social class division essay

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The class social division in society does not only relate to a person’s life chances in terms of employment but can also affect an individuals’ educational expectancy and journey. This divide occurs as people from a middle-class background have the funding and resources to go onto higher education in this instance the class division has beneficial life chances for a person from a middle-class background. This is supported by the number of recorded applicants that UCAS (2013), received showing that the number of applicants from a disadvantaged area of England was around 16%, these applicants tended to be from working-class areas; in comparison to this the number of applicants from an advantaged or middle-class areas of England were around 53%. Bourdieu (1997) would explain this occurrence as a result of the capital, in particular the cultural capital that the middle-class applicants have. This indicates that they use the resources and contacts for the means of furthering their life chances by getting into the university of their choice which results in them having greater opportunities to not only have the qualifications that they want but to also use it in order to influence their opportunities in employment and many other aspects of their lives. Within the education aspect of society, especially amongst the university aspects of education, the theory of intersectionality of social divisions play a key role in a person’s chances for getting into their desired university, as an indicator a man from a working-class would be less inclined to apply or got to university in comparison to that of a woman from a working or middle-class background. This is supported by statistics collected by UCAS (2013), as it found that 40% of women applied to university in comparison to the 29.9% of men that applied. This shows that within the gender social division women are more likely to have the opportunity or chance in their life to go and study at university. This contrasts to that for the figures for men, this could be due to that they are seen as being less desirable for universities in comparison or it could be that due to their class background it might not be seen as the right opportunity/path for them to take in addition they might not have the opportunity as they might lack the income in order to afford the rising costs of studying at university.

The middle-class social group might have a greater opportunity to go to University there are some aspects of their everyday life that are less likely to occur due to their background. An example of this would be that they are less likely to be emerged within a community that develops and supports each other. An example of this comes from Janes and Mooney (2002: 24), where they outlined that many people living within gated communities tend to be from a middle-class background due to the level of income that they have access to; they highlight that with them living within these residences it invites social exclusion as they create a barrier between themselves and the rest of society. This limits their chance to be within a supportive community; in McKenzie’s (2002: 1349), journal of ‘St Ann’s’ she found that within the council estate they created a community that supported each other as each member could relate and feel safe amongst each other due to them having a collective identity of belonging. McKenzie’s (2002: 1349), study refers back to the concept of intersectionality as she discovered that within the community that she studied many of them were black single mothers that were from a working-class background would actually have greater opportunities to be involved and integrated within their community as they would feel safe and comfortable to be in their community. This contrasts to that of the middle-class gated community (Jane and Mooney 2002: 24), as the people living within their community would have different priorities as they could see the interactive community as being one that will distract them from their work, hence why they invite social exclusion by living in a gated community and have little opportunity to integrate themselves in a community that share the same priorities as them.

The discussion around poverty can lead to further acts of inequality and social exclusion amongst people as well as the limitations that people face in their life. Fulcher and Scott (2004: 645-647), outline that the measurement and the classification of poverty is actually a matter that is difficult to both identify and measure due to the changing attitudes/beliefs that people have over time regarding this matter. This idea of trying to map the areas of high levels of poverty dates back was done previously by Townsend (1979), where they highlighted that areas of people living in poverty tended to be confined to urban areas of the cities and within the country. He later found that many people, in particular children, living within these levels of poverty would miss out on many opportunities or were not given many opportunities. For instance, he highlighted that many people within these areas were limited to the areas that they could visit in terms of a holiday and were even limited to the amount of uninterr upted leisur e time that they could have. However, one of most influential types of poverty around in contemporary society is around the issue of food poverty, where it was identified that within the UK there are 4.7 million people that are living within food poverty. The social divisions amongst people facing food poverty has implications on their life chances as they might choose to have a cheap and small meal in order to afford the money to have access to other resources like heating. Referring back to the concept of intersectionality, the sense of food poverty seems to highlight the limitations that single, working-class mothers face when it comes towards the opportunity to have a nutritious meal (Garthwaite 2016: 115). A mother from a working-class background facing food poverty would often limit the opportunity that they would have for food in order for her children to acquire a meal. This can often cause wider health implications for herself as she would not be gaining enough nutrients in her daily life but for her this would be a necessity as it meant that her children could eat. Alongside this she comes from a working-class background this could limit the opportunity to gain enough money to obtain a healthy, nutritional meal as she might have to prioritise buying cheap food in order to eat over potentially not having enough money in order to pay for the gas and electricity that keeps them warm.

