Social stratification theories

Significance: All societies divide people into various social strata or hierarchies based on one or more characteristics such as race, gender, age, or social class. The concept of social stratification, derived from geology, refers to this structured inequality. Generally, stratification takes the form of either a class system or caste system. Although a class system is more open to upward social mobility than a caste system, both systems severely and systematically restrict people’s access to such valued social resources as wealth, education, power, and prestige.

Social stratification theories are attempts to explain why stratification occurs and how it is maintained. They fall into four broad categories: biologically based theories, conflict theories, functionalist theories, and cultural theories.

Biologically Based Theories

Prominent among biologically based theories is social Darwinism. Grounded in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, social Darwinism erroneously applied the concept of natural selection, the key evolutionary mechanism, to the variation in human societies and cultures. Although Darwin believed that human beings belong to a single species because of a common ancestry, he theorized that races constitute various subspecies within the human species. The social Darwinists, reflecting nineteenth-century European prejudices toward those they had colonized or enslaved, interpreted this to mean that races were unequal in their evolutionary advancement and that white Europeans represented the apex of human evolution.

British sociologist Herbert Spencer, who used the phrases “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest” to provide a general philosophical framework within which to understand Darwin’s theory, believed that human groups and nations were involved in a relentless struggle for survival, pushing aside, out, and under the unfit groups and nations while continuously improving the species. William Graham Sumner, an American sociologist who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, also held social Darwinist views.

Historically, belief in evolutionary explanations for social stratification has led to overt subjugation, exclusion, or genocide of ethnic and racial minorities. Racist ideologies emerge to legitimize continued oppression. When overt forms of oppression disappear, resistance to changes in the existing social structure persists.

For example, Ernst Haeckel, a nineteenth-century German thinker, seized upon Darwin’s theory to propagate the myth of the superiority of the Aryan race. He believed that the Nordic race, with what he saw as its distinct physical and mental characteristics—blond hair, blue eyes, great physical strength, superior intelligence, and bravery—had the natural right to rule the “inferior” races. Haeckel’s ideas quickly became popular in nineteenth-century Germany and were eventually used as an ideological prop by the Nazis.

Representative Social Stratification Theorists and Their Positions

A more recent extension of social Darwinism is sociobiology, systematically presented by American biologist E. O. Wilson in his classic work Sociobiology: A New Synthesis (1975). Sociobiologists reject the charge of supporting a racist ideology; however, they assert that values, culture, and behavioral patterns are grounded in biology, which leads to the conclusion that social stratification is a function of genetics.

Theories that link race and intelligence to explain the class structure of a society also have their early beginnings in the nineteenth-century social Darwinism and eugenics movement. Francis Galton, one of the founders of the eugenics movement, believed that superior races with superior intelligence naturally ended up on top of the social hierarchy. A modern statement of this position is found in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Such theories resurface from time to time, despite the fact that human genetic material (deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) is nearly identical across all human ethnicities and races.

Conflict Theories

The classical conflict theory is found in the writings of the nineteenth-century economist and political philosopher Karl Marx, who held that the capitalist social structure creates two classes of people: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who work for the bourgeoisie. The capitalist system of production is designed to maximize profit or surplus value for the bourgeoisie by paying the proletariat the lowest possible wages for their labors. The more the workers produce, the more the capitalists benefit, progressively impoverishing and alienating the former while empowering the latter.

The Marxist tradition has never enjoyed much vitality or favor in American society. However, modified class conflict theories have always found some level of acceptance in the United States. Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, has shown that the authority structure of contemporary advanced societies, while successful in preventing violent revolutions, is still grounded in class conflicts. Gerhard Lenski, utilizing Marxist ideas and functionalist insights, has made historical comparative analyses of the formation of class structures based on power, prestige, and wealth. His hypothesis, however, that greater democratization will result in greater economic equality has not been borne out by historical experience.

Functionalist Theories

Functionalism, also called structural functionalism, compares society to a machine or an organism whose efficiency depends upon the proper coordination of its diverse parts. If some phenomenon is universally and persistently found in a society, such as poverty or crime, functionalists conclude that it must serve a positive function for the entire society. The originator of functionalism in sociology was the French theorist Émile Durkheim.

The principles of a functionalist explanation are found in one of Durkheim's early works, The Division of Labor in Society (1893), in which he analyzed the transition of simple societies to more complex, modern societies. Key to this transition, he argued, was the social division of labor, or the proliferation of specialized social roles. Consequently, complex societies, which he called organic societies, are characterized by interdependence. Although this is a positive development, it is also accompanied by many social pathologies including anomie or alienation. What needs correction is not the proliferation of specializations resulting in social stratification, but the social pathologies it creates.

After World War II, theorists such as Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Merton popularized functionalism. With the United States’ postwar ascendance to superpower status, functionalism, which supports the status quo, quickly spread.

The four major components of a social system identified by Parsons are economy, polity, society, and the fiduciary system, which includes religion. Contemporary functionalists argue that changes to the social structure must be gradual and only to the extent that is necessary to maintain the system’s equilibrium among these four components. Existing divisions of labor among social classes and racial and ethnic groups are reaffirmed as beneficial to the system. Davis and Moore’s contention that the existing stratification system is the result of the most suitable groups or individuals filling important positions in the social system has been widely influential, although sharply criticized by conflict theorists. Functionalists fear that insistence on equality will harm the system by making it unable to choose the most qualified individuals to fill highly valued social positions.

