Social Class Stratification

Summary: In chapter ten of the online text, global inequality and global stratification. Global inequality involves the concentration of resources in certain nations, significantly affecting the opportunities of individuals in poorer and less powerful countries. On the same scale, global stratification refers to the unequal distribution of resources among nations. Industrialization gave way to a split in nations called core, peripheral and semi-peripheral nations. The core nations are those that are dominant in capital, highly industrialized, technological and urbanized. Peripheral nations have little industrialization, unstable government, inadequate

Social Classes have been used in many countries, in dystopian books, and in history. They are called by many names, but they all have similar jobs which separates into these social classes. In the Brave New World, Aldous Huxley created a caste system with Greek alphabet names. This caste system consists of Alphas being the Upper class, Betas being the Middle class, Gammas being the Working class, and Deltas and Epsilons being the Working Poor class or Lower class. In Brave New World, the caste system is very similar to society in the United States, which separates Americans into different social classes.

Ascribed status defines one’s place in the society but it does not rule who a person is, and what they might become. However, depending on their ascribed status, people face different challenges in the workplace, at home, and in public. Below I discuss three examples of ascribed status and how each are effected by their status.

People are destined to be ranked into a social class. Social class is something, which one is born into, and this class cannot be changed. These classes begin with the low, middle, and high classes. Each class has different tiers, such as upper middle class or lower middle class.

How does a person’s social class affect their successes? Daniel James Brown answers this question in his book The Boys in the Boat. People in lower classes tend to be more humble and hardworking than those in higher classes. Success means more to lower class citizens because they have to work for every piece of it. People of higher classes can, to some extent, ‘buy’ success with money.

Diana Kendall concludes in her article that the media plays a role in how public opinions about socio-economic classes are formed by framing their stories in misleading ways. The media takes class and social inequality and trivializes it. I think the media is portraying images in a bad manner because they are selling the idea that the only way to get ahead is to identify with the rich and powerful. Television also promotes hedonistic consumerism, TV encourages the audience to view themselves as having an equal right to purchase high end items. I found it interesting to find out that people who watch television for an extensive period of time leads to higher rates of spending and to lower savings. I agree that reality shows such as For Love

I agree with almost everything you said. When companies advertise their low rates but don 't mention their high interest rates that are attached to it- It puts the poor in more debt. Social inequality, social class and social mobility all make it harder to get out of debt and move up to higher classes. Yes, I think it is unfair to give super high interest rates to the poor knowing they can 't pay them back, but at the same time, people in the lower class are a higher risk when it comes borrowing money. I think they are uninformed, but it is almost useless to inform them once they have already made these mistakes and find themselves in debt. People need to be informed before they find themselves in this problem.

There is no denying that social inequality is getting worse in the US. The Gini index, which is the most widely used measurement of income disparity, used to be 34.6 in 1979; now it sits at above 40 (GINI Index for the United States, 2018). To put this into perspective, the number makes the US the 4th most unequal country—trailing behind Mexico, Chile and Turkey—in 37 major economies surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD): Gini, poverty, income, Methods and Concepts, n.d.). What are the consequences of social inequality in developed countries like the US? Who does it affect? What are the root causes

In the urban communities, the relationship between social class and general well-being seem rather troublesome. According to PBS (2017), “Class can be harder to spot than racial or ethnic differences, yet in many ways it’s the most important predictor of what kind of financial and educational opportunities someone will have in life (para. 2). I think that the material on social class provides evidence to the empirical fact that most individuals tend to overlook the inequalities that exist within the social classes. Throughout history, social class has been a major predictor for a tremendous amount of social inequalities related to a wide diversity of factors such as education, income, wealth and other opportunities associated with socioeconomic

Imagine this: you are in a society where everyone looks, talks, and walks the same. Genetic engineering has evolved so far that you are identical to everyone else. But, suddenly an airborne virus starts spreading, slowly killing off everyone. Now the human race is extinct. Wouldn’t you think it would have been better for someone to be even a little different, so that the human race was able to live on? Doesn’t a society, where everything is identical, seem very dreary? Humans should value the ability of being different. Choosing to genetically altering your child appearance, is taking away their uniqueness. This would cause people to question if they are truly are something special. Also, genetically altering your child could result in harsh