Overall, social divisions do relate and often influence the chances that people would receive within society. Going back to the argument of social class, many people from a working-class background would often be confined into low skilled manual labour jobs, unlike those from a middle-class background as they would often be in high position jobs such as managerial positions as they would often have the means, resources and opportunities in their life to gain the skills to place themselves in the highly paid roles. This is a result of the social division as the people in the working-class division would not be able to afford or have the contacts in order to have these same life chances from society. The argument shows that many of the social divisions in society like social class, ethnicity, gender and many more not only relates to the way people interact with each other but have larger implications on how life chances occur for individuals’. In addition to this the intersectionality of social divisions relate to an individuals’ life chances as each of the divisions interact with each other to create the perceptions and actions that the rest of society conduct towards people that are classified within multiple social divisions.

Bibliography

Anthias, F. 2005, “Social Stratification and Social Inequality: Models of Intersectionality and Identity” in Devine, F., et al (eds), Rethinking Class. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Bourdieu, P. 1977. “Outline of a Theory of Practice”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, G. & Mellon, J. 2015, “Social Class. Identity, awareness and political attitudes: why are we still working class?”, University of Oxford, 33rd edition, British Social Attitudes, NatCen Social Research.

Fulcher, J. and J. Scott. 2003. “Inequality, Poverty and Wealth”, in Sociology, 2nd edition. Oxford: OUP.

Garthwaite, K. 2016. “’Doing the best I can with what I’ve got’: Food and health on a low income”, Chapter 6 in Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain, Bristol: Policy Press.

Janes, L and Mooney, G. 2002. “Place, Lifestyle and Social Divisions” in Braham, P. and Janes, L. (eds). 2002. Social Differences and Divisions. Oxford: Cowley.

Kyriakides, C; Virdee, S; and Modood, T. 2009. ‘Racism, Muslims and National Imagination”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol 35(2).

McKenzie, L., 2013. “Narratives from a Nottingham council estate: a story of white working class mothers with mixed-race children”. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(8).

Payne, G. (ed) 2006. Social Divisions. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chapter 15 “Social Divisions as a Sociological Perspective”.

Townsend, P. 1979. “Poverty in the United Kingdom”. Harmondsworth: Penguin

UCAS, 2013, ‘UCAS Analysis & Research,’ https://www.ucas.com/sites/default/files/january-application-rates-13-01-30_0.pdf , date accessed: 26/10/17

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8.3 Social Class in the United States

Learning objectives.

Distinguish objective and subjective measures of social class.
Outline the functionalist view of the American class structure.
Outline the conflict view of the American class structure.
Discuss whether the United States has much vertical social mobility.

There is a surprising amount of disagreement among sociologists on the number of social classes in the United States and even on how to measure social class membership. We first look at the measurement issue and then discuss the number and types of classes sociologists have delineated.

Measuring Social Class

We can measure social class either objectively or subjectively . If we choose the objective method, we classify people according to one or more criteria, such as their occupation, education, and/or income. The researcher is the one who decides which social class people are in based on where they stand in regard to these variables. If we choose the subjective method, we ask people what class they think they are in. For example, the General Social Survey asks, “If you were asked to use one of four names for your social class, which would you say you belong in: the lower class, the working class, the middle class, or the upper class?” Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership” depicts responses to this question. The trouble with such a subjective measure is that some people say they are in a social class that differs from what objective criteria might indicate they are in. This problem leads most sociologists to favor objective measures of social class when they study stratification in American society.

Figure 8.3 Subjective Social Class Membership

Subjective Social Class Membership: 45.7% Working, 43.4% Middle, 7.3% Lower, 3.6% Upper

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

Yet even here there is disagreement between functionalist theorists and conflict theorists on which objective measures to use. Functionalist sociologists rely on measures of socioeconomic status (SES) , such as education, income, and occupation, to determine someone’s social class. Sometimes one of these three variables is used by itself to measure social class, and sometimes two or all three of the variables are combined (in ways that need not concern us) to measure social class. When occupation is used, sociologists often rely on standard measures of occupational prestige. Since the late 1940s, national surveys have asked Americans to rate the prestige of dozens of occupations, and their ratings are averaged together to yield prestige scores for the occupations (Hodge, Siegel, & Rossi, 1964). Over the years these scores have been relatively stable. Here are some average prestige scores for various occupations: physician, 86; college professor, 74; elementary school teacher, 64; letter carrier, 47; garbage collector, 28; and janitor, 22.

Despite SES’s usefulness, conflict sociologists prefer different, though still objective, measures of social class that take into account ownership of the means of production and other dynamics of the workplace. These measures are closer to what Marx meant by the concept of class throughout his work, and they take into account the many types of occupations and workplace structures that he could not have envisioned when he was writing during the 19th century.

For example, corporations have many upper-level managers who do not own the means of production but still determine the activities of workers under them. They thus do not fit neatly into either of Marx’s two major classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Recognizing these problems, conflict sociologists delineate social class on the basis of several factors, including the ownership of the means of production, the degree of autonomy workers enjoy in their jobs, and whether they supervise other workers or are supervised themselves (Wright, 2000).