Cultural Theories

Cultural theorists believe that social groups and nations occupy varying positions in the social hierarchy based on their cultural ideas and value systems. German social theorist Max Weber proposed a cultural theory to demonstrate the power of ideas to influence people’s material condition. Weber did not deny the advantage that certain groups had already gained by their economic positions. However, he stressed that values have social and economic consequences. Weber’s classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920), is an attempt to demonstrate this thesis.

Weber contended that such Puritan values as hard work, asceticism, frugality, and deferred gratification have contributed to the development of what he called “the spirit of capitalism.” These cultural values, originally articulated and promoted by religious reformers, have eventually become ingrained in the Protestant ethic that underpins the capitalist enterprise. Financial success, in other words, is a function of the values by which one lives.

Those who share similar values and lifestyles join together to form status groups and discriminate against those who have dissimilar values. Friends and associates are chosen on the basis of a level of comfort based on shared values. Members of the same status groups tend to intermarry, reside in the same neighborhood, choose similar occupations, belong to the same or similar organizations and associations, and enjoy similar forms of entertainment. Based on these considerations, Weber identified three distinct dimensions of stratification: class, status, and power.

Referring to the racial conflicts in the United States, Weber observed that the antipathy between whites and blacks is not natural but political. Whites made interracial sex a taboo and a crime only after the abolition of slavery. When former slaves demanded equal civil rights they were perceived by the whites as a threat to their competitive advantage. Even the slightest admixture of black ancestry was made a bar to their admission to the status hierarchy of the whites.

Once a group is marked out to be despised, denigrated, and held in contempt, not only their physical characteristics but also their customs, lifestyles, and values are despised and rejected. Over the course of time, a minority group’s exclusion from the dominant population results in the widening of the cultural gap, leading to further isolation and hostility. Culture, historical experiences, and physical characteristics thus become interlinked, strengthening the basis of stratification.

Culture of Poverty Thesis

Weber’s contention that the Protestant ethic, which is the spirit of capitalism, underlies the success of this system has generated much debate on the cultural basis of poverty and stratification. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis contends that poverty is one of the numerous traits—he identified fifty-five—of what he called the “culture of poverty.” In his view, although poverty is an essential trait of this culture, poverty alone does not account for it. The culture that generates poverty is a “total system” of ideology and psychological attitudes, including marginality, helplessness, dependency, lack of future orientation, and indulgence of impulses.

The culture of poverty thesis has found wide-ranging acceptance among economists and sociologists such as Gunnar Myrdal to explain the economic status of African Americans. In his 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Myrdal wrote that while whites attributed the economic situation of blacks to “low standards of efficiency, reliability, ambition, and morals,” it was in fact the result of the culture of poverty and "other discriminations in legal protection, public health, housing, education and in every other sphere of life." Conservative thinkers, however, have also relyed on cultural explanations to oppose social programs meant to improve the conditions of the poor as ineffective in overcoming chronic poverty. They blame poverty and inequality on a variety of cultural factors, including single motherhood, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy, laziness, the ingratitude of immigrants, rap music, and the drug culture.

Rational Choice Theory

Weber maintained that rationalization—choosing the most efficient means to optimize benefits while minimizing costs—is the dominant trend in contemporary societies. Later theorists have seized on Weber’s rational action model to analyze the social status of individuals as the outcome of a series of choices that they make under the constraints of available resources. They assert that even choices that later turn out to be bad are rational at the time they are made. Applying this theory to race and ethnic relations, rational choice theorists argue that individuals align themselves with their own racial and ethnic groups to maximize their chances of success, creating in-groups and out-groups. The outcome of the resulting competition among different groups is the creation of the various social strata.

Impact on Social Policy

While some of these theories serve to legitimize existing inequalities, others offer grounds for critiquing them. Biological theories of stratification have had a profound impact on US social policy toward minorities. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States restricted immigration from non-English-speaking countries and denied equal educational opportunities to African Americans in the belief that these racial and ethnic groups lacked the genetic capacity to become successful in American society. The culture of poverty thesis is often evoked by conservative politicians to criticize social programs. Most social ills that disproportionately affect the underclass—drug addiction, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy, welfare dependency, unemployment, poverty, and crime—have been blamed on the culture of poverty. Liberal politicians have used diluted versions of conflict theory to pass laws and programs, such as civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs, in an attempt to reverse the ill effects of past oppression of minority groups.

Bibliography

Davis, Kingsley, and Wilbert Moore. “Some Principles of Stratification.” American Sociological Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 1945, pp. 242–49.

Fisher, Calude S., et al. Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton UP, 1996.

Gilder, George. Wealth and Poverty. Basic Books, 1981.

Grusky, David B., editor. Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective. 4th ed. Westview Press, 2014.

Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Free Press, 1994.

Kerbo, Harold R. Social Stratification and Inequality. McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Translated by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach. 1976. Penguin Classics, 1990. 3 vols.

Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. Basic Books, 1984.

Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action. 1937. Free Press, 1968.

Parsons, Talcott. The Social System. Free Press, 1951.

Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited and translated by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford UP, 1946.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. G. Allen & Unwin, 1930.