Similar to the earth strata, sociologists also think that there are existing different layers or strata in human society. Thereby, social stratification may define as a division of society into strata. It divided people into different groups and their lives are structured according to these groupings. In one word, when individuals and groups are ranked, members of a particular layer have a common identity and they possess a similar life style. Lifestyles include such matters like the residential areas in every community which have gradations of prestige-ranking, mode of housing, means of recreation, the kinds of dress, and so on. It denotes a style of life which is distinctive of a particular social status. A prominent example of a status group is the caste system. In a caste-divided society, for example- in India ‘the ancient Aryas’ a special type of stratification in the form of caste is found: the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Sudras; the ancient Romans were divided into the patricians and the plebeians; the ancient Greeks were divided into freemen and slaves, history tells us that the person’s position is immediately determined unalterably at birth. Once positions are assigned, they can not advance and improve their social status in any way. Pascual Gisbert said that social stratification is the division of society into permanent groups of categories linked with each other by the relationship of superiority and subordination. The upper class remains on the upper

Social stratification is mention when society is being explained in a disagreement in two, or more groups being separated from themselves. Basically what I am trying to say is that what social stratification is social classes or categories. Which is a trend that finds out how measurable is social stratification; which is essentially economic ones. For example, there are people that are categorized in the names of the lower class, middle class, and the upper middle class. By saying that the lower class are poor and have to work for a living, and barely have food for end of the month after paying their bills; which make life hard for them. On the other hand, there is the middle class which have standard decent jobs that are able to pay off all their bills and still have money leftover to buy whatever they want and still have less stress than the lower class do. The last is the upper middle class, that are very rich people that don’t have any financial problems and live a nice and easy steady

Race has been the focus of media and politics in the United States. It is a hotbed of protests that lead to riots covered in a media frenzy which has turned it into a widespread epidemic. There is a huge push to love diversity, but do not dare try to be similar because everyone must be unique, not united. In a perfect world, people should be able to embrace their individuality, accept others embracing their individuality, and live together in peace and harmony. However, no matter how much people push to have a diverse and loving society something will not click into place and this something continues to drive society apart. What if it is not purely a race problem? What if it has more to do with economics than racism? Here in America, people

Abstract This essay reviews post-1980 research on class stratification, socioeconomic inequalities, and social mobility in the People’s Republic of China. Chinese class stratification has transformed from a rigid status hierarchy under Mao to an open, evolving class system in the post-Mao period. Socioeconomic inequalities have also been altered. State redistributive inequalities are giving way to patterns increasingly generated by how individuals and groups succeed in a growing market-oriented economy; rigorous empirical studies have been conducted on occupational prestige, income distribution, housing and consumption, and gender inequality. Finally, occupational mobility, a rare opportunity under Mao, is becoming a living experience for many CLASS STRATIFICATION Overall Trend China underwent extensive change in the wake of the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. Under Mao, a rigid status hierarchy grew out of a state socialist economy in which private ownership of productive assets was gradually eliminated between 1952 and 1958 by collectivization of farming and state consolidation of urban economy, diminishing pre-revolution social classes in a Communist regime (Whyte 1975, Kraus 1981). Ironically, the post-1978 regime under the new paramount leader Deng Xiaoping began what now is known to be a remarkable reform policy that has decollectivized and commodified both rural and urban economies, eroding the institutional bases of the pre-reform status hierarchy. Since then, an open, evolving class system has been in the making (Davis 1995). The Pre-Reform Status Hierarchy Four structural and behavioral dimensions classified the Chinese into qualitatively different status groups under Mao: (a) a rural-urban divide in residential status, (b) a state-collective dualism in economic structure, (c) a cadre-worker dichotomy Huang (1993) sees Chinese intellectuals divided between “in-institution” and “out-institution” groups, depending on whether they work primarily within the state sector or outside it. This institutional boundary implies no anticipation that “out-institution” intellectuals are “autonomous humanists” (zi you wen hua ren) who might otherwise work in an independent sphere of civil society. THE MIDDLE CLASSES State factory workers, because of their lifelong employment and a high level of benefits, were seen to be Mao’s “quasi middle class” (Li 2001), and this once politically and economically protected group has become differentiated in the reform era (Whyte 1999). Mao’s middle classes—managers and professionals—were incorporated into the Communist order from the early 1950s onward (Davis 2000a), but in the reform era these two groups, along with private entrepreneurs, appear to have become the central players in the rising market economies in rural and urban China (Qin 1999:29–48). But China’s middle classes today do not yet share a commonly recognized image of their

advocated that education is an important attribute of class formation. “In western societies the formal organization of education in school systems meant that schools became the principal purveyors of social facts of the individual’s class status. Schools as formal institutions were linked with other social institutions in determining the structure of society and the attitudes, values and behavior of the public. In many literature, the term Socio-Economic Status is preferably used over the term class, because the former is considered to be a more neutral term than the latter one. There seems to be a tendency by British writers to use the term class and by Americans to prefer Socio-Economic Status whether they in fact are describing different