The American Class Structure

As should be evident, it is not easy to determine how many social classes exist in the United States. Over the decades, sociologists have outlined as many as six or seven social classes based on such things as, once again, education, occupation, and income, but also on lifestyle, the schools people’s children attend, a family’s reputation in the community, how “old” or “new” people’s wealth is, and so forth (Coleman & Rainwater, 1978; Warner & Lunt, 1941). For the sake of clarity, we will limit ourselves to the four social classes included in Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership” : the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class. Although subcategories exist within some of these broad categories, they still capture the most important differences in the American class structure (Gilbert, 2011). The annual income categories listed for each class are admittedly somewhat arbitrary but are based on the percentage of households above or below a specific income level.

The Upper Class

Depending on how it is defined, the upper class consists of about 4% of the U.S. population and includes households with annual incomes (2009 data) of more than $200,000 (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2010). Some scholars would raise the ante further by limiting the upper class to households with incomes of at least $500,000 or so, which in turn reduces this class to about 1% of the population, with an average wealth (income, stocks and bonds, and real estate) of several million dollars. However it is defined, the upper class has much wealth, power, and influence (Kerbo, 2009).

The upper class in the United States consists of about 4% of all households and possesses much wealth, power, and influence.

Steven Martin – Highland Park Mansion – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Members of the upper-upper class have “old” money that has been in their families for generations; some boast of their ancestors coming over on the Mayflower . They belong to exclusive clubs and live in exclusive neighborhoods; have their names in the Social Register ; send their children to expensive private schools; serve on the boards of museums, corporations, and major charities; and exert much influence on the political process and other areas of life from behind the scenes. Members of the lower-upper class have “new” money acquired through hard work, lucky investments, and/or athletic prowess. In many ways their lives are similar to those of their old-money counterparts, but they do not enjoy the prestige that old money brings. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and the richest person in the United States in 2009, would be considered a member of the lower-upper class because his money is too “new.” Because he does not have a long-standing pedigree, upper-upper class members might even be tempted to disparage his immense wealth, at least in private.

The Middle Class

Many of us like to think of ourselves in the middle class, as Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership” showed, and many of us are. The middle class includes the 46% of all households whose annual incomes range from $50,000 to $199,999. As this very broad range suggests, the middle class includes people with many different levels of education and income and many different types of jobs. It is thus helpful to distinguish the upper-middle class from the lower-middle class on the upper and lower ends of this income bracket, respectively. The upper-middle class has household incomes from about $150,000 to $199,000, amounting to about 4.4% of all households. People in the upper-middle class typically have college and, very often, graduate or professional degrees; live in the suburbs or in fairly expensive urban areas; and are bankers, lawyers, engineers, corporate managers, and financial advisers, among other occupations.

A house for someone in the upper-middle class

The upper-middle class in the United States consists of about 4.4% of all households, with incomes ranging from $150,000 to $199,000.

Alyson Hurt – Back Porch – CC BY-NC 2.0.

The lower-middle class has household incomes from about $50,000 to $74,999, amounting to about 18% of all families. People in this income bracket typically work in white-collar jobs as nurses, teachers, and the like. Many have college degrees, usually from the less prestigious colleges, but many also have 2-year degrees or only a high school degree. They live somewhat comfortable lives but can hardly afford to go on expensive vacations or buy expensive cars and can send their children to expensive colleges only if they receive significant financial aid.

The Working Class

A not-so-nice house belonging to someone who is part of the blue-collar/less skilled clerical jobs.

The working class in the United States consists of about 25% of all households, whose members work in blue-collar jobs and less skilled clerical positions.

Lisa Risager – Ebeltoft – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Working-class households have annual incomes between about $25,000 and $49,999 and constitute about 25% of all U.S. households. They generally work in blue-collar jobs such as factory work, construction, restaurant serving, and less skilled clerical positions. People in the working class typically do not have 4-year college degrees, and some do not have high school degrees. Although most are not living in official poverty, their financial situation is very uncomfortable. A single large medical bill or expensive car repair would be almost impossible to pay without going into considerable debt. Working-class families are far less likely than their wealthier counterparts to own their own homes or to send their children to college. Many of them live at risk for unemployment as their companies downsize by laying off workers even in good times, and hundreds of thousands began to be laid off when the U.S. recession began in 2008.

The Lower Class

The lower class or poor in the United States constitute about 25% of all households. Many poor individuals lack high school degrees and are unemployed or employed only part time.

Chris Hunkeler – Trailer Homes – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Although lower class is a common term, many observers prefer a less negative-sounding term like the poor, which is the term used here. The poor have household incomes under $25,000 and constitute about 25% of all U.S. households. Many of the poor lack high school degrees, and many are unemployed or employed only part time in semiskilled or unskilled jobs. When they do work, they work as janitors, house cleaners, migrant laborers, and shoe shiners. They tend to rent apartments rather than own their own homes, lack medical insurance, and have inadequate diets. We will discuss the poor further when we focus later in this chapter on inequality and poverty in the United States.

