Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society

Christopher B. Doob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000007626
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sulle minoranze

Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society uses a historical and conceptual framework to explain social stratification and social inequality. The historical scope gives context to each issue discussed and allows the reader to understand how each topic has evolved over the course of American history. The author uses qualitative data to help explain socioeconomic issues and connect related topics. Each chapter examines major concepts, so readers can see how an individual's success in stratified settings often relies heavily on their access to valued resources—types of capital which involve finances, schooling, social networking, and cultural competence. Analyzing the impact of capital types throughout the text helps map out the prospects for individuals, families, and also classes to maintain or alter their position in social-stratification systems.

PART 1

The Foundation of Social Stratification and Social Inequality

CHAPTER 1

The Road to Social Inequality: A Conceptual Introduction

Our society has been changing—changing in ways that have been vast, sometimes imperceptible but relentless. Writer George Packer has referred to “the unwinding,” where such prominent structures as factories, farms, public schools, unions, and churches have often either disappeared or lost much of the supportive role they played in people’s lives. Furthermore, in such activities as politics or banking traditional restraints have become less operative. Meanwhile as those people-serving structures and practices have declined, major corporations have expanded their influence, becoming even larger and more powerful and increasingly enriching a select few but financially and often psychologically undermining most Americans’ lives (Packer 2013, 3–4).

While the United States has always featured inequality, the presence of strong structures in the past often made life for less affluent people more secure than it has become. Consider a comparison between a contemporary son and his father from the previous generation.

In the summer of 2013, Adam Hudson got a job in retail, the most common site for workers without college degrees. At Walmart he became a hardware associate, stocking shelves, setting up displays, and assisting customers and earning $8.25 an hour. Until then he had a low opinion of people using food stamps. “I’d always considered people who use food stamps as just taking advantage of the government,” Hudson said, because they “weren’t working hard enough to be able to afford for themselves” (Clark 2014). At Walmart, however, he saw hard-working colleagues who still needed the program. Then one day he returned home and learned that his fiancée who was pregnant was hungry with no food available. After considering the options available to them, “[i]t dawned on us that we can’t afford to feed ourselves and make sure all of our bills are paid and have a car with gas to get to work every day” (Clark 2014). Shortly afterwards Hudson enrolled in the food stamp program.

In comparison, Jim Hudson, Adam’s father, had never been on food stamps. In 1991, like his son, the senior Hudson had no college degree and was starting a family. At that time it was manufacturing not retail that provided plentiful jobs, and Jim Hudson signed on with General Motors, the largest employer in the country. He built TrailBlazers for $9.35 an hour, which in inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars would be nearly twice what his son makes. It is doubtful that at that time any GM employees qualified for food stamps. Adam Hudson said that he would love a job in the plant where his father worked, but it closed down in 2008 (Clark 2014).

The preceding material suggests that as part of the recent unwinding trend, working-class people’s economic prospects have declined. Discussion of that trend carries through the book, but perhaps an even more enduring conclusion is the following: that select groups—higher-class members, whites, and males—have had better opportunities and therefore more extensive rewards than lower-class people, racial and ethnic minorities, and women.

This text’s mission is to examine the processes that have produced and sustained those inequalities. Besides a multitude of quantitative studies and statistics extensively updated from the previous edition, the upcoming chapters contain both historical and qualitative sources, broadening and deepening the reader’s grasp of the topics at hand. In addition, the relentless use of certain concepts—such as social reproduction and four types of capital, which are introduced in this chapter—help to structure a coherent overall organization and to reveal “the fine print” of American social inequality and social stratification. At this juncture it is necessary to introduce the book’s most fundamental concepts.

Sociologists recognize the prevalence of social inequality, a setting in which individuals, families, or members of larger structures like neighborhoods or cities vary in access to such valued resources as wealth, income, education, jobs, influential and helpful individuals and groups, and health care. Sometimes people’s inequalities can change—for instance, a segment of working-class individuals might obtain a substantial pay boost, raising their wages as well as their ranking among the nations’ earners. Like the members of all classes, however, their location in the class structure, which is a prominent type of social stratification, generally remains fairly stable when compared to the previous generation’s income, wealth, job prestige, and educational level.

All societies display social stratification, a deeply embedded hierarchy providing different groups varied rewards, resources, and privileges and establishing structures, practices, and relationships that both determine and legitimate those outcomes. Most people within a given society consider that its social-stratification system represents the natural order of things. As a rule the people at the top of the system have better resources and opportunities than those who are less affluent or powerful (Beeghley 2008; DeAngelis 2015; Oxfam Briefing Paper 2016).

This text examines social-class, racial, and gender stratification. Within the American social-class system, middle-class individuals’ chances for advanced education and high-paying jobs have been better than working-class people’s opportunities. A persistent suspicion expressed throughout the text is that growing economic inequality between affluent members of the upper and upper-middle class, and people in other social classes is a precursor of a stratification system featuring a smaller middle class and concomitantly a larger working class. All in all, systems of social-class, racial, and gender stratification provide the conceptual foundations for analyzing trends in social inequalities.

