Social Stratification Essays -- Papers

Inequalities exist in all types of human society. Even in the simplest cultures where variations in wealth or property are non-existent, there are inequalities between individuals, men and women, the young and the old. A person may have a higher status than others because of a particular prowness at hunting, for instance, or because he or she is believed to have special access to the ancestral spirits. To describe inequalities, sociologists speak of Social Stratification. Social Stratification lies at the core of society and of the discipline of sociology. Social inequality is a fundamental aspect of virtually all-social processes and a person's position in the stratification system is the most consistent predictor of his/her behaviour, attitudes, and life chances. "Social Stratification is a characteristic of society, not simply a reflection of individual differences." Social Stratification persists over generations. Social Stratification is universal but not variable. It involve s not only inequality but also beliefs. 'It is useful to think of stratification as rather like the geological layering of rock in the earth's surface,' Societies can be seen as consisting of 'strata' in a hierarchy, with the more favoured at the top and the less privileged at the bottom." If we look back at the year 1912, when the Titanic sank, we can make a connection with social inequality for the way people lived back then. When we watched the blockbuster hit in 1997, we were shown how much of an impact that social inequality had on the lower class passengers. Women and children had the highest survival rate. Those who held a first class ticket, more than 60% of those survived because their cabins were on the upper decks. Only 1/3 of the third cla... ...ibility, and however imperfectly measured in the existing social classification. Of course, we recognise that in contemporary society, people are less likely spontaneously to describe their own experiences in the language of class. They search for more direct and specific determinants of their life chances to put alongside their recognition of class, and they recognise the independent part played by age, gender, and ethnicity. We do not, then, live in a 'classless' society, though we do live in a society whose members no longer spontaneously and unambiguously use the language of class as the obvious, taken-for-granted way of describing social inequalities. Class is not dead, but perhaps the monolithic social imagery of class has, indeed, had its day. It is this, which makes our society a functional one, and what will help shape it to be a stronger one in the future.