Social Stratification

Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective

David B. Grusky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974274
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The book covers the research on economic inequality, including the social construction of racial categories, the uneven and stalled gender revolution, and the role of new educational forms and institutions in generating both equality and inequality.

Introduction

1 • David B. Grusky and Katherine R. Weisshaar

The Questions We Ask About Inequality

The dispassionate observer of the last half century of poverty and inequality research might easily characterize the field as one of the great success stories of modern social science. The breakthroughs are many and include (1) building a sophisticated infrastructure for monitoring key trends in poverty, segregation, income inequality, racial and gender inequality, and other labor market outcomes; (2) resolving long-standing debates about how much discrimination there is, whether residential segregation matters, how much social mobility there is, and whether social classes are disappearing; and (3) making substantial headway in understanding the deeper causes of poverty, mobility, and many types of inequality. If poverty and inequality are still very much with us, it is not because they are any longer “puzzles” or enigmas driven by forces we cannot fathom. It instead is because we have collectively decided not to undertake the well-known institutional reforms necessary to reduce them.

Although we have come quite far, our optimistic stance has to be tempered with some appreciation of the field’s equally visible shortcomings. The most prominent failures have occurred when scholars have turned to the idiographic task of understanding the dynamics of change. The spectacular takeoff in income inequality, one of the most consequential developments of our time, was largely unpredicted. The resilience of school segregation was something of a surprise to most social scientists. The sudden “stalling out” of long-standing declines in gender inequality remains poorly understood. The equally sudden evaporation of opposition to gay marriage and other types of gay rights was unimaginable just five years ago. The lightning-fast rise and fall of one of the first anti-inequality movements in contemporary US history (the Occupy Wall Street movement) is likewise a puzzle. Although the field has by this accounting performed less impressively in understanding the dynamics of change, we must concede that this is hardly a distinctive feature of the poverty and inequality field itself. Across all fields of social science, the idiographic task has never fully yielded to science, an obvious implication of having but one world and one case to explain.

This chapter introduces the types of questions that have been and continue to be taken on in the field of poverty and inequality. We consider questions pertaining to the lawlike behavior of frequently repeated events (i.e., “nomothetic” phenomena) as well as those pertaining to the way in which singular entities, such as the US stratification system, are evolving (i.e., “idiographic” phenomena). Because the often-complicated answers to these questions are laid out in the readings themselves, it would be unwise to attempt here an encyclopedic introduction to all that is known in the sprawling poverty and inequality field. Rather, our objective is to discuss the types of questions that have been taken on, with a special emphasis on understanding how those questions have changed and evolved.

The second half of this introductory chapter shifts the focus from the questions that we ask to the stories that we tell. That is, whereas our purpose here is to provide a roadmap to the book and the types of questions that our contributors have taken on, the second half introduces readers to the main narratives about the trajectory of inequality that show up throughout the chapters of this book.

Basic Concepts

Before introducing the ten main lines of inquiry that form the intellectual backbone of the poverty and inequality field, we discuss some of the basic concepts used to describe the amount and structure of inequality, its genesis and persistence, and its effects on social behavior. The key components of stratification systems are (1) the institutional processes that define certain types of goods as valuable and desirable; (2) the rules of allocation that distribute these goods across various jobs or occupations in the division of labor (e.g., doctor, farmer, “housewife”); and (3) the mobility mechanisms that link individuals to jobs, thereby generating unequal control over valued resources. It follows that inequality is produced by two types of matching processes: the social roles in society are first matched to “reward packages” of unequal value, and individual members of society are then allocated to the positions so defined and rewarded.¹ In all societies, there is a constant flux of occupational incumbents as newcomers enter the labor force and replace dying, retiring, or out-migrating workers, yet the positions themselves and the reward packages attached to them typically change only gradually. As Schumpeter (1953) puts it, the occupational structure can be seen as “a hotel … which is always occupied, but always by different persons” (171).

What types of rewards do these two matching processes distribute? It is increasingly fashionable to recognize that inequality is “multidimensional,” that income is accordingly only one of many important resources, and that income redistribution in and of itself would not eliminate inequality (e.g., Sen, Chapter 29). In taking a multidimensionalist approach, one might usefully distinguish among the eight types of assets listed in Table 1.1, each understood as valuable in its own right rather than as a mere investment item.² These assets may of course serve investment as well as consumption functions. For example, most economists regard schooling as an investment that generates future streams of income, and some sociologists likewise regard social networks as forms of capital that can be parlayed into educational credentials, income, and other valued goods.³ Although most of the assets listed in Table 1.1 are clearly convertible in this fashion, the individuals involved do not necessarily regard them as investments. In fact, many valuable assets can be secured at birth or through childhood socialization (e.g., the “good manners” of the aristocracy), and they are therefore acquired without the beneficiaries explicitly weighing the costs of acquisition against the benefits of future returns.⁴

The implicit claim underlying Table 1.1 is that the listed assets exhaust all consumption goods and as such constitute the raw materials of stratification systems. The stratification field has developed a vocabulary that describes how these raw materials are distributed among the population. The main parameters of interest are (1) the overall amount of inequality, (2) the extent to which individuals are locked permanently into certain positions (i.e., rigidity), (3) the extent to which ascriptive traits fixed at birth are used for purposes of allocation, and (4) the degree to which the various dimensions of inequality cohere (or are “crystallized”).