Social Mobility

Regardless of how we measure and define social class, what are our chances of moving up or down within the American class structure? As we saw earlier, the degree of vertical social mobility is a key distinguishing feature of systems of stratification. Class systems such as in the United States are thought to be open, meaning that social mobility is relatively high. It is important, then, to determine how much social mobility exists in the United States.

Here we need to distinguish between two types of vertical social mobility. Intergenerational mobility refers to mobility from one generation to the next within the same family. If children from poor parents end up in high-paying jobs, the children have experienced upward intergenerational mobility. Conversely, if children of college professors end up hauling trash for a living, these children have experienced downward intergenerational mobility. Intragenerational mobility refers to mobility within a person’s own lifetime. If you start out as an administrative assistant in a large corporation and end up as an upper-level manager, you have experienced upward intragenerational mobility. But if you start out from business school as an upper-level manager and get laid off 10 years later because of corporate downsizing, you have experienced downward intragenerational mobility.

Sociologists have conducted a good deal of research on vertical mobility, much of it involving the movement of males up or down the occupational prestige ladder compared to their fathers, with the earliest studies beginning in the 1960s (Blau & Duncan, 1967; Featherman & Hauser, 1978). For better or worse, the focus on males occurred because the initial research occurred when many women were still homemakers and also because women back then were excluded from many studies in the social and biological sciences. The early research on males found that about half of sons end up in higher-prestige jobs than their fathers had but that the difference between the sons’ jobs and their fathers’ was relatively small. For example, a child of a janitor may end up running a hardware store but is very unlikely to end up as a corporate executive. To reach that lofty position, it helps greatly to have parents in jobs much more prestigious than a janitor’s. Contemporary research also finds much less mobility among African Americans and Latinos than among non-Latino whites with the same education and family backgrounds, suggesting an important negative impact of racial and ethnic discrimination (see Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control” ).

A college education is a key step toward achieving upward social mobility. However, the payoff of education is often higher for men than for women and for whites than for people of color.

Nazareth College – Commencement 2013 – CC BY 2.0.

A key vehicle for upward mobility is formal education. Regardless of the socioeconomic status of our parents, we are much more likely to end up in a high-paying job if we attain a college degree or, increasingly, a graduate or professional degree. Figure 8.4 “Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007” vividly shows the difference that education makes for Americans’ median annual incomes. Notice, however, that for a given level of education, men’s incomes are greater than women’s. Figure 8.4 “Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007” thus suggests that the payoff of education is higher for men than for women, and many studies support this conclusion (Green & Ferber, 2008). The reasons for this gender difference are complex and will be discussed further in Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” . To the extent vertical social mobility exists in the United States, then, it is higher for men than for women and higher for whites than for people of color.

Figure 8.4 Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007

Source: Data from U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2010 . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab .

Certainly the United States has upward social mobility, even when we take into account gender and racial discrimination. Whether we conclude the United States has a lot of vertical mobility or just a little is the key question, and the answer to this question depends on how the data are interpreted. People can and do move up the socioeconomic ladder, but their movement is fairly limited. Hardly anyone starts at the bottom of the ladder and ends up at the top. As we see later in this chapter, recent trends in the U.S. economy have made it more difficult to move up the ladder and have even worsened the status of some people.

One way of understanding the issue of U.S. mobility is to see how much parents’ education affects the education their children attain. Figure 8.5 “Parents’ Education and Percentage of Respondents Who Have a College Degree” compares how General Social Survey respondents with parents of different educational backgrounds fare in attaining a college (bachelor’s) degree. For the sake of clarity, the figure includes only those respondents whose parents had the same level of education as each other: they either both dropped out of high school, both were high school graduates, or both were college graduates.

Figure 8.5 Parents’ Education and Percentage of Respondents Who Have a College Degree

As Figure 8.5 “Parents’ Education and Percentage of Respondents Who Have a College Degree” indicates, we are much more likely to get a college degree if our parents had college degrees themselves. The two bars for respondents whose parents were high school graduates or dropouts, respectively, do represent upward mobility, because the respondents are graduating from college even though their parents did not. But the three bars taken together also show that our chances of going to college depend heavily on our parents’ education (and presumably their income and other aspects of our family backgrounds). The American Dream does exist, but it is much more likely to remain only a dream unless we come from advantaged backgrounds. In fact, there is less vertical mobility in the United States than in other Western democracies. As a recent analysis summarized the evidence, “There is considerably more mobility in most of the other developed economies of Europe and Scandinavia than in the United States” (Mishel, Bernstein, & Shierholz, 2009, p. 108).

Key Takeaways

Several ways of measuring social class exist. Functionalist and conflict sociologists disagree on which objective criteria to use in measuring social class. Subjective measures of social class, which rely on people rating their own social class, may lack some validity.
Sociologists disagree on the number of social classes in the United States, but a common view is that the United States has four classes: upper, middle, working, and lower. Further variations exist within the upper and middle classes.
The United States has some vertical social mobility, but not as much as several nations in Western Europe.

