Stratification, differentiation and inequality

• Stratification is the division of society into a hierarchy of unequal layers. Differentiation is simply difference — being older, or female, or Welsh. The sociological question is how a difference becomes a hierarchy: how difference is turned into advantage and disadvantage.
• Systems of stratification vary. Closed systems (caste, feudal estates, slavery) allocate position by ascription — birth — and permit almost no movement. Open systems (modern class societies) claim to allocate by achievement and permit social mobility. Whether Britain is genuinely open is the central empirical argument of this topic.
• Life chances — Weber's term — are your probability of obtaining the good things in life: health, education, housing, security, long life. Stratification matters precisely because it distributes life chances.
• The dimensions you must cover: class, gender, ethnicity, age and disability — and, crucially, their intersection. Black feminists have long insisted that the experience of a working-class Black woman is not the sum of three separate disadvantages but a distinct position in its own right.

Precision earns marks: stratification is structured inequality — it persists across generations and is institutionalised. Random inequality between two individuals is not stratification.

Open and closed systems

The two great theories of class

Marx. Class is defined by your relationship to the means of production.

• Two classes matter: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who own only their labour power and must sell it. Between them lies exploitation: the worker produces more value than they are paid, and the difference — surplus value — is appropriated as profit. Class is therefore an objective, antagonistic relationship, not a ladder of income.
• Marx predicted polarisation (the middle strata sink into the proletariat), the growth of class consciousness as workers move from a class in itself to a class for itself, and eventual revolution. Meanwhile false consciousness, sustained by the ideological superstructure, holds the system together.
• Criticisms: the predicted polarisation did not occur — a large, differentiated middle class grew instead; revolution did not come in the advanced capitalist countries; and defining everyone by two categories is crude. Wright tried to rescue the theory with contradictory class locations: managers, for instance, are exploited by capital yet exercise authority over labour, occupying two class positions at once.

Weber. Stratification has three separate dimensions, which do not always coincide.

• Class — your market situation: the skills, credentials and property you can bring to the labour market and the rewards they command. Weber therefore identifies several classes, not two — including the propertied, the professionals, the petty bourgeoisie and the manual working class.
• Status — social honour or prestige, and the lifestyle and consumption that express it. Status groups can cut right across class: an impoverished aristocrat has high status and low class position; a wealthy criminal, the reverse.
• Party — organised power: unions, parties, professional associations, pressure groups.
• Why this matters: Weber can explain the fragmentation of the working class into status groups, and the salience of ethnic and religious status distinctions, which pure Marxism struggles with. Marxists reply that class remains fundamental, since market situation itself reflects the ownership of property.

Weber's three dimensions

Is inequality necessary?

• Davis & Moore give the classic functionalist defence of inequality. Some positions are functionally more important and require scarce talent and lengthy training. To motivate the talented to undergo that training and to fill those posts, society must attach unequal rewards to them. Stratification is therefore functionally necessary — a mechanism of role allocation ensuring the most able occupy the most important positions.
• Parsons adds that inequality is legitimated by shared values: we reward what we collectively value, so stratification reflects a value consensus and is broadly seen as fair.
• Criticisms — and they are severe. Tumin asks how we can identify 'functional importance' independently of the reward already paid (the argument is circular); points out that talent is not scarce so much as undiscovered, because inequality itself prevents its development; notes that training is not really a sacrifice, since it is repaid many times over; and observes that inequality is divisive, not integrating, and that ascription — inherited wealth, private schooling, networks — routinely defeats the meritocratic mechanism the theory assumes.
• The New Right (Saunders) reach a similar conclusion by a different road: inequality is the price of a dynamic, free economy, and attempts to level it destroy incentives and liberty. Saunders argues Britain is broadly meritocratic and that class differences in attainment largely reflect differences in ability and effort. Critics reply this understates the effect of inherited advantage and cannot explain why mobility is so strongly patterned by class of origin.

Tumin's criticism

Marx, Weber or functionalism?

Tap a claim, then tap the theorist or perspective behind it.

Bourdieu, Goldthorpe and the Great British Class Survey

• Bourdieu reframes class in terms of three capitals: economic (money and assets), cultural (tastes, knowledge, credentials, the confident bearing that institutions reward) and social (networks and connections). They are convertible: money buys the education that yields the credentials that open the networks. His concept of habitus — the durable dispositions instilled by our class position — explains why inequality reproduces itself without anyone having to enforce it. Class becomes a way of walking, talking and judging, not just a payslip.
• Goldthorpe's employment-relations approach underpins the official NS-SEC classification: class is defined by the nature of the employment contract — a service relationship (salaried professionals with autonomy, career progression and long-term rewards) versus a labour contract (paid for time or output, easily replaced). It is measurable and empirically powerful; critics say it ignores wealth and the elite at the very top, and classifies people by occupation alone.
• Savage and the Great British Class Survey applied Bourdieu's three capitals to a large survey and proposed a seven-class model, ranging from an 'elite' with high stocks of all three capitals to a 'precariat' with very little of any. Its contribution is to show that class is cultural and social, not merely economic. Critics note the survey was self-selecting and that the class labels are contestable.
• Postmodern challenge. Pakulski & Waters proclaim the 'death of class': identity is now formed through consumption and lifestyle rather than production, and class no longer determines how people vote, live or see themselves. Against them: class continues to predict health, education, mobility and life expectancy with brutal reliability. The experience of class may have fragmented; the structure plainly has not.

