Stratification

Social Division and Inequality

Wendy Bottero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415281799
• eBook ISBN: 9781134460915
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering a fresh and exciting new perspective on differentiation and inequality, this absorbing book investigates how our most personal choices (of sexual partners, friends, consumption items and lifestyle) are influenced by hierarchy and social difference. Exploring the topics of assortative mating; social capital; friendship networks and cultural identity; the book examines how hierarchy affects our tastes and leisure time activities, and who we choose (and hang on to) as our friends and partners. This book:

* introduces debates on stratification by exploring its effect on everyday social relations
* relates class inequalities to broader processes of social division and cultural differentiation, exploring the associational and cultural aspects of hierarchy
* explores how groups draw on social, economic and cultural resources, using cultural 'cues', to admit some and exclude others from their social circle
* explores new theoretical approaches to stratification: drawing on cultural theories of class, social interaction approaches, and research on differential association

The book has a novel and fresh new way of looking at a well-established area in sociology - social stratification.

Part 1
Foundations

1 Stratification and social distance

Persistence and transmission

This book is about who gets what, and how. Social stratification is concerned with the patterning of inequality and its enduring consequences on the lives of those who experience it. All of us live within pre-existing relations of unequal power, status or economic resources; and these unequal relations surround and constrain us, providing the context of our interactions, inevitably affecting the choices we make in life, opening some channels of opportunity, and closing off others. This is a condition of social life (individual choice is always limited by the choices of those around us), but stratification is concerned with how some have more freedom and choice than others. Money, power or influence give those who possess them greater control over the external forces which affect us all, and open doors which might otherwise be closed. The point of stratification analysis is to see how such inequalities persist and endure – over lifetimes and between generations. Going to university, for example, opens the door to higher-level, better-paid jobs. So someone who cannot take up a university place because they cannot afford the fees will be affected by this throughout their life, in the sort of career they can get, and in the level of their lifetime earnings. If we start off as unequal, these disadvantages are likely to accumulate and be reinforced over our lifetimes. As the old phrase has it: ‘the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer’.

The study of stratification is therefore the study of how inequalities between individuals at any given point in time are reproduced between and across generations. As Otis Duncan argues, the difference between inequality and stratification is that ‘social stratification refers to the persistence of positions in a hierarchy of inequality, either over the life time of a birth cohort of individuals or, more particularly, between generations’ (1968: 681). The notion of inter-generational transmission is important here. Inequality in one generation affects inequality in the next. The resources that are available to us growing up as children affect the success of our schooling, and so our eventual occupational careers, and the lifestyles we adopt as adults. However, this means there is also an impact on the next generation, since our social position influences the resources to which our children have access, and so their life-chances too. Here the social location of children constrains the choices of their adult lives, and the choices of their children, quite independent of their individual efforts. So social stratification also looks at the extent to which advantage (or disadvantage) is handed down from one generation to the next, reproducing the pattern of inequalities between individuals and groups over time.

Stratification analysis looks at how where we start in life affects where we end up, and the impact of parents’ social position on that of their children. However, the persistence of inequality is represented in more ways than inter-generational transmission, since stratification also has an important impact on our social relations. Whom we fall in love and settle down with, and the friends and social contacts that we make throughout our life, are all affected by our hierarchical position. This process, called differential association, is an essential feature of stratification. People sharing a similar social position, in terms of social class or status group membership, are more likely to interact socially with members of the same group than with members of other groups. So, acquaintances, friends and sexual partners all tend to be chosen much more frequently from within the same group than from without. There are many reasons why this occurs, but all of them result from living within stratified social arrangements. So people may actively seek to exclude certain groups from their social circles, for reasons of prejudice or snobbery, but this is bound up with the uneven levels of prestige, resources and social standing of different groups. However, differential association is not just based on the deliberate exclusion of others. It also happens because people with different social resources (whether economic, social or cultural) tend to travel in different social circles, and have different lifestyles, so they are less likely to bump into those from different social groups and, when they do, they often don’t have much in common.