For Your Review

Which way of measuring social class do you prefer, objective or subjective? Explain your answer.
Which objective measurement of social class do you prefer, functionalist or conflict? Explain your answer.

Blau, P. M., & Duncan, O. D. (1967). The American occupational structure . New York, NY: Wiley.

Coleman, R. P., & Rainwater, L. (1978). Social standing in America . New York, NY: Basic Books.

DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B. D., & Smith, J. C. (2010). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2009 (Current Population Report P60-238). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.

Featherman, D. L., & Hauser, R. M. (1978). Opportunity and change . New York, NY: Academic Press.

Gilbert, D. (2011). The American class structure in an age of growing inequality (8th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Green, C. A., & Ferber, M. A. (2008). The long-term impact of labor market interruptions: How crucial is timing? Review of Social Economy, 66 , 351–379.

Hodge, R. W., Siegel, P., & Rossi, P. (1964). Occupational prestige in the United States, 1925–63. American Journal of Sociology, 70 , 286–302.

Kerbo, H. R. (2009). Social stratification and inequality . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Mishel, L., Bernstein, J., & Shierholz, H. (2009). The state of working America 2008/2009 . Ithaca, NY: ILR Press [An imprint of Cornell University Press].

Warner, W. L., & Lunt, P. S. (1941). The social life of a modern community . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wright, E. O. (2000). Class counts: Comparative studies in class analysis . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

Social Class – An Introduction to the Concept

What is social class? Outlining the Registrar General’s Scale, and the New British Class Survey.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on December 13, 2022 by Karl Thompson

Social Class refers to divisions in society based on economic and social status. People in the same social class typically share a similar level of wealth, educational achievement, type of job and income.

Social Class is one of the most important concepts within AS and A Level Sociology because of the relationship between social class background and life chances (or lack of them) and the debate over the extent to which social class background determines an individual’s life chances.

The concept of social class is certainly relevant today – according to the latest 2022 data from YouGov 68% of young people think that their life chances are ‘broadly determined’ by their parents socioeconomic backgrounds…

Many people in the United Kingdom have an idea of what social class is, but Sociologists define the concept in more precise terms.

Below I look at ‘common conceptions’ of social class before moving on to look at two ways of measuring social class – The Registrar General’s Social Class Scale and The New British Class Survey

Common Conceptions of Social Class

The classic formulation of social class in Britain is to see Britain as being divided into three classes: working, middle and upper class. Social Class, is however, open to change, and most agree that the last two decades have seen the emergence of an underclass, with little prospect of full time employment. These four terms are in common usage and we have to start somewhere, so here are some starting definitions which you should aim to move beyond.

According to the UK government’s 2021 Social Mobility Barometer 48% of respondents defined themselves as working class, 36% as middle class and 0% as upper class. 79% of people said they felt there was a large gap between social classes today.

This means that 84% of respondents were prepared to identify themselves with a particular social class background, which suggests that these broad ‘class divisions’ have meaning for people.

The disadvantages of common conceptions of social class is that they lack clarity – although most of us have heard of social class and have some idea of what it means to be a member of a social class, exactly what constitutes middle or working class, for example, is subjective and varies from person to person.

This is precisely why socologists have striven to develop more objective classifications of social class – and below I look at two of these – The registrar General’s Social Class Scale and the New British Class Survey

The Registrar General’s Social Class Scale (1911)

Sociologists use more nuanced categories of social class, than the common sense conceptions above. The way in which sociologists group people into social classes has changed considerably over time, mainly because of the changing occupational structure. To illustrate this just two examples are provided below.

For most of the 20 th Century social class was measured using the Registrar General’s Scale . When this was originally conceived in 1911 it was based on the alleged standing in the community of the different occupational groups.

Occupations were divided into the following:

Manual occupations – those that involve a fair amount of physical effort. These are also known as blue collar occupations and are seen as working class.
Non-manual occupations – those that involve more mental effort, such as professions and office work. These are also known as white collar occupations and are seen as middle class.

Strengths and Limitations of the Registrar General’s Social Class Scale

The problems with the above scale is that the occupational structure in the UK has moved on – there are many more unskilled non manual jobs – in call-centres for example, and there is no room for the long-term or intermittently unemployed in the above scale either.

However, even today the majority of occupations fit pretty unambiguously into one of the categories, and six categories broadly organised along educational achievement and income is very easy to manage if we wish to make comparisons, and if we stick to these six simple categories, there does appear to be a historical relationship between these social class groupings and life chances – especially where life expectancy is concerned.

The New British Class Survey

The New British Class Survey was an attempt to update the Registrar General’s Social Class Scale and make it more relevant to contemporary Britain.

