15 Facts About Social stratification

Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power.

In modern Western societies, social stratification is typically defined in terms of three social classes: the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class; in turn, each class can be subdivided into the upper-stratum, the middle-stratum, and the lower stratum.

Whether social stratification first appeared in hunter-gatherer, tribal, and band societies or whether it began with agriculture and large-scale means of social exchange remains a matter of debate in the social sciences.

In modern Western societies, stratification is often broadly classified into three major divisions of social class: upper class, middle class, and lower class.

Concept of social stratification is often used and interpreted differently within specific theories.

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Third, social stratification is universal but variable (differs across time and place).

Fourth, social stratification involves not just quantitative inequality but qualitative beliefs and attitudes about social status.

Open Social stratification systems are those that allow for mobility between, typically by placing value on the achieved status characteristics of individuals.

Social stratification class, according to Marx, is determined by one's relationship to the means of production.

Social stratification emphasizes the difference between class, status and power, and treats these as separate but related sources of power, each with different effects on social action.

John Gowdy writes, "Assumptions about human behaviour that members of market societies believe to be universal, that humans are naturally competitive and acquisitive, and that social stratification is natural, do not apply to many hunter-gatherer peoples.

Social status variables underlying social stratification are based in social perceptions and attitudes about various characteristics of persons and peoples.

However, the variables posited to affect social stratification can be loosely divided into economic and other social factors.

Strictly quantitative economic variables are more useful to describing social stratification than explaining how social stratification is constituted or maintained.

An index of Social stratification has been recently proposed by Zhou for this purpose.