Bourdieu's habitus

Other dimensions of stratification

• Gender. Walby defines patriarchy as a system with six structures: paid work, household production, culture, sexuality, violence and the state. She traces a historical shift from private patriarchy (control by the individual husband in the household) to public patriarchy (control exercised in the workplace and the state) — women are no longer excluded from public life but are segregated and subordinated within it. That is the sociological account of the glass ceiling, of horizontal segregation (women concentrated in caring, clerical and retail work) and of vertical segregation (women concentrated at the bottom of every occupation). Liberal feminists expect gradual legal and cultural reform to close the gap; radical feminists locate the cause in patriarchy itself; Marxist feminists tie women's subordination to capitalism's need for cheap and unpaid labour; difference feminists insist there is no single category 'woman'.
• Ethnicity. Minority-ethnic groups are unevenly distributed across the class structure, and the differences between groups are as striking as those between minorities and the white majority — so no single explanation will do. Weberian accounts (Barron and Norris's dual labour market) point to segregation into the insecure secondary sector; Marxists (Castles and Kosack) argue minority workers function as a reserve army of labour that divides the working class; and analyses of institutional racism locate discrimination in the routine workings of organisations rather than in individual prejudice.
• Age. Both the young and the old face structured disadvantage — in pay, in employment, in status. Age is a social construction (as Aries showed for childhood), and old age in particular is constructed as dependency, which Marxists link to the loss of the person's value as labour.
• Disability. The social model (Oliver, Barnes) distinguishes impairment from disability: it is a society built for able bodies that disables. Disabled people face lower employment rates, lower pay, and Goffman's stigma.
• Intersectionality is the essential final move: these dimensions do not simply add up. They combine to produce distinct positions.

Walby on patriarchy

Is Britain an open society?

• Absolute mobility is the total proportion of people who end up in a different class from the one they were born into. Relative mobility — the far more revealing measure — compares the chances of people from different origins reaching a given destination. You can have a great deal of absolute mobility with no change at all in relative chances, if the occupational structure itself expands at the top. Getting this distinction right is the single quickest way to impress an examiner on this topic.
• The Oxford Mobility Study (Goldthorpe and the Nuffield team) found substantial absolute upward mobility in post-war Britain — but it was driven overwhelmingly by structural change: the expansion of professional and managerial jobs created 'room at the top'. Relative chances barely moved: the odds of a service-class child ending up in the service class remained far better than those of a working-class child. Britain looked more open than it actually was.
• Long-range mobility remains rare. Most movement is short-range — a step, not a leap. And the very top is strikingly closed: elite occupations continue to be dominated by the privately educated, a pattern the Sutton Trust has documented repeatedly.
• Explaining the barriers: cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu); the labelling and setting processes of schools; social capital and the role of networks in recruitment; the cost of internships and postgraduate study; and, for women, the career penalty of childbearing.
• The meritocracy debate. Saunders argues Britain is broadly meritocratic and that class differences in outcome mostly reflect ability and effort. His critics reply that ability itself is shaped by class, that his measures of ability are contaminated by advantage, and that the persistence of relative immobility across generations is precisely what a meritocracy would not produce.

Absolute and relative mobility

Theorist to concept

Match each theorist to their key idea.

Who rules? And is class now global?

• Elite theory. C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite) argued that in the United States power is concentrated in an interlocking power elite drawn from the top of three institutional orders — the corporate, the military and the political — whose members share social origins, schooling and clubs, and move between the three. Note the difference from Marxism: for Mills the elite is defined by institutional position, not by ownership of the means of production. Classical elite theorists (Pareto, Mosca) went further: rule by an elite is inevitable in any society, and history is 'a graveyard of aristocracies' — which is a direct challenge to the Marxist hope of a classless society.
• Pluralism replies that power is dispersed among many competing groups — unions, businesses, parties, campaigns — none of which prevails on every issue. Critics (Lukes) point to the third face of power: the ability to shape people's very preferences, so that conflict never surfaces at all. The absence of visible conflict is not proof of consent.
• Globalisation and stratification. Sklair argues a transnational capitalist class has emerged, whose members' interests, careers and identities are global rather than national. Bauman's complementary point is that mobility itself is now the great stratifying resource: the elite are 'tourists' who move freely, while the poor are 'vagabonds' whose movement is restricted or forced. Meanwhile capital moves and labour largely cannot — which shifts bargaining power decisively towards employers, and is a large part of the explanation for the growth of insecure work.

Mills' power elite

Judging the debate

• Class is not dead, but it has changed shape. Pakulski and Waters are right that class identity has weakened as a source of politics and self-description; they are wrong that class has stopped structuring life chances. Health, education, mobility and life expectancy all remain powerfully patterned by class. Say both, and say which matters more — structure, not identity, is what stratification means.
• Marx or Weber? The honest answer is that each explains what the other cannot. Marx grasps exploitation and the fundamental antagonism of ownership; Weber grasps the fragmentation of the middle strata, the salience of status, and the fact that ethnic and religious divisions cut across class. Bourdieu's three capitals are, in effect, an attempt to synthesise the two — economic and cultural and social.
• Functionalism has few defenders now: Tumin's circularity objection is fatal, and the evidence on relative mobility shows that ascription — not talent — is doing much of the allocating.
• The strongest single line in an essay on this topic is the distinction between absolute and relative mobility. It shows immediately that you understand that a society can look open while remaining closed.

Exam craft: for the 20-mark question, always finish with a judgement. 'Class remains the most powerful predictor of life chances in Britain, even where it has ceased to be the most powerful source of identity.'

The death of class?

The big ideas to know

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