The survey was conducted by the BBC in 2011, in conjunction with The London School of Economics, recently conducted an online survey of 161 000 people. The survey measured three aspects of social class – economic capital, cultural capital and social capital.

Economic Capital – Measured by a combination of household income, household savings and the value of house owned.

Cultural Capital – The level of engagement in ‘highbrow’ and ’emerging’ culture. The amount of ‘Highbrow’ culture people consumed was measured by scoring how engaged they were with classical music, attending stately homes and so on. How much ’emerging’ cultural capital people owned was measured by scoring engagement with video games, a preference for hip-hop etc.

Social Capital – Measured using the average status or importance of people’s social contacts and the number of occupations people said they knew.

According to this survey, there are now 7 new classes in the United Kingdom…..

Established Middle Class (25% of the population) Members of this class have high levels of all three capitals although not as high as the Elite. They are a gregarious and culturally engaged class.
Technical Middle Class (6%) – A new, small class with high economic capital but seem less culturally engaged. They have relatively few social contacts and so are less socially engaged.
New Affluent Workers (14%) – This class has medium levels of economic capital and higher levels of cultural and social capital. They are a young and active group.
Emergent Service Workers (15%) This new class has low economic capital but has high levels of ‘emerging’ cultural capital and high social capital. This group are young and often found in urban areas.
Traditional Working Class (19%) – This class scores low on all forms of the three capitals although they are not the poorest group. The average age of this class is older than the others.

Strengths and Limitations of the New British Class Survey

This seems to be a clear improvement on previous class scales – it seems to describe social class divisions as they actually are in the UK (you might say it’s a more valid measurement of social class) – and the inclusion of ‘lowest’ class – the precariat reflects the important fact that many people are in low-paid work are in poverty because of the precarious nature of their flexible and/ or part-time employment. It also includes more indicators (or aspects of class) and reflects the importance of property ownership which only typically comes with age.

However, because it includes more aspects of class and because it is more subjective, it is simply harder to ‘get your head around’ – the divisions aren’t as clear cut, and it’s more difficult to make comparisons – of which there are few available because this is such a new measurement. Still, these aren’t necessarily weaknesses if that’s the way social class really does manifest itself in reality in contemporary Britain.

Further Sources

Social Stratification – Wikipedia entry
The Registrar General’s Class Scale – includes problems with it

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2 thoughts on “Social Class – An Introduction to the Concept”

Fair point. All schemes have their limitations. Thanks for the comment and link!

‘Seems to be more valid’ is not a very strong argument in support for a scheme that has been widely criticised. e.g. Mills, Great British Class Fiasco… http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038038513519880

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Social Class in the United States

Learning objectives.

Distinguish objective and subjective measures of social class.
Discuss whether the United States has much vertical social mobility.

Most sociologists define social class as a grouping based on similar social factors like wealth, income, education, and occupation. These factors affect how much power and prestige a person has. Social stratification reflects an unequal distribution of resources. In most cases, having more money means having more power or more opportunities. There is a surprising amount of disagreement among sociologists on the number of social classes in the United States and even on how to measure social class membership. We first look at the measurement issue and then discuss the number and types of classes sociologists have delineated.

Measuring Social Class

Figure 8.3 Subjective Social Class Membership

Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008.

The American Class Structure

The Upper Class

The upper class is considered the top, and only the powerful elite get to see the view from there. In the United States, people with extreme wealth make up 1 percent of the population, and they own one-third of the country’s wealth (Beeghley 2008).

The upper class in the United States consists of about 1% of all households and possesses much wealth, power, and influence.

Steven Martin – Highland Park Mansion – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Money provides not just access to material goods, but also access to a lot of power. As corporate leaders, members of the upper class make decisions that affect the job status of millions of people. As media owners, they influence the collective identity of the nation. They run the major network television stations, radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and sports franchises. As board members of the most influential colleges and universities, they influence cultural attitudes and values. As philanthropists, they establish foundations to support social causes they believe in. As campaign contributors, they sway politicians and fund campaigns, sometimes to protect their own economic interests.

U.S. society has historically distinguished between “old money” (inherited wealth passed from one generation to the next) and “new money” (wealth you have earned and built yourself). While both types may have equal net worth, they have traditionally held different social standings. People of old money, firmly situated in the upper class for generations, have held high prestige. Their families have socialized them to know the customs, norms, and expectations that come with wealth. Often, the very wealthy don’t work for wages. Some study business or become lawyers in order to manage the family fortune. Others, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, capitalize on being a rich socialite and transform that into celebrity status, flaunting a wealthy lifestyle.

However, new-money members of the upper class are not oriented to the customs and mores of the elite. They haven’t gone to the most exclusive schools. They have not established old-money social ties. People with new money might flaunt their wealth, buying sports cars and mansions, but they might still exhibit behaviors attributed to the middle and lower classes.

