One of the major types of social inequality is classs inequality. Class is a central concept in social science.
In social science, it’s important in understanding the structure and dynamics of different types of society.
Many people have argued that it's is impossible to understand contemporary societies or the lives that people live in the world today,
without reference to class.
That’s because class is a major organising principle of our society, and because it’s part of the self-understanding of ordinary people in most
societies. Most people when asked in surveys, see their society as having three main classes -
an upper class, a middle class, and a working class.
And they can place themselves quite readily into this class structure.
In sociology, there are many different definitions of class, and ways in which it is studied and understood.
Two of the main approaches to understanding class, are the stratification approach and the Marxist or relational approach to class.
If you think about class in terms of stratification, you see society as being made up of many different layers of people,
from the top to the bottom, in a hierarchy of income, education or occupational prestige.
These layers are called strata, and society is believed to be stratified, like a cake which has many different layers of sponge and cream in it.
This is the dominant way of understanding ‘class’ in everyday life, among government policy
makers and analysts, and sometimes even in sociology.
One of the signs of this dominance is that textbooks in sociology often characterise this as the only approach to class.
In the stratification approach to class, researchers start by gathering information about
people’s income, occupational prestige or educational level from survey research.
Then they rank people from high to low on a scale in terms of these variables.
This ranking system is then cut into broad bands, and each band is said to be a ‘social class.’
For example, researchers might divide this ranking scale into three broad bands of low, middle and high income.
Or they might divide it into deciles (bands of 10%) or perhaps quintiles (bands of 20%).
Each of these bands is then often referred to as a different social class.
Ulrich Beck, for example, refers to ‘People with the same income level’ being ‘within the same “class”.’
Through survey analysis, researchers go on to look for statistical associations between someone’s ‘social class’ and other things,
such as their health status, which political party they vote for, or their views about social or economic issues,
such as industrial relations or taxation.
In relation to health, for example, there’s a solid body of research that shows people from the lowest social class
have much higher rates of death and illness than people in the highest social class.
This sort of approach is good at finding and describing patterns between ‘class’ and other variables of interest to researchers.
These patterns often raise questions for which there are no immediate answers.
For example, why is it that people from the lowest social class would be more likely to die or become sick than
people in the highest social class?
Researchers working in this tradition put forward hypotheses and tentative explanations to try to explain the patterns they find.
For example, is it because the lowest class people can’t afford good health care?
Is it because they have less healthy lifestyles than higher class people?
Or is it some other reason?
To try to find answers to these questions, researchers develop hypotheses
which have to be tested to find what is true and what accounts for most of their ill health.
However, this approach to class has some serious limitations and weaknesses.
First, it isn’t guided by any kind of clear theory about what is important, what to look for, or how to make sense of what is being observed.
Second, it focuses on the immediately observable, rather than on underlying structures and processes.
The concentration on what’s observable leads to a neglect of unobservable social structures and processes,
which may actually cause the observable patterns the researchers can see.
For example, no one has seen a capitalist economy or a state.
But, not studying these things because they’re not directly observable can seriously weaken the research.
Third, the ‘class’ divisions constructed by researchers can be subjective and arbitrary,
because the same scale can be divided up in many different ways.
For example, on the same income scale, researchers could have more or fewer classes, and classes of different sizes,
depending on how many lines they draw through the scale and where they place them.
Fourth, the stratification approach to class has only weak explanatory value.
That is, it generally can’t explain the statistical associations it finds,
and it is largely left to speculate about what why they occur, and to repeatedly call for more research to investigate them.
It’s weak on the explanation of the patterns it finds, because it’s not guided by any theory.
It’s primarily a descriptive approach to inequality which rests content with finding statistical correlations,
and offering explanations uninformed by any kind of theory of what class is actually based on.
These flaws in the stratification approach are all addressed by the next approach we’ll be looking at, inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx.