Social stratification refers to the process by which societies group people into socioeconomic tiers. There are four main systems of social stratification: slavery, estate systems, caste systems, and class systems. Slavery involves the ownership of people as property. Estate systems divided societies into nobility who owned land and peasants/serfs who worked the land. Caste systems assign people occupations and social status based on their family, limiting social mobility. Class systems group people based on factors like wealth, education, and occupation, allowing for some social mobility. Stratification also occurs along political, economic, and social prestige dimensions regarding the distribution of power, money, and social respect.
Social stratification refers to the process by which societies group people into socioeconomic tiers. There are four main systems of social stratification: slavery, estate systems, caste systems, and class systems. Slavery involves the ownership of people as property. Estate systems divided societies into nobility who owned land and peasants/serfs who worked the land. Caste systems assign people occupations and social status based on their family, limiting social mobility. Class systems group people based on factors like wealth, education, and occupation, allowing for some social mobility. Stratification also occurs along political, economic, and social prestige dimensions regarding the distribution of power, money, and social respect.
Social stratification refers to the process by which societies group people into socioeconomic tiers. There are four main systems of social stratification: slavery, estate systems, caste systems, and class systems. Slavery involves the ownership of people as property. Estate systems divided societies into nobility who owned land and peasants/serfs who worked the land. Caste systems assign people occupations and social status based on their family, limiting social mobility. Class systems group people based on factors like wealth, education, and occupation, allowing for some social mobility. Stratification also occurs along political, economic, and social prestige dimensions regarding the distribution of power, money, and social respect.
Social stratification refers to the process by which societies group people into socioeconomic tiers. There are four main systems of social stratification: slavery, estate systems, caste systems, and class systems. Slavery involves the ownership of people as property. Estate systems divided societies into nobility who owned land and peasants/serfs who worked the land. Caste systems assign people occupations and social status based on their family, limiting social mobility. Class systems group people based on factors like wealth, education, and occupation, allowing for some social mobility. Stratification also occurs along political, economic, and social prestige dimensions regarding the distribution of power, money, and social respect.
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Social Stratification
• In all societies people differ from each other on the
basis of their age, gender and personal characteristics. • Human society is not homogeneous but heterogeneous. • Apart from the natural differences, human beings are also differentiated according to socially approved criteria. Definition • Sutherland and Maxwell ; Social stratification is defined as a process of differentiation that places some people higher than the others. Systems of stratification • Social stratification occurs when a society has a number of different “layers” of people within it who have different statuses. In other words, social stratification exists if there are different groups of people who have different levels of such things as power, prestige, and wealth. All societies have social stratification. These are the different systems of social stratification. • The major systems of stratification are slavery, estate systems, caste systems, and class systems. Slavery
• Slavery is a system in which people are
bought and sold as property, forced to work, or held in captivity against their will. • The most closed system is slavery, or the ownership of people, which has been quite common in human history. Slavery is thought to have begun 10,000 years ago, after agricultural societies developed, as people in these societies made prisoners of war work on their farms. Continued-- • Many of the ancient lands of the Middle East, including Babylonia, Egypt, and Persia, also owned slaves, as did ancient China and India. Slavery especially flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, which used thousands of slaves for their trade economies. Continued-- • Today’s slaves include (a) Men first taken as prisoners of war in ethnic conflicts (b) Girls and women captured in wartime or kidnapped from their neighborhoods and used as prostitutes (c) Children sold by their parents to become child laborers (d) Workers paying off debts that are abused and even tortured and too terrified to leave. Estate Systems • Estate systems are characterized by control of land and were common in Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages and into the 1800s. In these systems, two major estates existed: the landed gentry or nobility and the peasantry or serfs. The landed gentry owned huge expanses of land on which serfs toiled. Continued-- • The serfs had more freedom than slaves had but typically lived in poverty and were subject to arbitrary control by the nobility. • Much of Asia, especially China and Japan, also had estate systems. For centuries, China’s large population lived as peasants in miserable conditions and frequently engaged in peasant uprisings. These escalate starting in the 1850s after the Chinese government raised taxes and charged peasants higher rents for the land on which they worked. After many more decades of political and economic conflict, Communists took control of China in 1949. Caste Systems
• In a caste system, people are born into
unequal groups based on their parents’ status and remain in these groups for the rest of their lives. • Caste systems are closed stratification systems in which people can do little or nothing to change their social standing. A caste system is one in which people are born into their social standing and will remain in it their whole lives. Continued-- • People are assigned occupations regardless of their talents, interests, or potential. There are virtually no opportunities to improve a person’s social position. • India’s caste system is the most widely-known example of a society that is stratified by caste., people were expected to work in the occupation of their caste and to enter into marriage according to their caste. Class System • A class system is based on both social factors and individual achievement. A class consists of a set of people who share similar status with regard to factors like wealth, income, education, and occupation. Unlike caste systems, class systems are open. People are free to gain a different level of education or employment than their parents. Continued--
• This is, for the most part, what we have today.
People in our society are stratified based on how much material wealth they have. We tend to give more power and prestige to those who have more money or more of other forms of wealth. Dimensions of social stratification Different kind of scare resources is distributed unequally in a society. We could rank the people on the basis of how each kind of the scare resources is distributed. According to the Max, there are three major dimensions of the stratification they are as follows Political/Power Dimension
• When we talk about the political
dimension of the stratification of the social inequality, we are mostly talking about the unequal distribution of the power. Power is the ability to affect the action of others, even when others resists. Power may be exercised in the individuals, group or the societal level. On the societal level, power means the ability to make the decision in which whole societies are affected. Power can be defined as the ability to get people to behave as we want to behave them. Economic Dimension
• The economic dimension of
stratification concern the money and the things one can buy. It includes the two key variable income and the wealth, which are related but not the same. Income refers to the amount of money that the person or the family receives over some defined period of the time, usually a calendar year. Wealth refers to the total value of everything that a person or the family owns; minus any debts owed. Social prestige Dimension
The third dimension of the
stratification is social prestige, sometimes referred to as status; this dimension has to do with what people think of you. If people think highly of you and you are well known, you have the high level of status. If the people think poorly of you, you have the low level of the prestige. Prestige is the scare resources.