Another central concept is ideology, which is the complex of values and beliefs that support a society’s social-stratification systems and their distribution of wealth, income, and power. The American ideology, which emphasizes the centrality of individual achievement, equal opportunity, and the importance of hard work, receives politicians’, business leaders’, and media spokespeople’s frequent endorsement, but the actual workings producing social inequalities and social stratification tend to remain unexamined—the fine print hidden behind the ideology’s bold public claims. As the world’s wealthiest nation, one might expect that the United States would spend more on its impoverished members, resulting in less social inequality than in other developed nations. Such an assumption, however, overlooks the powerful influence of the country’s ideology, which both lionizes individuals fixated on the pursuit of wealth and criticizes, even demonizes, the less successful, particularly the poor. The potency of the American ideology seems revealed throughout the text, which provides various measures to show that among developed nations the United States has some of the highest levels of social inequality.

The upcoming section describes the development of the global economy and its impact on the American workforce. Then discussion focuses on certain central concepts, social reproduction and forms of capital, which analyze the process providing some people better opportunities and rewards than others. Finally sociological research comparing working-class and middle-class schooling illustrates these concepts.

Much of this chapter, in fact most of this text, focuses on the United States. As a foundation for understanding social inequality in American society, however, it seems useful to lead off with a broader view of major developments since World War II. Then the discussion returns to a decidedly more contemporary analysis.

THE RISE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Globalization is the increasing integration of nations in an age featuring highly reduced costs for communication and transportation along with the lowering of such “artificial barriers” as treaties or tariffs restricting the movement of goods, services, financial capital, and technology across borders (Stiglitz 2002, 9–10). Multinational corporations, many of which are American based, have been driving forces in globalization, demonstrating that the largely unregulated movement of capital, goods, and technology internationally leads to accelerated profit making.

Is globalization new? The term is fairly recent, with the verb “globalize” first appearing in the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1944. However, early efforts toward globalization extend back thousands of years. For instance, in 325 bce, merchants established overland trade routes connecting the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and central Asia (Ludden 2008). Since the 1970s, however, a greatly expanded globalization process has developed. While globalization involves a variety of issues including education, agriculture, politics, and infrastructure the current emphasis is on the economic dimension, which powerfully impacts social inequality.

Globalization has produced certain distinct economic changes. First, many nations once considered underdeveloped have begun producing quality goods.

Computer-based manufacturing plants located in southeast Asia and Latin America have started to compete favorably with factories in developed countries in western Europe and North America, pressuring American corporate executives to downsize or close their plants. Second, nowadays advanced technology helps coordinate international economic activities. Because of the use of both modern computers and telecommunications, multinational corporations can decentralize their activities, locating subsidiaries around the world and effectively monitoring their activities from headquarters. Finally the global economy has created an international workforce, with both white- and blue-collar jobs susceptible to being shipped overseas. The option to use alternative workers gives corporate executives greater clout when negotiating American employees’ wages and benefits.

The global economy has rapidly expanded trade over time, with the wealthier nations leading the way. In 2014 China led the percentage of shares in world trade with 15.5 closely followed by the 28-member European Union (tallying only trade outside the EU) with 15, the United States with 10.7, and Japan with 4.5 (World Trade Organization 2015, 45).

At the end of World War II, the international economic picture was distinctly different. Most prominent nations possessed severely damaged economies and infrastructures that made them incapable of effectively providing food, shelter, and other basic necessities to their citizenry. The major exception to this predicament was the United States, which emerged from the war with its economy intact, ready to undertake a massive international business expansion. For nearly 30 years, the United States controlled three-fourths of the world’s invested capital and two-thirds of its industry. The government helped subsidize this dominance, developing a $22 billion foreign aid package to western Europe known as the Marshall Plan. The funding was earmarked for purchasing American agricultural and industrial products and bringing European nations into a global federation headed by the United States—both moves that helped solidify the preeminence of American business.

Global economics, however, has seldom been a stable entity. By the middle 1970s, the once war-ravaged nations of western Europe and Japan had recovered and were becoming rising industrial powers. As a result these countries were less inclined to import American industrial and agricultural goods. Meanwhile the profits of US corporations declined in the domestic market, falling from a return on investment of 15.5 percent in the late 1960s to below 10 percent after 1975.

Who or what is responsible for the decline? Corporate leaders, politicians, and media spokespeople have criticized various groups for contributing to the American business slowdown: organized labor for pushing too hard for salaries and benefits, thereby making American products too expensive for the competitive market; American workers, whether unionized or not, for being overpaid, complacent, and prone to shoddy production; and increased environmental and health-and-safety legislation for raising business costs.

What such corporate leaders and media spokespeople have conveniently ignored is the fact that American business ventures usually focus on short-term profits, largely abandoning such demanding but effective tactics as purchasing updated, more efficient technol...