The Middle Class

Many people consider themselves middle class, but there are differing ideas about what that means. People with annual incomes of $150,000 call themselves middle class, as do people who annually earn $30,000. That helps explain why, in the United States, the middle class is broken into upper and lower subcategories. Upper-middle-class people tend to hold bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees. They’ve studied subjects such as business, management, law, or medicine. Lower-middle-class members hold bachelor’s degrees from four-year colleges or associate’s degrees from two-year community or technical colleges.

The upper-middle class in the United States consists of about 4.4% of all households, with incomes ranging from $150,000 to $199,000.

Alyson Hurt – Back Porch – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Comfort is a key concept to the middle class. Middle-class people work hard and live fairly comfortable lives. Upper-middle-class people tend to pursue careers that earn comfortable incomes. They provide their families with large homes and nice cars. They may go skiing or boating on vacation. Their children receive high-quality education and healthcare (Gilbert 2010).

In the lower middle class, people hold jobs supervised by members of the upper middle class. They fill technical, lower-level management or administrative support positions. Compared to lower-class work, lower-middle-class jobs carry more prestige and come with slightly higher paychecks. With these incomes, people can afford a decent, mainstream lifestyle, but they struggle to maintain it. They generally don’t have enough income to build significant savings. In addition, their grip on class status is more precarious than in the upper tiers of the class system. When budgets are tight, lower-middle-class people are often the ones to lose their jobs.

The Working Class

The working class in the United States consists of about 25% of all households, whose members work in blue-collar jobs and less skilled clerical positions.

Lisa Risager – Ebeltoft – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Working-class households generally work in blue-collar jobs such as factory work, construction, restaurant serving, and less skilled clerical positions. People in the working class typically do not have 4-year college degrees, and some do not have high school degrees. Although most are not living in official poverty, their financial situation is very uncomfortable. A single large medical bill or expensive car repair would be almost impossible to pay without going into considerable debt. Working-class families are far less likely than their wealthier counterparts to own their own homes or to send their children to college. Many of them live at risk for unemployment as their companies downsize by laying off workers even in good times, and hundreds of thousands began to be laid off when the U.S. recession began in 2008.

The Lower Class

The lower class or poor in the United States constitute about 25% of all households. Many poor individuals lack high school degrees and are unemployed or employed only part time.

Chris Hunkeler – Trailer Homes – CC BY-SA 2.0.

Although lower class is a common term, many observers prefer a less-negative sounding term like the poor, which is used here. Just like the middle and upper classes, the lower class can be divided into subsets: the working class, the working poor, and the underclass. Compared to the lower middle class, lower-class people have less of an educational background and earn smaller incomes. They work jobs that require little prior skill or experience and often do routine tasks under close supervision.

The working poor have unskilled, low-paying employment. However, their jobs rarely offer benefits such as healthcare or retirement planning, and their positions are often seasonal or temporary. They work as sharecroppers, migrant farm workers, house cleaners, and day laborers. Some are high school dropouts. Some are illiterate, unable to read job ads.

How can people work full-time and still be poor? Even working full-time, millions of the working poor earn incomes too meager to support a family. Minimum wage varies from state to state, but in many states it is approaching $8.00 per hour (Department of Labor 2014). At that rate, working 40 hours a week earns $320. That comes to $16,640 a year, before tax and deductions. Even for a single person, the pay is low. A married couple with children will have a hard time covering expenses.

The underclass is the United States’ lowest tier. Members of the underclass live mainly in inner cities. Many are unemployed or underemployed. Those who do hold jobs typically perform menial tasks for little pay. Some of the underclass are homeless. For many, welfare systems provide a much-needed support through food assistance, medical care, housing, and the like.

We will discuss the poor further when we focus later in this chapter on inequality and poverty in the United States.

Social Mobility

Social mobility refers to the ability to change positions within a social stratification system. When people improve or diminish their economic status in a way that affects social class, they experience social mobility.

Individuals can experience upward or downward social mobility for a variety of reasons. Upward mobility refers to an increase—or upward shift—in social class. In the United States, people applaud the rags-to-riches achievements of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey or LeBron James. But the truth is that relative to the overall population, the number of people who rise from poverty to wealth is very small. Still, upward mobility is not only about becoming rich and famous. In the United States, people who earn a college degree, get a job promotion, or marry someone with a good income may move up socially. In contrast, downward mobility indicates a lowering of one’s social class. Some people move downward because of business setbacks, unemployment, or illness. Dropping out of school, losing a job, or getting a divorce may result in a loss of income or status and, therefore, downward social mobility.

Nazareth College – Commencement 2013 – CC BY 2.0.

Figure 8.4 Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007

It is not uncommon for different generations of a family to belong to varying social classes. This is known as intergenerational mobility . For example, an upper-class executive may have parents who belonged to the middle class. In turn, those parents may have been raised in the lower class. Patterns of intergenerational mobility can reflect long-term societal changes.

