Significance Of Social Class

11 Key excerpts on "Significance Of Social Class"

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  Inequality

  A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender

  • Lisa A. Keister, Darby E. Southgate(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Naturally, the relevance of class identity varies across people, over time, and from place to place. We discuss this in more detail later in the chapter, but for now it is useful to be aware that class can be an important part of a person’s identity. This suggests that people have a conception of class groups and, therefore, that the groups are real. To fully understand the definition and measurement of class and why debates arise regarding its meaning and implica- tions, it is helpful to consider two dimensions: economic and cultural. We address those dimensions before considering how many classes there are, class consciousness, and implications of social class. 100 4 The Structure of Inequality and Social Class American Class Structure: Economic Dimensions A common way to identify class position is to use economic traits. From this perspective, social class is seen as a group of people with relatively common wealth, income, occupation, and education. Social classes typically are relatively large groups of people who are similar to one another on these measures and distinct from others. Using economic characteristics to identify class is a relatively objective method of categorizing people. Sociologists often refer collectively to these traits as socioeconomic status (SES). The process of grouping people based on these traits can be complicated because the measures are interrelated but not perfectly correlated, which leads to difficulty when deciding where one group ends and the other begins. For example, people with high incomes usually have high wealth because greater income makes it easier to save money. Figure 4.1 uses income, wealth, and occupational prestige to array the U.S. population in a way that might be useful for identifying class boundaries. Disagreements arise when identifying social classes because the relationships among these variables are not perfect.

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  Troubling Sociological Concepts

  An Interrogation

  • Martyn Hammersley(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, this is true even when the central focus of the research concerns social class differences, their causes or consequences. But, as already indicated, even when attention is given to these important semantic issues, we are immediately faced with a variety of interpretations of the meaning of the terminology, these partly reflecting conflicting assumptions about the nature of modern societies, as well as different value positions (Marsh 1986). I can do little more in this chapter than to explore some of the problems and examine attempts to deal with them. I will begin by sketching the background to the emergence of concepts of social class, before going on to investigate in more detail variation in the meaning of this terminology as used in sociology, and the issues of conceptualisation and operationalisation involved. Social Class as a Socio-Historical Category Concepts of social class are grounded in four common, albeit interrelated, facts about national societies. The first is that people vary in their opportunities and capacities to satisfy basic and higher-level needs, and/or to improve their situation in relation to such needs. The second is that people differ in the extent to which they are in a position to exercise power over others, whether to serve their own or other purposes. The third is that people differentiate among one another in terms of a range of criteria, including the perceived level of resources available to them and the degree to which they exercise power, but also according to judgments about their social status—in other words, the honour, respect, or deference generally due to them

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  Contemporary Northern Irish Society

  An Introduction

  • Colin Coulter(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  2 The Significance Of Social Class These are scarcely auspicious times for the left. An unfortunate confluence of recent social and political trends has conspired to question seriously the value of materialist interpretations. The reconstruction of western societies out of the debris of the economic crises of the 1970s has led to the emergence of increas-ingly intricate class hierarchies. Changed work practices and accelerated consumption have both served to blur the boundaries between previously distinct social strata. The increasingly complex and dynamic nature of contemporary bourgeois society has invited predictable and indeed opportunistic responses from neoliberal critics. Most famously the political scientist Francis Fukuyama (1989; 1992) has declared that we are living through the end of history. The unprecedented material wealth and optimal political freedom that global capitalism has allegedly afforded humanity have ensured, Fukuyama insists, that the notion of social class has effectively ceased to have real meaning. Those commentators who consider the social significance of class to have declined substantially often make reference to the realm of personal and political identity. The eminent sociologists Anthony Giddens (1994; 1998) and Ulrich Beck (1992; 1994) have argued that people living in contemporary society have increasingly come to transcend the influence of social aggregates such as classes. Social actors have apparently begun to dispense with traditional collective identities in order to assemble their own distinctive personal biographies out of the plentiful resources of everyday life. For both Giddens and Beck the fluid social relations that have arisen out of the process of globalisation offer the conditions that promise to liberate the individual. The principal authors of the brave new world of flexible accumulation are no longer social classes, but rather autonomous human subjects.

