Social Stratification

What exactly is social stratification? Social stratification is a system in which groups of people are divided. You are divided according to your relative property, power and prestige. Social stratification is not a way to categorize individuals, but rather ranking large groups of people according to their opportunities. Not only do your material resources have a impact on your stratification, but your gender plays a big part in it as well. Gender is a way for society to either deny or allow people certain things according to which gender they are. Since social stratification is universal, all of us at some point will become part of a stratified society.

There are four main systems of stratification; slavery, caste, estate and class. Slavery is a term used to describe someone who “owns” another individual. All of us know that slavery has been around for a long time. The question is, how did slavery start? How did slavery become a major system of social stratification? Most of us would answer this question as an assumption based on someone’s race. This answer would be correct, but there are other underlying causes as well. Slavery was a way to “punish” or to get even with someone. If a person was in debt with someone else, the creditor could enslave that person for not paying off their debts. Slavery was also a punishment for committing a crime. Instead of a person being killed, a criminal would be enslaved for punishment. In summary, slavery was a way to punish people for doing something that they shouldn’t have. However, this definition of slavery soon became out of hand, and slavery was described as a “punishment” for someone based on the color of their skin.

The second system of stratification is a caste system. In a caste system a person’s status is determined by birth and lasts through out your life time. For example, someone who is born into a low-status group will always have a low status period. No matter how much that person may accomplish in their life, they will always fall under a low-status group. In a caste system a person’s achieved status cannot change their place in the system. Societies with this form of stratification try to make certain that the boundaries between the different castes stay the same. In other words they do not want individuals going up or going down into different castes.

The third system of stratification is an estate system. This type of system was more dominant in medieval Europe. There were three estates that existed, they were, nobility, clergy, and commoners. The nobility estate was your upper class people. These people would include the king, queens etc. The clergy estate could be defined as the people in the middle class. They would include people who worked in higher status areas. For example, people in the clergy estate would be the people who worked under the noble, so people like doctors and teachers. The commoner estate would be considered the lower class. This estate would include the farmers, “dirty” workers (factory workers, street sweepers) and housekeepers. Estate systems practiced primogeniture. This means that the first born son would inherit the land belonging to his family. This system of stratification isn’t seen very much now days….why do you think this is?

The last system of stratification is the class system. This is the most open system out of the four that we have discussed. The class system is based primarily on money or material possession that you acquired in your life. This system begins at birth, when a child is born, they take the status of their parents, but unlike the other systems, individuals have the ability to change their class by what they personally achieve. Class systems usually have 3 classes within them; upper-class, middle-class and lower-class. One characteristic that a class system has that the other systems don’t is social mobility. Social mobility is the ability for a person to move up or down in classes (climbing the class ladder). There are many different factors that can effect whether a person climbs or falls on the class ladder. For example if a child inherits obstacles from his family at birth, he or she will have a harder time of climbing far on the class ladder; however, climbing is still achievable. That is what makes the class system so great, just because you are born into a lower-class family, doesn’t mean that you have to live in a low-class for the rest of your life. The individual gets to choose their success, not the status to which they were born into. Do you think there are factors that would inhibit someone from being able to climb the ladder? Are there stigmas that can cause someone from climbing? If so, how does someone has a stigma climb the class ladder? Is it even possible?