with, Davis and Moore don't talk
about how their thesis actually works in society:
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They only talk about why inequality might
be functionally useful.
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And this leads to another problem: Not all
jobs that are important are necessarily hard
to learn, or come with high pay.
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Garbage collecting, for instance, is extremely
important for the smooth functioning of society.
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But it's not a particularly high-paid, socially
valued job.
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And this mismatch works the other way, too:
Not all highly paid jobs are functionally important.
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For instance, ask yourself who is more functional
for society: a high school teacher or a famous actor?
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Now think about who gets paid more.
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Finally, Davis and Moore also ignore the fact
that not all paths are equally open to all people.
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If inequality is functional for society because
it motivates hard work, then society should
reflect this by being meritocratic –
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a society in which everyone can work hard
and get ahead.
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But as we’ve already seen, this is not the
social reality.
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The structural nature of inequality, or the ways in which a society is organized to the advantage some groups over others, can be a cause of individual success or failure, no matter how hard a person works.
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Now, while Davis and Moore don’t really
deal with the impact of inequality, social-conflict
theory very much does.
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For Karl Marx, stratification is based on
different relations to the means of production.
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At the simplest level, one class controls the means
of production, which allows them to extract labor from
the other class, which controls only their own labor.
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Marx believed that, as capitalism progressed,
the inequality between the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat would get worse until,
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eventually, the proletariat would unite and
overthrow the bourgeoisie.
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And in doing that, he thought, they’d
ultimately derail the whole capitalist system
and all the inequality that came with it.
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But one of the central criticisms of the social-conflict understanding of stratification is that the proletariat revolution never happened in Western Europe, or the United States.
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If inequality was so bad for workers, why
did the revolution not happen?
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Well, German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf argued
that Marx wasn’t wrong about conflict per se,
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but he saw that the conflict that Marx
observed had changed in several ways that
prevented revolution from happening.
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First, Dahrendorf said, the capitalist class
in Europe has been too fragmented to serve
as a single target for revolutionaries.
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Rather than having just a few capitalists
against an ever increasing proletariat, we actually
have more capitalists, of different kinds:
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business owners, and executives, and
people who own stocks.
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More and more people are invested in capitalism
as an economic system.
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And a fragmented capitalist class makes it
difficult for workers to focus their revolutionary
energies on any one group.
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In addition, he argued, greater worker organization,
in the form of unions, has allowed workers
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to fight for better working conditions, higher
pay, and greater control over their labor,
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resulting in an increased standard of living.
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Greater legal protections for workers, like
workers' compensation, unemployment insurance,
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and Social Security have also worked to prevent
the revolution that Marx predicted.
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All of these structural changes, in turn, helped
lead to greater job stability, which makes workers
less likely to push for revolutionary change.
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But Dahrendorf saw that the ideology of
capitalism plays a role here as well.
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Just as more people are financially invested in
capitalism, people are also ideologically invested in it.
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But this isn't just a matter of whether
people like the system or not:
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ideology determines what people see as
available to struggle over.
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Fighting for higher wages seems reasonable,
but abolishing wage labor does not.
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There are more criticisms of Marx than just an
absent revolution, and one of the more fundamental
ones was made by none other than Max Weber.
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Specifically, Weber argued that Marx's focus
on economic stratification was too simplistic:
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Weber pointed out that there are other kinds
of conflict to consider.
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Weber argued that stratification actually
occurs along three dimensions:
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economic class, social status,
and social power, or what sociologists
refer to as socioeconomic status.
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This view adds more complexity and
nuance to the matter of stratification,
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but as with the structural functionalist approach,
it’s focused only on the macro perspective.
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Marx’s theory, for example, is all about
the long historical arc of class conflict,
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but it doesn’t really tell us what that
looks like in everyday life.
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For a more micro- or individual-level view
of inequality, sociologists turn to symbolic-interactionism.
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When we first defined social stratification, we said
that it involved putting people into categories.
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Symbolic-interactionism lets us understand how this actually works because, sure, what class you're in might come down to how much money you make.
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But how can other people tell what class that
is in everyday interaction?
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It’s not like people walk around with signs.
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Except that they kind of do, in the form of
conspicuous consumption.
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This is when the products that you buy make
statements about your social position.
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Buying a really nice bottle of wine for a
dinner party or wearing designer sunglasses
isn’t just about the thing itself,
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it’s also about sending a message to
anyone who sees it, a message that says
"I'm in the upper class."
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The objects act as sign vehicles, carrying
meaning just like a written word.
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To some degree, all consumption is
conspicuous consumption:
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Your tastes are shaped by your social position,
and you use them to define yourself just as others
read your tastes to judge you and your position.
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To see how this works, let’s go to
the Thought Bubble.
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Imagine you’re driving in your car with an
acquaintance, and you want to put on some music.
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The music you choose tells them something
about you.
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Let’s say you put on some really esoteric
classical music.
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Obviously, this tells your friend that you like
it and hopefully that you think they’ll like it too.
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But it also tells them that you are the kind
of person who likes esoteric classical music.
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Now, if it’s not obvious what this has to do with
stratification, think about the assumptions that your
acquaintance is gonna make about you:
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that you come from a particular background,
one that’s allowed you to have access to certain
kind of education and upbringing,
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or that you’ve had years of music lessons.
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They might readily assume that you’re the
kind of person whose class standing allows
them to develop these musical tastes.
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To be clear, I’m not saying that these
judgements are true.
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Lots of people who like classical music are
not, say, wealthy or well-educated.
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I’m saying that assumptions like these tend
to be widely held, and recognized.
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So when you put on your music, your friend
might recognize you as a person like them,
if they share your tastes.
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Or maybe they don’t recognize you as being
like them, so they judge you for being pretentious.
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And this isn’t because classical music
is special somehow:
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it’s true regardless of what kind of music you put
on, and applies just as much to the clothes you wear,
the books you read, and all of your other tastes.
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These are all ways in which people categorize
you in the hierarchy of stratification.
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They’re the signs you carry around that
tell people where you fit in society and how
to interact with you.
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Thanks Thought Bubble.
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This kind of judgement and mutual recognition
isn’t a minor thing.
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It’s a powerful force for stratification.
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For instance, it can be extremely important
in getting a job.
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Hiring can often be an exercise in this kind of judgement, as managers look for people who “fit the culture” and will get along well with the rest of the team.
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And it’s not just about what you like, it’s
also about how you like it.
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If you decide to start telling people that you
like opera because you want to seem upper class,
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but then you show up to a performance
in a T-Shirt and flip-flops, you’re probably
not gonna get anywhere.
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There’s a ton of background knowledge and
understanding behind tastes and preferences
that you can’t just conjure out of nowhere,
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and the difficulty of acquiring this
knowledge helps maintain stratification.
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So these three perspectives, structural-functionalism,
social-conflict, and symbolic-interactionism
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can help us better understand not just how
stratification works, but why we have it.
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Today we learned about different theories
of stratification.
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We talked about ideology and how it helps
stratification reproduce itself.
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We discussed structural-functionalism: the
Davis-Moore thesis and its problems.
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We talked about Marx's understanding of classes
and Weber's criticisms.
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And we saw how symbolic-interactionism helps
explain stratification in everyday life.
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Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s made with the help of all of these nice people.
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Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash
Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.
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