140 Part III: Equality and Inequality in Our Diverse World
Excavating the Social Strata
The word “stratification” is a geological term referring to the way that layers of earth and rock are stacked on top of one another. Social stratification refers to social groups being similarly stacked on top of one another. In this section, I discuss how sociologists think about social inequality in general, and then explain the debate over whether inequality is necessary.
Understanding social inequality
What does it mean to be “unequal” in society? From a sociological perspective, it means having unequal access to social resources. In other words, you and I are unequal if one of us has, or is able to get, more of some desirable resource than the other one has. These resources might include:
Material possessions: Anything from food to shelter to luxury items.
Money: Currency or credit that can be exchanged for goods.
Power: The ability to influence others to do as you want.
Prestige: Interested and respectful treatment by others.
Relationships: Access, whether personal or professional, to people of value.
These are resources that you might reasonably want in society, but that you probably have less access to than others. Just how many others have more access than you to these things depends on where you stack up in the stratification order of your society.
As it happens, having more of these resources puts you in a better position to get more of them — in most societies, advantages are multiplicative, meaning that if you’re relatively high in the stratification order, you have access to a lot of resources that will help you stay there. If you’re relatively low in the stratification order, on the other hand, you may have a hard time climbing up. People with a lot of money, for example, are able to invest in business ventures that can earn them even more money; people without money have to work for pay and take whatever their employers pay them.
But there isn’t just a single dimension of stratification: You can’t just add up all the different resources you have and come up with a single score or a number or even a category that completely sums up where you stand in the stratification order. There are many different bases of social inequality —
people are where they are in the stratification order for a number of different
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reasons that may persist no matter how much power or money they have. If, for example, you are a racial minority in a society that discriminates against racial minorities, you’re going to have an obstacle to face no matter what you achieve in life. (See sidebar, “Locking the Gates.”)
In the next section of this chapter, I discuss several different common bases of social stratification: money, occupation, ability, motivation, connections, credentials, specialized knowledge, race, sex, caste, and age. These are all ways people may be different from one another that may lead to having different positions in a society’s stratification order — but not all differences among people lead to differences in stratification. I have a birthmark on my chest; that makes me unique, but in my society that difference is not apt
to lead to either an advantage or a disadvantage in the stratification order. Some people may find it ugly and some people may find it attractive, but either way it’s probably not going to make it any easier or more difficult for me to find a job or to influence others.
It’s conceivable that there might be a society where it would matter: societies differ, sometimes dramatically, in how the stratification system works. Some of these differences are formal differences (that is, differences written into the legal system and organizational rules, like whether or not slavery is legal) and others are informal differences (that is, rules that are not written down but are nonetheless meaningful, like whether or not racism pervades a society). The bottom line is that each society has its own system of social stratification, and those systems vary over time.
Sociologists divide bases of stratification into two categories.
Ascribed bases of stratification are attributes that you’re born with, and that society judges you upon — for example, your physical appearance (including your race), your place of origin, and your caste, if you live in a caste system.
Achieved bases of stratification are attributes over which you have at least some control: your job, your social connections, your education, your wealth. These attributes may change over the course of your life.
To make things even more complicated, different bases may matter in different places and at different times, and they may interact with one another to determine your place in the stratification system. For example, some jobs may be more advantageous for women than for men, and vice-versa. Social stratification is quite complex, but it’s worth taking the time to understand because it’s so very important to everyone — in any society.
It’s easy to be confused when talking about “social class.” The word “class” is typically used to refer to differences in a society’s stratification order, whatever that may be. If you’re “upper class,” you are relatively privileged. If you’re
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“lower class,” you’re relatively unprivileged. When people use these terms in reference to modern capitalist society, they’re generally referring to money matters. “Upper-class” people have more money than “lower-class” people.
But class is about more than money, even in industrial capitalist societies. A librarian and a steelworker may make about the same amount of money, but does that mean they’re in the same class? A lot of people would say no, which is why many sociologists prefer to link “class” with occupation rather than with income alone.
Even more factors could be considered. It gets so complicated, in fact, that people don’t even know their own class; if you define “middle class” as being in the middle third of a society by income level, many more people consider themselves “middle class” than actually are. The fact of the matter is that
in most societies there’s no hard-and-fast definition of the social order that everyone can agree on, so the question of what “classes” are — and which people belong in which class — will always be a matter of some debate.
The perennial debate: Is inequality necessary?
Orwell’s animals aren’t the only ones to wonder whether social inequality is necessary. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a society where everyone is equal — where no one is privileged over anyone else?
Among sociologists, Karl Marx most famously called for the creation of a society where everyone would be equal. In Marx’s communist utopia, people might do different jobs, but no one would be locked into a job that made them miserable. People would receive the resources they needed to meet their basic needs and have whatever luxuries might be available, but no one would reap rewards on the backs of others. “From each according to his ability,” wrote Marx, and “to each according to his needs.”
