Social class

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Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. While anthropologists, historians and sociologists identify class as a social structure emerging from pre-history, the idea of social class entered the English lexicon about the 1770s. Social classes with more power usually subordinate classes with less power. Social classes with a great deal of power are usually viewed as elites, at least within their own societies. The concept of a social class is a "conservative" concept.

Sociological class

Schools of sociology differ as to which social traits are significant enough to define a class, although when sociologists speak of "class" in modern society they usually mean economically-based classes. The relative importance and definition of membership in a particular class differs greatly over time and between societies, particularly in societies that have a legal differentiation of groups of people by birth or occupation. In the well-known example of socioeconomic class, many scholars view societies as stratifying into a hierarchical system based on occupation, economic status, wealth, or income.

Weberian class

The seminal sociological interpretation of class was advanced by Max Weber. Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with social, status and party classes (or politics) as conceptually distinct elements.

Social class is based on economic relationship to the market (owner, renter, employee, etc.)
Status class has to do with non-economic qualities such as education, honour and prestige
Party class refers to factors having to do with affiliations in the political domain

Each of the three dimensions has consequences for what Weber called "life chances". Class system like the UK has has been derived from invasion and occupation (Norman Invasion). Class system which is inherited from birth when some are perceived better than others is a form of suppression (e.g., Lords)

Dimensions of sociological class

The following traits are sometimes used to define social class:

occupation
education
income
manners, style and cultural refinement. For example, Bourdieu suggests a notion of high and low classes with a distinction between bourgeois tastes and sensitivities and the working class tastes and sensitivities.
net worth
power
ownership of land, property, means of production, slaves...
political standing vis-a-vis the government
reputation of honor or disgrace
social prestige, as from an honorary title, or association with an esteemed organization or person

Stratum models of class

Sociologists generally identify different classes as social strata in higher or lower order based on a class's measurable position on a dimensional scale. The number of models possible is dependent upon the analytical and statistical framework used in particular sociological studies. Some typical models include:

Two-class models: That divide societies between the powerful and weak.
Three-class models: That develop a two class model with a postulated middle class.
Multi-stratum models: Sociologists who seek fine-grained connections between class and life-outcomes often develop precisely defined social strata, like historian Paul Fussell's nine-tier stratification of American society.

Fussell's model classifies Americans according to the following classes:

Top out-of-sight: the super-rich, heirs to huge fortunes
Upper Class: rich celebrities and people who can afford full-time domestic staff
Upper-Middle Class: self-made well-educated professionals
Middle Class: office workers
High Prole: skilled blue-collar workers
Mid Prole: workers in factories and the service industry
Low Prole: manual laborers
Destitute: the homeless
Bottom out-of-sight: those incarcerated in prisons and institutions

Warnerian social class model

Another example of a stratum class model was developed by the sociologist William Lloyd Warner in his 1949 book, Social Class in America. For many decades, the Warnerian theory was dominant in U.S. sociological theory.

Based on social anthropology, Warner divided American into three classes (upper, middle, and lower), then further subdivided each of these into an "upper" and "lower" segment, with the following postulates:

Upper-upper class. "Old money." People who have been born into and raised with wealth.
Lower-upper class. "New money." Individuals who have become rich within their own lifetimes.
Upper-middle class. High-salaried professionals (i.e., doctors, lawyers, corporate executives).
Lower-middle class. Lower-paid professionals, but not manual laborers (i.e., police officers, non-management office workers, small business owners).
Upper-lower class. Blue-collar workers and manual labourers. Also known as the "working class."
Lower-lower class. The homeless and permanently unemployed, as well as the "working poor."

To Warner, American social class was based more on attitudes than on the actual amount of money an individual made. For example, the richest people in America would belong to the "lower-upper class" since many of them created their own fortunes; one can only be born into the highest class. Nonetheless, members of the wealthy upper-upper class tend to be more powerful, as a simple survey of U.S. presidents may demonstrate (i.e., the Roosevelts; John Kennedy; the Bushes)

Another observation: members of the upper-lower class might make more money than members of the lower-middle class (i.e., a well-salaried factory worker vs. a secretarial worker), but the class difference is based on the type of work they perform.

