[1] Social positions an individual may hold fall into the categories of occupation (medical doctor, academic lecturer), profession (member of associations and organisations), family (parent, sibling, etc.
Social positions are visible if they require an individual to wear a uniform or some other kind of identifying mark.
According to Kristina Lindemann the individual objective characteristics like education, occupation and income are related with the subjective social position.
[2] In addition, the culture and society that a person lives and grows in, heavily impacts an individual's subjective social position.
The status maximizing process also mentioned by Lindemann means that subjective social position reflects also person prospects and hopes for future societal attainment.
Young people give higher estimation to their social position, which is a tendency also found in other Eastern European countries.
In general, the subjective social position of men and women is not significantly different in western countries.
[2] Different studies have shown that the effect of income on class identification in particular has increased during the last decades in Western countries.
The increased influence of income on the subjective social position can be explained by the rise of consumer society values.
People with the highest salaries, best ranked jobs and highest education levels are depicted as standing on the upper rungs of the ladder, whereas those with the lowest salaries, poorest jobs, and lowest education levels are those who stand at the bottom of the ladder.
His simple understanding of classes in modern capitalist society, are the proletariat, those who work but do not own the means of production; and the bourgeoisie, those who invest and live off of the surplus generated by the former.
[8] The term "class" is etymologically derived from the Latin classis, which was used by census takers to categorize citizens by wealth, in order to determine military service obligations.
[9] In the late 18th century, the term "class" began to replace classifications such as estates, rank, and orders as the primary means of organizing society into hierarchical divisions.
Erika James finds through studies and analysis that in general blacks have been promoted at a slower pace than whites.
[13] The values at work in modern trust are those of the scientific community: "universalism, communism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism" (Merton 1973, p. 270).