The overall amount of inequality in any given resource (e.g., income) may be defined as its dispersion or concentration among the individuals in the population. Although many scholars seek to characterize the overall level of societal inequality with a single parameter, such attempts will obviously be compromised insofar as some types of rewards are distributed more equally than others. This complexity clearly arises in the case of contemporary inequality regimes. The recent diffusion of “citizenship rights,” for example, implies that civil goods are now widely dispersed among all citizens, whereas economic and political goods continue to be controlled by a comparatively small elite.

Table 1.1. Types of Assets and Examples of Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups

Assets			Examples
Asset group	Examples of types		Advantaged	Disadvantaged
1. Economic	Wealth		Billionaire	Bankrupt worker
	Income		Professional	Laborer
	Ownership		Capitalist	Worker (i.e., employed)
2. Power	Political power		Prime minister	Disenfranchised person
	Workplace authority		Manager	Subordinate worker
	Household authority		Head of household	Child
3. Cultural	Knowledge		Intelligentsia	Uneducated persons
	Digital culture		Silicon Valley residents	Residents of other places
	“Good” manners		Aristocracy	Commoners
4. Social	Social clubs		Country club member	Nonmember
	Workplace associations		Union member	Nonmember
	Informal networks		Washington A-list	Social unknown
5. Honorific	Occupational		Judge	Garbage collector
	Religious		Saint	Excommunicate
	Merit-based		Nobel Prize winner	Nonwinner
6. Civil	Right to work		Citizen	Unauthorized immigrant
	Due process		Citizen	Suspected terrorist
	Franchise		Citizen	Felon
7. Human	On-the-job training		Experienced worker	Inexperienced worker
	General schooling		College graduate	High school dropout
	Vocational training		Law school graduate	Unskilled worker
8. Physical	Mortality		Person with long life	A “premature” death
	Physical disease		Healthy person	Person with AIDS, asthma
	Mental health		Healthy person	Depressed, alienated

The rigidity of a stratification system is indexed by continuity in the social standing of its members. We consider a stratification system to be rigid, for example, insofar as the current wealth, power, or prestige of individuals can be accurately predicted on the basis of their prior statuses or those of their parents. It should again be emphasized that such rigidity (or “social closure”) will typically vary in degree across the different types of assets listed in Table 1.1.

The stratification system rests on ascriptive processes to the extent that conditions present at birth (e.g., parental wealth, sex, race) influence the subsequent social standing of individuals. If ascriptive processes of this sort are very prominent, it is possible (but by no means guaranteed) that the underlying traits will become bases for group formation and collective action (e.g., race riots, feminist movements). In contemporary societies, ascription of all kinds is usually seen as undesirable or discriminatory, and much governmental policy (e.g., antidiscrimination legislation) is therefore oriented toward fashioning a stratification system in which individuals acquire resources solely by virtue of their achievements.⁵

The degree of crystallization is indexed by the correlations among the various resources (e.g., income, wealth, education) that are socially valued. If these correlations are strong, then the same individuals (i.e., the “upper class”) will consistently appear at the top of all hierarchies, while other individuals (i.e., the “lower class”) will consistently appear at the bottom of the stratification system. By contrast, various types of status inconsistencies (e.g., a poorly educated millionaire) will emerge in stratification systems with weakly correlated hierarchies, and it is correspondingly difficult in such systems to define a unitary set of classes that have predictive power with respect to all resources.

Although the preceding terms are fundamental to the field, there are of course a great many others, some of which are introduced in the following sections. We turn next to introducing the ten subfields around which the field of inequality—and this book—are organized.

Core Fields of Inquiry

The main task of stratification scholarship, describing the contours of inequality and explaining its causes, is pursued in well-defined subfields that have become so large that it is not unusual for scholars to spend their entire careers working within just one of them. It is accordingly possible to provide only brief summaries of each subfield.

The Functions and Dysfunctions of Inequality

In economics and sociology alike there is a long theoretical tradition emphasizing that some forms of inequality have the positive effect of (1) inducing the most qualified workers to take on the important jobs and (2) incentivizing people to work hard and innovate. The famous trade-off thesis implies that a taste for equality is exercised at the cost of reducing output and potentially leaving everyone worse off. We cannot, as Okun (1975, 2) so cleverly put it, “have our cake of market efficiency and share it equally.” In Part I we introduce some of the key protagonists in this debate, with Davis and Moore (Chapter 2) and Tumin (Chapter 3) presenting the classic sociological version of this debate, and Fischer and his colleagues (Chapter 4) providing the requisite update. Although some commentators and ideologues continue to take the trade-off thesis as an article of faith, most social scientists now treat it as testable by asking whether groups or societies with higher inequality are indeed more productive.

The trade-off thesis of course implies that inequality is functional only insofar as it delivers the proper incentives. There are many ways in which high-inequality regimes may not be incentivizing all people to work hard in a manner that then increases total output. If, for example, inequality takes a simple winner-take-all form, it could be counterproductive and reduce output. The relevant thought experiment here is that of a golf tournament in which all prize money is allocated exclusively to the winner (e.g., Freeman 2012). In this set...