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  Society and Social Change in 21st Century Europe

  • Colin Crouch(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  There is an analogy here with the natural sciences. If we ask people what is coming out of their taps, they will answer ‘water’. A mineralogist will give a more complex answer listing various carbonates, sulphates and other chemicals including pollutants that may well be important for understanding what people are taking into their bodies when they have a glass of what they call water. It is important to know if mem-bership of a class has wider implications for people’s attitudes and behaviour, irrespective of whether they define themselves as being a member of that class in precise terms or not – just as the chemical content of tap water might affect a person’s health whether they know that content or not. The wider implications of class 171 Education and social mobility A first aspect of life where class membership is highly important is education. This has the added significance that, as we have seen in Chapter 4 , education is one of the defining characteristics of occu-pational groups and income levels: education reproduces class and class reproduces education. To the extent that parental class influences children’s educational achievements, class membership is perpetuated across generations, which in turn strengthens the position of classes as social groups with distinctive cultures and lifestyles. The intergenerational transmission of class positions has been one of the most closely studied themes of modern sociology, not so much through literal property inheritance as through that of cultural prop-erty passed on through family contacts and traditions and also through formal education – what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1973 ). The strength of such mechanisms is seen to consolidate class structures. When they are weak, and there is not much connection between the occupation held by one genera-tion of a family and the next, there is said to be a high rate of ‘social mobility’.

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  Power and Society

  An Introduction to the Social Sciences

  • Brigid Harrison(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  5 / Power and Sociology: The Importance of Social Class 127 R E S E A R C H T H I S ! Your Analysis: 1. Based on the data shown, what was the trend regarding people’s level of satisfaction with the opportunity to get ahead by working hard between the years 2001 and 2008? 2. How did this trend change between 2008 and 2012? Why do you think this was the case? 3. What has been the trend in the most recent years? Do you think this trend will continue? Why or why not? 22 22 30 76 69 69 70 55 53 54 60 2001 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 30 29 44 46 45 38 % Very/Somewhat satisfied % Very/Somewhat dissatisfied How Satisfied Are You With the Opportunity for a Person in This Nation to Get Ahead by Working Hard? 66 66 68 57 42 33 33 31 77 Source: www.gallup.com/poll/181340/satisfied-ability-ahead.aspx?utm_source=social class&utm_medium=search&utm_ campaign=tiles workers to improve their productivity through better education and increased training. And it is not surprising that many middle-class American families emphasize education as a means of upward mobility. But increasingly, the cost of education has proven an impediment to many middle-class Americans. The cost is compounded by the fact that in the current economic climate, high-paying, entry level jobs tend to be concentrated in certain fields, particularly in careers concerning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, where formal education is often a prerequisite for obtaining high-paying jobs in a technology-centered economy. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

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  The Meaning of the Twentieth Century

  The Great Transition

  • Kenneth Boulding(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  III. The Significance of the Social Sciences

  THE scientific revolution has not been confined to man’s image of the physical or biological world. It has likewise extended into his image of himself and of the society which he created and in which he as an individual is embedded. This is the field of social science, which ordinarily embraces economics, psychology, sociology, political science, and anthropology. Certain aspects of geography, history, and linguistics should be included in this list. Geography in a sense studies all sciences in so far as they are related to distribution on the surface of the earth, and human geography is an important element in the social sciences. History has a somewhat ambiguous status. In one sense it provides the raw material for all the sciences, for the record of the past is the only raw material we have. The historian, however, perhaps because he deals with the social system as a whole as it stands in time and space, is also unwilling to develop theoretical models because of the very complexity of the system with which he deals. The problem of the testing of theoretical systems is usually difficult in history, and it is therefore not surprising to find that the historian frequently occupies an uneasy position between the social scientist on the one hand and the pure literary humanist on the other. Literary and linguistic studies likewise straddle the boundary between the humanities and the social sciences.

