Difference, inequality, stratification and life chances

• Social difference — people are simply different (taste, culture, belief). Difference alone is not inequality.
• Social inequality — differences that are attached to unequal rewards: income, wealth, power, status, health, safety.
• Social stratification — inequality that is structured and enduring, arranged in layers, and passed between generations.
• Life chances — Max Weber's term for a person's likelihood of obtaining the things a society values: good health, a long life, education, housing, security. This is the concept that turns 'inequality' from an abstraction into a life: OCR asks you to 'consider how social inequalities affect life chances'.

The move that scores. Do not just list inequalities. Show the mechanism: how does a disadvantage at one point (a low income) convert into a disadvantage at another (worse housing → worse health → more missed school → lower qualifications → a worse job)? That chain is what sociologists mean by life chances.

Class: patterns, work and mobility

• Wealth is far more unequal than income, and it compounds: assets generate more assets, and are inherited. This is why class advantage persists across generations even where incomes converge.
• Work and employment — OCR names this explicitly. Class today is closely tied to the labour market: secure salaried careers at one end; insecure, low-paid, zero-hours or gig work at the other. Guy Standing (The Precariat, 2011) argues a new class is forming, defined by chronic insecurity rather than by low pay alone.
• Deskilling. Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) argued that capitalism systematically strips skill and control out of jobs, so that even white-collar work becomes routinised and proletarianised.
• Social mobility. John Goldthorpe's Oxford Mobility Study (1980) found substantial absolute mobility — but largely because the occupational structure had changed, creating more professional jobs ('more room at the top'). Relative mobility — the comparative chance of a working-class child overtaking a middle-class one — had barely improved. That distinction is worth a whole paragraph in an essay.
• Class today. Mike Savage and colleagues' Great British Class Survey (Sociology, 2013) proposed a seven-class model built from economic, social and cultural capital — from an 'elite' to a 'precariat' — arguing that the old manual/non-manual line no longer captures British class.

Evidence check (synoptic): mobility studies rely on comparing father's and child's occupation. That method historically excluded women, and occupational schemas struggle with the self-employed, the unemployed and the very rich. Know the limits of your own evidence.

Gender: pay, segregation and the double shift

• Vertical segregation — women are concentrated at the lower levels of occupational hierarchies, and face a glass ceiling: an invisible barrier to the top.
• Horizontal segregation — women and men are clustered in different kinds of work. The '5 Cs' — caring, cashiering, catering, cleaning, clerical — are heavily female, and are among the lowest paid. The Office for National Statistics continues to report a persistent gender pay gap in the UK.
• The dual labour market. Barron and Norris (1976) argued the labour market splits into a primary sector (secure, well paid, promoted) and a secondary sector (insecure, low paid, few prospects) — and that women are disproportionately confined to the secondary sector, held there by employer assumptions, weaker unionisation and interrupted careers.
• The domestic double shift. Ann Oakley's The Sociology of Housework (1974) found housework remained overwhelmingly the wife's responsibility even where she also worked, and that most housewives found the work monotonous and isolating. Duncombe and Marsden (1995) added a triple shift: paid work, housework, and emotion work — managing everyone else's feelings.
• Changing aspirations. Sue Sharpe's Just Like a Girl, comparing London girls in the early 1970s with the 1990s, found their priorities had shifted from 'love, marriage, husbands, children' towards careers and self-reliance — evidence of real change, not just continuity.

Reading the pay gap

Ethnicity: the ethnic penalty and institutional racism

• The ethnic penalty. Sociologists Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung (research for the Department for Work and Pensions, 2006) used the term to describe the disadvantage in employment and pay that remains for some minority ethnic groups even after qualifications, age and region are controlled for. The residual is the penalty — and it points to discrimination, not deficiency.
• Diversity within 'ethnic minority'. Outcomes differ sharply between minority groups and within them by class and gender. Writing about 'ethnic minorities' as one bloc is a mark-losing error.
• Institutional racism. The Macpherson Report (1999) into the Metropolitan Police investigation of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence defined it as 'the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin'. The crucial move: racism can be systemic — built into procedures and unwitting assumptions — without any individual being a self-declared racist.
• Marxist explanation. Castles and Kosack (1973) argued migrant workers function as a reserve army of labour: hired in booms, discarded in slumps, and used to divide the working class along racial lines so that it cannot unite against capital.
• Weberian explanation. Rex and Tomlinson (1979) argued that minority ethnic groups can form a disadvantaged underclass, marginalised in the labour market, housing and education simultaneously — a Weberian account, because it stresses status and market position, not just ownership.

