STRATIFICATION

Social Stratification

Social Stratification

1: Social Stratification

Social stratification is rigid subdivision of a society into a hierarchy of layers, differentiated on the basis of power, prestige, and wealth. It is the hierarchical arrangement of people in a society. Stratification is common in the animal kingdom on the basis of power and gender and some form of stratification has probably always existed among humans. With the development of food and other surpluses resulting from technological advances in agriculture and manufacturing, some people began to accumulate more resources or wealth than others.

Thus, the origins of social stratification in UK are situated in the transition from hunter/gatherer societies to horticultural/pastoralist societies. UK is marked by class stratification, intensive agriculture, and were based on assumptions of social inequality. All had complex government bureaucracies and were often ruled by despotic leaders who governed as divine monarchs. UK is classified on the basis of their economic condition. At the international level, comparisons in economic condition are made between different countries. While it is still common to hear countries described as first-world or third-world, this system of classification is outdated and has been replaced with the terms developed and developing. Social stratification can happen on the basis of caste, income, wealth, education, religion, power, age, gender, occupation, race, region, language, party and politics. There could be many other factors influencing social stratification.

For the greater part of UK history, the existing stratification order was regarded as an immutable feature of society, and the implicit objective of commentators was to explain or justify that order in terms of religious or quasi-religious doctrines.

Social stratification can be defined as, “An institutionalized system of social inequality; rankings based on share of scarce and desirable values such as property, power, and prestige.” (www.owlnet.rice.edu)

The key components of social stratification are (1) the institutional processes that define certain types of goods as valuable and desirable, (2) the rules of allocation that distribute those goods across various positions or occupations (e.g., doctor, farmer, "housewife"), and (3) the mobility mechanisms that link individuals to positions and generate unequal control over valued resources. A complete understanding of stratification requires several kinds of knowledge: first, what stratification structures consist of and how they vary; second, the individual and collective consequences of the different states of those structures; and third, the factors that make stratification structures change. Two different lines of thought inform modern theory on societal stratification. One is classical theory; concerned with political power and privilege, it employs historical evidence. The other is the empirical tradition, which deals with systematic data on stratification as it exists contemporarily.

The social status played a key role in early-modern English society. Wealth was important, but so were birth, education, and employment in determining social rank. As William Harrison describes in 'Of Degrees Of People In The Commonwealth Of Elizabethan England', “We in England, divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen, and artificers or labourers. Of gentlemen the first and chief (next the king) be the ...