  By comparison with the physical and even biological sciences the social sciences often seem immature. They cannot claim any practical success as spectacular as the release of nuclear energy or the elimination of a disease. This immaturity is sometimes explained as the effect of youth. The social sciences, however, are not so young as they are sometimes supposed to be. The crucial date in the birth of science is the point in time at which its fundamental theoretical structure is first formulated; a theoretical structure which is then capable of successive refinement and modification in the light of further evidence. For physics this crucial date is unquestionably the appearance of Newton’s Principia in the late seventeenth century. Economics may well claim to be the next oldest science, for its critical stage is reached with Adam Smith in 1776. In The Wealth of Nations

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  An Introduction to Sociology

  • Ken Browne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  ✘ It underestimates the power of the ruling class with which Marx was concerned. In most cases, those with the most power in society are those belonging to the highest social classes and status groups, and the most successful parties tend to be those which least threaten the interests of the ruling class.

  Defining class by occupation

  Occupation or socio-economic group is the most common indicator of social class used by governments, by advertising agencies when doing market research, and by sociologists when doing surveys. This is because occupation is:

  • an easy piece of information to obtain from people
  • generally a good guide to people’s skills, qualifications, their income, their lifestyle, their health and other life chances, and other important aspects of their lives
  • a major factor influencing people’s power and status in society, and most people judge the social standing of themselves and others by the jobs they do.

  There is a wide range of occupational scales in use, but two of the bestknown and most widely used ways of grading occupations into socio-economic classes are the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC), shown in table 6.1 , and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Scale (table 6.2 ). The NS-SEC is used for all official statistics and surveys, and the IPA Scale is widely used in market research and many surveys, including opinion polls. Tables 6.1 and 6.2 include references to what percentage of the population over 16 belong to each of these classes, and what these classes roughly refer to in the everyday language used by sociologists: the middle-class and working-class categories found in this book.

  • Middle-class occupations are generally non-manual, with people working primarily in offices, doing mainly mental rather than physical work. The term
    white-collar workers
    is sometimes used to refer to lower-middle-class clerical and sales occupations.
    White-collar workers

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  Moving Up And Out

  Poverty, Education & Single Parent Family

  • Lori Holyfield(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  Some we have control over; others we do not. Sociologists assign social class by taking into account a person’s income, occupation, and education. These three conditions, com-bined with race and gender, largely determine our location in the social arrangement of American society. Sociologists also speak of various kinds of social mobil-ity, or the extent to which our social class changes over time. Intergenerational mobility, for example, refers to the degree to which one is better or worse off than one’s par-ents. Intragenerational mobility is the extent to which an in-dividual experiences upward or downward mobility over a Education and Mobility 55 lifetime. Structural mobility is movement upward or down-ward according to large-scale changes in the occupational structure. This type of mobility affects large segments of the population. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s there was significant growth in upper-middle-class jobs, such as in the technology sector. Growth also occurred in the low-skill, low-wage sector, while mid-level jobs shrank in num-ber. 12 This polarized growth suggests a downward trend in structural mobility as the middle rung of the employment ladder narrows. 13 What does this mean for single parents, especially sin-gle mothers? Quite simply, it means that without an edu-cation or substantial training, the best they can hope for are jobs at the bottom of the continuum paying poverty-level wages. These “secondary market” jobs, as they are called, do not offer adequate wages, health care and retire-ment benefits, job security, or opportunities for advance-ment. Whether we experience upward or downward mobility depends upon several factors, but the most important of these is the circumstance of our birth. The socioeconomic status of the family into which we are born is the best pre-dictor of our own status as adults. Sociologists call this phe-nomenon class inheritance.