What makes racism institutional?

Age: dependency at both ends

• Older people. Peter Townsend (1981) argued that the dependency of the elderly is not a natural fact of ageing but is structured — created by compulsory retirement, inadequate pensions and residential care that strips away autonomy. Society manufactures the dependency it then complains about.
• Young people. Youth face insecure, low-paid entry work, unpaid internships that only the affluent can afford, and the collapse of accessible housing. Guy Standing's precariat is disproportionately young.
• Age is socially constructed. The meanings of 'child', 'teenager' and 'old' vary across cultures and history — and each carries a different bundle of rights, expectations and stereotypes.
• Intersection. A wealthy 75-year-old and a poor 75-year-old do not share a common experience of old age. Age compounds class, gender and ethnicity rather than replacing them — pensioner poverty, for instance, falls hardest on women, whose interrupted careers left them with smaller pensions.

Whose theory is this?

Tap a claim, then tap the perspective that would make it.

Functionalism: inequality is necessary

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore ('Some Principles of Stratification', 1945) made the boldest claim in the whole topic: stratification is universal and functionally necessary.

• Some roles (surgeon, judge) are more functionally important than others, and require scarce talent and long, costly training.
• To motivate the ablest people to make that sacrifice, society must attach unequal rewards — high pay, status, privilege — to those positions.
• Stratification is therefore a device for role allocation: it sorts the right people into the right jobs. Parsons adds that the resulting hierarchy expresses a shared value consensus about what society esteems.

Melvin Tumin's reply (1953) is devastating, and OCR loves it: (1) Who decides which roles are 'functionally important'? A society without refuse collectors collapses faster than one without footballers. (2) The theory assumes a meritocracy — but ascribed factors (inherited wealth, private schooling, contacts) block talent from rising, so society never draws on its full 'pool of ability'. (3) Rewards do not track importance: care workers are essential and poor. (4) Stratification is dysfunctional — it breeds resentment and hostility, not solidarity. (5) It ignores power: elites can simply protect their own rewards.

Testing Davis and Moore

Marxism: inequality is exploitation

• For Karl Marx, class is defined by the relationship to the means of production. The bourgeoisie own them; the proletariat own only their labour power and must sell it.
• Profit comes from surplus value: workers produce more value than they are paid. Inequality is therefore not a by-product of capitalism but its engine.
• Ideology and false consciousness keep the system stable: the ruling class controls the means of mental production, so its ideas circulate as common sense. Antonio Gramsci refined this as hegemony — rule by consent, won culturally, and therefore always contestable.
• Westergaard and Resler (Class in a Capitalist Society, 1976) argued that despite the welfare state, the fundamental distribution of wealth and power in Britain had barely shifted — the appearance of reform masked continuity.

Evaluation. Marx's prediction of polarisation into two hostile camps has not straightforwardly occurred: a large, internally divided middle class exists, and share ownership and pensions blur the line. Weberians argue Marx reduced everything to economics and had no room for status inequalities — which is why a rich footballer may have less social prestige than a poor bishop. Feminists point out that Marx's proletarian was implicitly male, and that unpaid domestic labour is invisible in his model.

Weberian: inequality is multi-dimensional

Max Weber accepted much of Marx but insisted stratification has three dimensions, which do not always line up:

• Class — your market situation: the skills, credentials and property you can bring to the market. This produces many classes, not two: professionals sell scarce expertise, and are rewarded accordingly.
• Status — social honour and prestige, expressed in lifestyle. A well-regarded but poorly paid nurse has high status and modest class position; a wealthy loan shark, the reverse.
• Party — organised power: unions, political parties, professional associations, lobbies.

Frank Parkin developed Weber's key mechanism: social closure. Privileged groups shut others out — through professional licensing, credential requirements, nepotism, unpaid internships, restrictive membership. Parkin also identified dual closure, where an excluded group both defends itself from above and excludes others below it.

