Erik Wright's Sociological Model Of Social Class

According to many sociologists, social class is referred to the people who belong to the same class have similar characteristics and are close to each other in terms of power, prestige and wealth. Wealth basically includes the property possessed by an individual and the income or money he receives in his job etc. income alone does not define the wealth of a person. There can be cases where people own a lot of property but their income is less or vice versa. But income and wealth go hand in hand. More the income or property more is the wealth. The property owned by the people is not distributed evenly among all. A less section of society own the maximum property whereas a large population shares a little left property which includes shares,

One is the based on Marx and the other is based on Weber. According to Marx’s model, there are two broad classes of capitalists and workers. Erik Wright, a sociologist though explains that there are some people who do not fall in either of the two categories. For example, even though supervisors, executives etc fall under the workers’ category, they more accurately resemble to the capitalists. Thus, Wright stated that people can belong to more than a single category. He termed this case as contradictory class locations. According to him, there were four classes including those who owned large enterprises who were the capitalists, those who owned small businesses named as petty bourgeoisie, those employees who have power or authority over rest of the workers named as managers and those who worked as laborers classified as the workers. Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl who were the sociologists developed a model based on the framework of Weber to define the structure of class in the United States and other few capitalist countries. Just 1% of the population is the capitalist class which comprises of heirs, investors etc. it is divided into two categories that are ‘old’ money and ‘new’ money. The wards of ‘new’ money families enter the families of ‘old’ money by marrying them or by attending right kind of schools. 15% of the population consists of the upper middle class which comprises of upper managers, professionals etc who are mostly postgraduates and have attended good colleges or universities. This class is the one class that has most of its people groomed up by education. 34% of the population comprises of the lower middle class which consists of low level managers, foremen etc having a high school education at the least. Another 30% of the population is the working class comprising of low paid white collar workers and factory workers