Page 16 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Unit 1: Understanding Social Stratification

• A social class is any aggregate of persons who perform the same function in the organization Notes
of production.
• A sound and logically formulated view by Max Weber on social stratification can be taken as
a critique on the Marxian concept of class and stratification. “Power” is a keynote of the
Weberian theory of social stratification. Weber draws a clear distinction between three “orders”
of society, namely, economic, social and political. He observes that “classes”, “status groups”
and “parties” are phenomena of the distribution of power within a community.
• The class situation is determined by “market situation”. The term “class” refers to any group
of people that is found in the same class situation. “Property” and “lack of property” are,
therefore, the basic categories of all class situations. Competition eliminates some players in
the market situation and patronizes others.
• However, the two are not identical. The social order is determined by the economic order to
a high degree, and in turn reacts upon it.
• “Social order” is defined by the way in which social honour is distributed in a society. The
social order and the economic order are related to the legal order.
• Weber uses the expression “guarantees of status stratification” in the context of status honour,
expressed by a specific style of life. The most important point here is that there are restrictions
on “social” intercourse, and this is not subservient to economic status. “Status circle” is
evident through marriages.
• The most crucial element in Weber’s formulation of social stratification is “power”. Power is
defined by Weber “as the “chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will
in a communal action even against the resistance of others, who are participating in the
action”.
• Induced social honour, or prestige, may even be the basis of political or economic power.
Power as well as honour may be guaranteed by the legal order, but normally it is not their
primary source. The legal order is an additional source, and it cannot always secure power
and honour.
• Action of “parties is oriented toward the acquisition of “social power”, that is, to say,”
toward influencing a communal action no matter what its contents may be. Power exists in
any organization or in a given context in relation to the actors/participants having interaction
therein.
• A society has an authority structure to sustain its system of norms and sanctions. It has a
system of “institutionized power”. Thus, stratification originates from “closely related trinity
of norm, sanction and power”. The authority relations are always relations of superordination
and subordination.
• Ossowski suggests a scheme of “gradation” to understand social structure. Gradation denotes
both subjectively evaluated and objectively measured rank. He classifies gradation into simple
and synthetic categories. Gradation is based on objective criteria, such as income, wealth and
property, which are bases of class divisions, and it becomes synthetic when two or more
incommensurable criteria are involved.
• A look at the literature on social stratification makes it clear that the element of “process” has
become pronounced in the wake of rapid transformation of human society. The terms such
as “embourgeoisiement”, “privatization”, “deproletarianiz ation”, “status incongruence”,
“status crystallization”, “classles sness”, “egalitarianism”, “destratification”, “restratification”,
“globalization”, etc., have added more inputs in the conceptualization of stratification, and
it has also made the task of defining social stratification quite difficult and complex.

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