Social stratification
For instance, the stratification of neighborhoods based on spatial and racial factors can influence disparate access to mortgage credit.
It derives from the Latin strātum (plural 'strata'; parallel, horizontal layers) referring to a given society's categorization of its people into rankings of socioeconomic tiers based on factors like wealth, income, social status, occupation and power.
Conflict theories, such as Marxism, point to the inaccessibility of resources and lack of social mobility found in stratified societies.
Talcott Parsons, an American sociologist, asserted that stability and social order are regulated, in part, by universal values.
Theorists such as Ralf Dahrendorf alternately note the tendency toward an enlarged middle-class in modern Western societies due to the necessity of an educated workforce in technological economies.
Various social and political perspectives concerning globalization, such as dependency theory, suggest that these effects are due to changes in the status of workers to the third world.
The key components of such systems are: (a) social-institutional processes that define certain types of goods as valuable and desirable, (b) the rules of allocation that distribute goods and resources across various positions in the division of labor (e.g., physician, farmer, 'housewife'), and (c) the social mobility processes that link individuals to positions and thereby generate unequal control over valued resources.
Through the ideology of the ruling class—throughout much of history, the land-owning aristocracy—false consciousness is promoted both through political and non-political institutions but also through the arts and other elements of culture.
Marx predicted the capitalist mode would eventually give way, through its own internal conflict, to revolutionary consciousness and the development of more egalitarian, more communist societies.
[11] According to Marvin Harris[12] and Tim Ingold,[13] Lewis Henry Morgan's accounts of egalitarian hunter-gatherers formed part of Karl Marx' and Friedrich Engels' inspiration for communism.
[15] This, combined with the very different social and economic situations of hunter-gatherers may account for many of the difficulties encountered when implementing communism in industrialized states.
As Ingold points out: "The notion of communism, removed from the context of domesticity and harnessed to support a project of social engineering for large-scale, industrialized states with populations of millions, eventually came to mean something quite different from what Morgan had intended: namely, a principle of redistribution that would override all ties of a personal or familial nature, and cancel out their effects.
Most high-income jobs are difficult and require a high level of education to perform, and their compensation is a motivator in society for people to strive to achieve more.
[16] Max Weber was strongly influenced by Marx's ideas but rejected the possibility of effective communism, arguing that it would require an even greater level of detrimental social control and bureaucratization than capitalist society.
Weber held there are more class divisions than Marx suggested, taking different concepts from both functionalist and Marxist theories to create his own system.
[20] In order to maintain their highly exalted position within society, members of the power elite tend to marry one another, understand and accept one another, and also work together.[20][21][pp.
These memberships in turn pave the way to the prominent social clubs located in all major cities and serving as sites for important business contacts."[20][21][pp.
Prominent bankers and financiers, who Mills considered 'almost professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs,' are also members of the elite's inner core.[20][21][pp.
[15] Non-stratified egalitarian or acephalous ("headless") societies exist which have little or no concept of social hierarchy, political or economic status, class, or even permanent leadership."
Kinship-oriented cultures actively work to prevent social hierarchies from developing because they believe that such stratification could lead to conflict and instability.
Lee found this out when he purchased an entire cow as a gift for the group he was living with, and was teased for weeks afterward about it (since obtaining that much meat could be interpreted as showing off).
[24] Another example is the Australian Aboriginals of Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island, off the coast of Arnhem Land, who have arranged their entire society—spiritually and economically—around a kind of gift economy called renunciation.
The social perception of age and its role in the workplace, which may lead to ageism, typically has an intervening effect on employment and income.
Entire societies may be classified by social scientists according to the rights and privileges afforded to men or women, especially those associated with ownership and inheritance of property.
It often takes the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are perceived to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities.
Minority members in such a society are often subjected to discriminatory actions resulting from majority policies, including assimilation, exclusion, oppression, expulsion, and extermination.
Ethnic identification can include shared cultural heritage such as language and dialect, symbolic systems, religion, mythology and cuisine.
[37] Globalizing forces lead to rapid international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture.
[38] Advances in transportation and telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the telegraph and its modern representation the Internet, are major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities.
[45] Zygmunt Bauman has provocatively observed that the rise of the rich is linked to their capacity to lead highly mobile lives: "Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among coveted values—and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late modern or postmodern time.