The lives of social unequals are often lived in different places, with different sorts of people, who have different lifestyles, tastes and interests. This is a consequence of the impact on stratification of social arrangements, but it also helps to reproduce stratification. If individual and family decisions – about the choice of a partner, the raising of children or the choice of a career – are choices influenced by our (stratified) social location, then such patterned choices help to maintain differences in the outcomes of people’s lives. Friends and family are important sources of financial help, useful contacts and social support. They help us to ‘get on’ in life. But differential association means that disadvantaged people tend to associate with people who are similarly disadvantaged, whilst the privileged likewise draw more of their contacts from the privileged. If two people settling down are both from privileged backgrounds, this will reinforce (rather than dissipate) the pattern of economic privilege in such families. Similarly, if working-class people rarely make friends with upper-middle-class people, their friends will only be able to help them get working-class jobs. Differential association acts as a conservative force on the distribution of opportunities and resources, circulating them within groups rather than across them.

What this means is that the persistence of inequality is not simply a matter of material advantage and disadvantage; along with it goes a range of attitudes, social relationships and styles of life, so the persistence of inequality over time is partly about the continual reproduction of these social relationships and styles of life. Because social hierarchy acts as a constraint on all close social relationships, in turn, the patterning of such relationships helps to transmit and reproduce hierarchy itself.

The stratification space

To understand stratification as a process of enduring, unequal, social relations, we have to think about the nature of the social hierarchies in which people live their lives. Stratified social relations occur when social differences are organised hierarchically along some dimension of inequality. There are many dimensions to inequality, because we value many different resources and attributes (cultural, social, and economic) which all serve to stratify our social relations. Unequal social relations occur along lines of prestige, reputation, property, income, occupation, education, skill, gender, race, ethnicity, age, disability, and sexuality, to name just a few. And to complicate things, these dimensions of inequality do not straightforwardly map onto each other, but nor are they completely independent. This gives us a series of highly differentiated and stratified social relations which intersect and combine to influence an individual’s overall stratification position. Our social position, then, is the product of all our social relations, of our gender, age, race, class, sexuality, and so on. But how do these combine to produce an all-embracing stratification order, an overall space of unequal social relations – and how is this ordering best understood?

As the writer Pierre Bourdieu argues, because of the complex differentiation of social relations, the same experience of the social world can be ‘constructed in different ways … according to different principles of vision and division’ (1985: 726), and this is true for both stratification theorists and the people they study. There are a series of different approaches to stratification, which all picture it differently. Many of these approaches will be examined during the course of this book. However, these approaches can – very schematically – be divided into two main ways of thinking about stratification: structural approaches and relational or interaction approaches. Both of them use the notion of social distance, albeit in contrasting ways. The first sees social distance in terms of the different locations of people within an external structure of stratification. The second sees social distance in terms of social relations of closeness and distance, in which stratification is composed of the patterned nature of these social relations.

Social structure

The term ‘social distance’ is part of the language of spatial metaphor which has dominated stratification theory (Ossowski 1963: 9). Social distance, for most stratification writers, refers to the relative position of individuals within a structure, and is a metaphor for the degree of separation between groups placed by other criteria (so, the ‘distance’ between the rich and the poor refers to the extent of their difference economically). One early approach, by Pitirim Sorokin (1927), emphasises distance within an overall social space, in which an individual’s overall location is determined by the values of many coordinates, among them ‘family status, the state in which he [sic] is a citizen, his nationality, his religious group, his occupational group, his political party, his economic status, his race, and so on’ (1927: 5). Therefore, the level of social distance between individuals depends on how different they are in terms of various attributes. People from different ethnic backgrounds, and with different religions, would be regarded as ‘socially distant’ from each other, whereas people with different ethnic backgrounds, but the same religion (or vice versa), might be seen as somewhat closer to each other in social space.

The greater the resemblance of the positions of the different men [sic], the nearer they are towards each other in social space. The greater and more numerous are their differences in these respects, the greater is the social distance between them.

(Sorokin 1927: 6)

Because theorists of stratification are interested in the constraining and enduring nature of unequal social relations they have naturally been drawn to structural accounts of social behaviour, which usually focus on one main dimension of stratification, whilst recognising other, complicating, factors. Structural approaches then investigate this dominant dimension of inequality (usually, the economic) as an external structure, which – to a greater or lesser extent – determines people’s lives. In this method, the identification of the social structure comes first. The best-known approach of this kind is class analysis, which sees economic inequality as the main dimension of stratification, and so defines a structure of economic positions. Structural approaches see differential association (the impact of hierarchical location on our social relationships) as a key aspect of stratification. However, their method first defines the main dimension of stratification (as a set of classes or status groups) and then investigates patterns of social interaction between these groups.