In his research, findings, Warner observed that American social class was largely based on these shared attitudes. For example, he noted that the lower-middle class tended to be the most conservative group of all, since very little separated them from the working class. The upper-middle class, while a relatively small section of the population, usually "set the standard" for proper American behavior, as reflected in the mass media.

Marxian class

Karl Marx defined class in terms of the extent to which an individual or social group has control over the means of production.

In Marxist terms a class is a group of people defined by their relationship to the means of production. Classes are seen to have their origin in the division of the social product into a necessary product and a surplus product. Marxists explain the history of civilized societies in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who actually produce the goods or services in society (and also developments in technology and the like). In the Marxist view of capitalism, this is a conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and wage-workers (proletariat). For Marxists, class antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production necessarily entails control over the class which produces goods -- in capitalism this is the exploitation of workers by the bourgeoisie.

Proletarianisation

File:Pyramid of Capitalist System.gif

An Industrial Worker capitalist class critique

The most important transformation of society for Marxists has been the massive and rapid growth of the proletariat in the world population during the last two hundred and fifty years. Starting with agricultural and domestic textile labourers in England and Flanders, more and more occupations only provide a living through wages or salaries. Private enterprise or self-employment in a variety of occupations is no longer as viable as it once was, and so many people who once controlled their own labour-time are converted into proletarians. Today groups which in the past subsisted on stipends or private wealth -- like doctors, academics or lawyers -- are now increasingly working as wage labourers. Marxists call this process proletarianisation, and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies in the rich countries of the "first world."

The increasing dissolution of the peasant-lord relationship, initially in the commercially active and industrialising countries, and then in the unindustrialised countries as well, has virtually eliminated the class of peasants. Poor rural labourers still exist, but their current relationship with production is predominantly as landless wage labourers or rural proletarians. The destruction of the peasantry, and its conversion into a rural proletariat, is largely a result of the general proletarianisation of all work. This process is today largely complete, although it was arguably incomplete in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dialectics, or historical materialism, in Marxist Class

Marx saw class categories as defined by continuing historical processes. Classes, in Marxism, are not static entities, but are regenerated daily through the productive process. Marxism views classes as human social relationships which change over time, with historical commonality created through shared productive processes. A 17th-century farm labourer who worked for day wages shares a similar relationship to production as an average office worker of the 21st century. In this example it is the shared structure of wage labour that makes both of these individuals "working class."

Objective and subjective factors in class in Marxism

Marxism has a rather heavily defined dialectic between objective factors (i.e., material conditions, the social structure) and subjective factors (i.e. the conscious organization of class members). While most Marxism analyses people's class status based on objective factors (class structure), major Marxist trends have made excellent use of subjective factors in understanding the history of the working class. E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is a definitive example of this "subjective" Marxist trend. Thompson analyses the English working class as a group of people with shared material conditions coming to a positive self-consciousness of their social position. This feature of social class is commonly termed class consciousness in Marxism. It is seen as the process of a "class in itself" moving in the direction of a "class for itself," a collective agent that changes history rather than simply being a victim of the historical process.

Non-economic conceptions of class

In contrast to simple income--property hierarchies, and to structural class schemes like Weber's or Marx's, there are theories of class based on other distinctions, such as culture or educational attainment. At times, social class can be related to elitism, and those in the higher class are usually known as the "social elite".

For example, Bourdieu seems to have a notion of high and low classes comparable to that of Marxism, insofar as their conditions are defined by different habitus, which is in turn defined by different objectively classifiable conditions of existence. In fact, one of the principal distinctions Bourdieu makes is a distinction between bourgeois taste and the working class taste.

Class in different parts of the world

At various times the division of society into classes and estates has had various levels of support in law. At one extreme we find old Indian castes, which one could neither enter after birth, nor leave (though this applied only in relatively recent history). Feudal Europe had estates clearly separated by law and custom. On the other extreme there exist classes in modern Western societies which appear very fluid and have little support in law.

The extent to which classes are important differs also in western societies, though in most societies class as an objective measure has very strong empirical effects on life chances (e.g. educational achievement, life-time earnings, health outcomes). Only in the strongly social-democratic societies such as Sweden is there much long-term evidence of the weakening of the consequences of social class.

The effect of class on vote or life-style is more variable across countries and over time.

External links

Dictionary of the history of ideas: Class

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