But how would the dirty work get done? It would ideally be like in a family: when you see something that needs doing, you do it and then no one else will get stuck with the job. Other family members would turn around and do the same for you.
Anyone who’s ever lived in a family, though, knows that’s not always how it works . . . could that system ever work on the scale of an entire society? Most sociologists think not. Not only is it questionable in theory, what empirical evidence exists suggests that it’s untenable. (See sidebar, “Misadventures in socialism.”)
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Locking the Gates
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a black man, is one of the most respected academics in the world: chair of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies, he is the author of many books and is often seen on television speaking about the black experience in America. He draws an appropriately handsome salary, and he owns a house in a wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
One night in summer 2009, Prof. Gates came home to find that he’d accidentally been locked out of his house. He and a friend opened a window to crawl in, and a neighbor who could see only that two men were climbing through the window of the house called the police. When the police arrived, they asked Gates to provide identification proving that he owned the house. He became indignant, and was ultimately placed under arrest, though he was later released and no charges were filed against him.
Gates accused the white police officer who arrested him of racism, igniting a national debate. In the 21st century, was America still a place where a man — even a wealthy, famous man like Prof. Gates — could get arrested just for being black? It’s impossible to know if the incident would have gone differently had it been a white man breaking into his own house, but in the wake of the incident many AfricanAmericans came forward to cite examples of racial discrimination they faced every day. The discussion about the incident made clear to the entire country that in the United States — just as in every other country — social stratification is not just a matter of what job you have, or how much money you make, or the color of your skin. All of those attributes matter, though just how much they matter varies from one situation to the next.
The most notorious sociological argument for the necessity of social stratification — that is, inequality — was made in 1945 by functionalists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore. Davis and Moore were frank about the fact that people are of differing abilities, and that society has an interest in matching the most-able people with the most-important jobs. If someone has a brilliant mind and an exceptionally steady hand, it might benefit thousands of people for that person to become a surgeon . . . but what if she doesn’t want to be a surgeon? If surgeons are paid significantly more than people in less critical jobs, that provides people with an incentive to compete for jobs as surgeons; that way, the most able can be chosen rather than the job just going to whomever wants it.
Further, Davis and Moore pointed out, after a person is in a job, they need to be motivated to work hard — and there’s no motivation like the threat of losing your job and ending up on the street. If people are allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want, they’ll be too tempted to be lazy and very little will actually get done.
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Misadventures in socialism
As I explain in Chapter 4, one of the challenges of sociology is that you normally can’t experiment on society — put one group of people in one situation and another group in another situation — and see what happens. You have to observe whatever situations happen to occur, and do your best to figure out why and how things turned out the way they did.
Fortunately for sociologists studying stratification, over the past century quite a few countries have created a natural experiment by organizing themselves along socialist lines inspired by Marx’s ideas. No country has ever become the kind of perfect communist society that Marx imagined, but many have tried to hew to Marx’s values by strictly limiting the amount of money any one person can earn while guaranteeing certain things — food, shelter, employment — to all. How has the experiment turned out?
In some respects, it’s turned out pretty well. Communist China is a world superpower,
and many countries — for example, the Scandinavian nations — have had great success levying high taxes and guaranteeing many benefits, thus limiting social inequality even though they remain essentially capitalist.
In other respects, the experiment hasn’t turned out that well. The Soviet Union fell, and its constituent republics have largely become capitalist democratic countries rather than remaining communist. Sociologist Gerhard Lenski, after close study, has come to believe that the failure of many socialist societies shows a fundamental flaw in Marx’s theory. “Freed from the fear of unemployment and lacking adequate material incentives,” writes Lenski, workers didn’t willingly pitch in as Marx thought they would. “Worker performance deteriorated and production stagnated or declined in Marxist societies everywhere.” In other words, maybe people do need some financial incentive such as the threat of losing their jobs to do everything that needs to be done in a society.
So, to sum up Davis and Moore’s argument:
People need to be motivated to work hard and to take the jobs they’re best suited for.
Motivation means reward . . . and the real possibility of having significantly more or less reward.
Because there need to be people who are rewarded more than others, there needs to be inequality.
It seems to make a lot of sense, but Davis and Moore’s article has become one of the most-criticized in all of sociology. Why? Many sociologists believe Davis and Moore’s argument justifies the status quo. (The same criticism was leveled at their colleague Talcott Parsons; see Chapter 3.)
Just because people may need some motivation to work hard doesn’t mean that the amount of inequality present in most societies is necessary or humane. Plus, the system of financial reward as it actually exists doesn’t