Structural accounts of stratification are much the better known, and have dominated work in the area, with their models of social behaviour proving to be powerful analytical tools. However, in recent years a disillusionment with structural approaches in social analysis more generally has led to a declining interest in stratification. In this book I argue that these attacks are misguided and dramatically overstate the difficulties of structural analysis. Stratification remains a key force structuring our social experience, and structural approaches still have much to tell us about the nature of these processes. However, certain weaknesses in structural approaches have opened the door to such charges.

There are two related problems. First, there is the problem of how the structure of stratification relates to other dimensions of difference. Usually ‘structure’ is defined in terms of the valued resource that is seen to be the most important in people’s lives, and then analysts look at how inequalities in that resource affect social relations. This inevitably separates ‘structure’ from ‘action’, since – because there are always other, acknowledged, dimensions of difference – the ‘dominant’ structural location will only explain part of people’s social behaviour. Recent attacks have focused on this gap. It is argued that structural accounts are necessarily incomplete explanations, which make exaggerated claims. Second, therefore, structural accounts have been accused of determinism, placing too much emphasis on structural locations (the membership of class or status groups) which cannot explain the diversity of people’s lives. Structural accounts, it is claimed, see stratification as a mould into which we must pour our behaviour, whether we wish to or not, denying the freedom, choice and agency of individuals. Recent postmodern accounts of social ‘difference’ have stressed the hyper-differentiated nature of social relations, arguing that actors can slice up the social order in different ways, in much the same way as stratification theorists. That is, that highly differentiated social relations can be interpreted in different ways. Such accounts have argued that the internal differences within, and across, the categories of structural accounts simply undermine the usefulness of stratification theory altogether.

Relations in social space

However, there is another way of thinking about stratification and social distance, a parallel, less well-known tradition, which is less susceptible to charges of determinism or essentialism, but which still stresses the constraining nature of stratified social relations. Some of these approaches (particularly the work of Pierre Bourdieu) have come into greater prominence as a way of defending stratification analysis from the incursions of postmodernism. In the second tradition – known as relational or interaction approaches – the concept of social distance refers to closeness in social interactions.

According to an interaction notion of social distance, low distances should be assigned between individuals or groups who are likely to be involved in such social interactions as living near each other, seeing each other socially, intermarriage, having friends or relatives in the other group, moving from one group to the other, or merely approving of each other. High distances should be assigned where such social interactions are unlikely.

(McFarland and Brown 1973: 227)

In structural approaches, groups are defined as socially distant if they are very different to each other (in terms of class, gender, or race categories), in relational approaches groups are defined as socially distant if they rarely associate with each other. Groups can be very different (belonging to different class or racial categories) but can still be socially close if they engage in friendship and sexual partnership on a regular basis. The pattern of social relationships between categories (how similar their social behaviour is) is used to map the relative social distance between all the various categories.

Although they are less well known, relational accounts of social distance have a long history. One early approach, by Bogardus (1925), emphasises subjective social distance, and refers to the social approval for various social groups, as measured by the level of intimacy (neighbourliness, friendship, marriage, and so on) that respondents would find acceptable with individuals from different national, ethnic and religious groups. The urban sociologist Robert E. Park used the concept of social distance to describe the crowded urban neighbourhoods of Chicago in the early twentieth century, where different racial, ethnic and class groups lived in close physical proximity, rubbing up against each other in the normal course of their working and community lives. However:

Amongst the dense, diverse and transient populations of large and rapidly growing cities, one could no longer presume social affiliations and relationships from the mere fact of propinquity. People might live alongside each other, cheek by jowl, but the social distance separating them could still be a chasm of class, ethnic, occupational and age differences, a ‘mosaic of little worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate’.

(Amit and Rapport 2002: 42–43)

These early perspectives have given way to modern accounts which look at the patterning of social relationships to determine the stratification order (Blau 1977: 32). These approaches identify a ‘social space of relationships’ by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Foundations
• Part 2 Deconstructions
• Part 3 Re-orderings
• Bibliography
• Index