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  Social Mobility and Education in Britain

  Research, Politics and Policy

  • Erzsébet Bukodi, John H. Goldthorpe(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 | Social Class as the Context of Social Mobility Social mobility is the movement of individuals over time between different social positions. Insofar as positions are taken to be in some way more or less advantaged, mobility can be characterised as being upward or downward in direction: that is, as being from a less to a more advantaged position or vice versa. To this extent, the understand- ing of social mobility in the social sciences is on much the same lines as it is in everyday life. However, where questions arise concerning actual rates, patterns and trends of mobility, and the systematic collection and analysis of relevant data have to be undertaken, it is necessary for social scientists to think about mobility in ways that are conceptually more explicit and precise than those that serve for less demanding purposes. First and foremost, it is essential that the context of mobility – that is, the positions between which mobility is seen as occurring – should be clearly specified. Within the social sciences there are in fact signifi- cant differences in this regard. Sociologists, who, as indicated in the Introduction, have thus far carried out the greater part of research into social mobility, tend to focus on mobility between social strata, as characterised, for example, in terms of social class. In contrast, econo- mists, among whom a sustained interest in social mobility is, at least in Britain, a relatively recent development, focus on mobility in terms of income – that is, on the mobility of individuals between different levels within the overall income distribution. In this book we will, as sociologists, be concerned primarily with social class mobility: that is, with mobility between different class positions.

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  Sociology

  • Anthony Giddens, Philip W. Sutton(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  John Scott and Lydia Morris [Scott and Morris 1996] argue for a need to make distinctions between the class positions of individuals – their location in a division of labour – and the collective phenomena of social class through which people express a sense of belonging to a group and have a shared sense of identity and values. This last sense of class (a more subjective and collective sense) may or may not exist in a society at a particular time – it will depend on many social, economic and political factors.

  It is this last aspect of class that appears to have diminished in recent years. This does not mean that status and the cultural aspects of stratification are now so dominant that the economic aspects of class are of no significance; indeed, mobility studies and inequalities of wealth indicate the opposite. Class is not dead – it is just becoming that bit more complex!

  Source: Extracted from Abbott (2001).

  THINKING CRITICALLY

  What is your own class background? Are you in a different social class to that of your grandparents? Is class still a factor in your perception of who you are, or are other aspects of your identity more significant?

  Le Roux and her colleagues (2007) investigated the cultural tastes and participation of a stratified, random sample of just over 1,500 people in areas such as sport, television, eating out, music and leisure. They found that class boundaries were being redrawn in quite unexpected ways:

  Our findings suggest that class boundaries are being redrawn through the increasing interplay between economic and cultural capital. Those members of the ‘service class’ who do not typically possess graduate level credentials, especially those in lower managerial positions, are more similar to the intermediate classes than they are to the other sections of the professional middle class. Boundaries are also being re-drawn within the working class, where lower supervisory and technical occupations have been downgraded so that they have become similar to those in semi-routine and routine positions. (2007: 22)

  However, this does not mean that social class is no longer relevant. In fact, the authors conclude, class divisions are central to the organization of cultural tastes and practices in the UK.

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  Political Economy and Sociolinguistics

  Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class

  • David Block(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  This type of intersectionality across different domains of the social world leads to a final caveat, and that is how class is embedded in life experiences and the meaning-making activities that accompany them, which means we can talk about class as cultural. In effect, class is about being in the world – about who we are – which means we can also talk about class as part of our identity. However, it is worth bearing in mind the distinction that Nancy Fraser (1995, 2003, 2008) makes between aspects of being based in the realm of dis-tribution and those based in the realm of recognition. In the former case, we are talking about the material bases of the life experiences, of ‘collective sub-jects of injustice [who] are classes or class-like collectives, which are defined General category Dimensions Spatial conditions Mobility: physical movement, from highly local to global Proximity to other people during a range of day-to-day activities Dimensions and size of space occupied: layout of dwelling or place of work, size of bedroom; size of office, etc. Type of dwelling: trailer, house (detached/ semidetached), flat (studio, small, large), etc. 94 POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS 94 economically by a distinctive relation to the market or the means of produc-tion’ (Fraser, 2003: 14). Meanwhile, with regard to recognition, we are talking about respect for others and ‘an ideal reciprocal relationship between subjects in which each sees the other as an equal and also separate from it’ (ibid.: 10). Lamenting how ‘the discourse of social justice, once centred on distribution, is now increasingly divided between claims for distribution, on the one hand, and claims for recognition, on the other’ (ibid.: 7–8), Fraser proposes a way beyond such either/or thinking.

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