Why Weberians matter for OCR: only a multi-dimensional model can handle intersections. Gender and ethnic inequality operate powerfully through status and closure, not only through ownership — which is exactly why Rex and Tomlinson, Parkin and the ethnic penalty literature are Weberian in shape.

Feminism: inequality is patriarchy

• Liberal feminism — inequality stems from socialisation, outdated attitudes and unequal law. The remedy is reform: equal pay legislation, anti-discrimination law, changed gender socialisation. Ann Oakley's work sits broadly here. Critics say it is too optimistic and leaves the deep structure untouched.
• Marxist feminism — women's oppression serves capitalism. Unpaid domestic labour reproduces the workforce for free; women form a flexible reserve army of labour, drawn in and expelled as the economy requires; and, as Fran Ansley put it, wives absorb the frustration capitalism generates in their husbands. Critics: this makes patriarchy a mere function of capitalism, when men also benefit directly.
• Radical feminism — patriarchy is the primary and most fundamental division, and it is rooted in the private sphere: the family, sexuality, violence. Critics: it can be essentialist, treating all men as oppressors and all women as sharing one experience.
• Sylvia Walby (Theorizing Patriarchy, 1990) offers the strongest synthesis: patriarchy operates through six structures — paid work, housework, culture, sexuality, violence, and the state. She argues Britain has moved from private patriarchy (women confined to and controlled within the household) to public patriarchy (women admitted to paid work and public life, but subordinated there — segregated, underpaid and undervalued). Progress is real; equality is not.

Black feminists add the essential correction: 'women's experience' is not one experience. Class and racism shape gender inequality, so a single, universal account of patriarchy will always misdescribe someone.

Match the sociologist to the idea

Tap a sociologist on the left, then their idea on the right.

The New Right, poverty and the underclass

First, the two definitions of poverty you must be able to contrast:

• Absolute poverty — lacking the resources for physical subsistence. Seebohm Rowntree's York studies (from 1899) built a minimum subsistence budget and counted those who fell below it.
• Relative poverty — Peter Townsend (Poverty in the United Kingdom, 1979) redefined poverty as relative deprivation: being unable to participate in the ordinary activities and living conditions that are customary in your society. Poverty is social exclusion, not just hunger — and it can therefore exist in a rich country.

The New Right explanation. Charles Murray (Losing Ground, 1984; The Emerging British Underclass, 1990) argued that generous welfare creates a dependency culture and an underclass characterised, in his account, by illegitimacy, worklessness and crime. Poverty, on this view, is a behavioural problem caused by the incentives welfare creates. David Marsland made a parallel British argument that universal welfare undermines self-reliance and the family. The policy conclusion is to cut benefits and restore the discipline of the market.

Evaluation — this is where marks are won. Critics argue Murray blames the victim, confusing the effects of poverty with its causes. The evidence for a distinct 'culture' of dependency is weak: most people move in and out of poverty rather than forming a permanent caste, and most poor households contain someone in work — the working poor. And the structural causes Murray ignores (deindustrialisation, insecure low-paid work, unaffordable childcare) do not disappear because he has not mentioned them. Note, too, the ideological function: an explanation that locates the problem in the poor is very convenient for those who are not.

Evaluating the underclass thesis

Power: the inequality behind the inequalities

• Weber defined power as the ability to achieve your will even against the resistance of others, and distinguished coercion from authority (power seen as legitimate — traditional, charismatic or rational-legal).
• C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) argued that in the United States the top of the corporate, military and political hierarchies formed a single, interconnected elite with shared backgrounds and interests — a direct challenge to pluralist claims that power is dispersed among competing groups.
• Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 1974) identified three faces of power: (1) winning open decisions; (2) setting the agenda so that some issues are never decided at all; and (3) — the most insidious — shaping people's very wants, so they consent to arrangements that harm them. The third face is Gramsci's hegemony in analytical dress, and it explains why the losers of an unequal system so often defend it.

Use Lukes to finish an essay. If power can shape preferences, then the absence of protest is not evidence of fairness — which is exactly the flaw in functionalist and New Right claims that inequality reflects consensus or choice.

The third face of power

Choosing your explanation

Component 02 Section B — the big ideas

Press Finish to see your score.