Similarly, intragenerational mobility refers to changes in a person’s social mobility over the course of his or her lifetime. For example, the wealth and prestige experienced by one person may be quite different from that of his or her siblings.

Structural mobility happens when societal changes enable a whole group of people to move up or down the social class ladder. Structural mobility is attributable to changes in society as a whole, not individual changes. In the first half of the twentieth century, industrialization expanded the U.S. economy, raising the standard of living and leading to upward structural mobility. In today’s work economy, the recent recession and the outsourcing of jobs overseas have contributed to high unemployment rates. Many people have experienced economic setbacks, creating a wave of downward structural mobility.

When analyzing the trends and movements in social mobility, sociologists consider all modes of mobility. Scholars recognize that mobility is not as common or easy to achieve as many people think. In fact, some consider social mobility a myth. The American Dream does exist, but it is much more likely to remain only a dream unless we come from advantaged backgrounds. In fact, there is less vertical mobility in the United States than in other Western democracies. As a recent analysis summarized the evidence, “There is considerably more mobility in most of the other developed economies of Europe and Scandinavia than in the United States” (Mishel, Bernstein, & Shierholz, 2009, p. 108).

Key Takeaways

Several ways of measuring social class exist. Functionalist and conflict sociologists disagree on which objective criteria to use in measuring social class. Subjective measures of social class, which rely on people rating their own social class, may lack some validity.
Sociologists disagree on the number of social classes in the United States, but a common view is that the United States has four classes: upper, middle, working, and lower. Further variations exist within the upper and middle classes.
The United States has some vertical social mobility, but not as much as several nations in Western Europe.

Beeghley, Leonard. 2008. The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Coleman, R. P., & Rainwater, L. (1978). Social standing in America . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Gilbert, D. (2011). The American class structure in an age of growing inequality (8th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Green, C. A., & Ferber, M. A. (2008). The long-term impact of labor market interruptions: How crucial is timing? Review of Social Economy, 66 , 351–379.

Hodge, R. W., Siegel, P., & Rossi, P. (1964). Occupational prestige in the United States, 1925–63. American Journal of Sociology, 70 , 286–302.

Mishel, L., Bernstein, J., & Shierholz, H. (2009). The state of working America 2008/2009 . Ithaca, NY: ILR Press [An imprint of Cornell University Press].

Warner, W. L., & Lunt, P. S. (1941). The social life of a modern community . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wright, E. O. (2000). Class counts: Comparative studies in class analysis . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Introduction to Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Industrial Transformation in the North, 1800–1850

A New Social Order: Class Divisions

OpenStaxCollege

[latexpage]

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the shared perceptions and ideals of each social class
Assess different social classes’ views of slavery

The profound economic changes sweeping the United States led to equally important social and cultural transformations. The formation of distinct classes, especially in the rapidly industrializing North, was one of the most striking developments. The unequal distribution of newly created wealth spurred new divisions along class lines. Each class had its own specific culture and views on the issue of slavery.

THE ECONOMIC ELITE

Economic elites gained further social and political ascendance in the United States due to a fast-growing economy that enhanced their wealth and allowed distinctive social and cultural characteristics to develop among different economic groups. In the major northern cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, leading merchants formed an industrial capitalist elite. Many came from families that had been deeply engaged in colonial trade in tea, sugar, pepper, slaves, and other commodities and that were familiar with trade networks connecting the United States with Europe, the West Indies, and the Far East. These colonial merchants had passed their wealth to their children.

After the War of 1812, the new generation of merchants expanded their economic activities. They began to specialize in specific types of industry, spearheading the development of industrial capitalism based on factories they owned and on specific commercial services such as banking, insurance, and shipping. Junius Spencer Morgan ( [link] ), for example, rose to prominence as a banker. His success began in Boston, where he worked in the import business in the 1830s. He then formed a partnership with a London banker, George Peabody, and created Peabody, Morgan & Co. In 1864, he renamed the enterprise J. S. Morgan & Co. His son, J. P. Morgan, became a noted financier in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.

A photograph of Junius Spencer Morgan is shown.

Visit the Internet Archive to see scanned pages from Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review . This monthly business review provided the business elite with important information about issues pertaining to trade and finance: commodity prices, new laws affecting business, statistics regarding imports and exports, and similar content. Choose three articles and decide how they might have been important to the northern business elite.

Members of the northern business elite forged close ties with each other to protect and expand their economic interests. Marriages between leading families formed a crucial strategy to advance economic advantage, and the homes of the northern elite became important venues for solidifying social bonds. Exclusive neighborhoods started to develop as the wealthy distanced themselves from the poorer urban residents, and cities soon became segregated by class.

Industrial elites created chambers of commerce to advance their interests; by 1858 there were ten in the United States. These networking organizations allowed top bankers and merchants to stay current on the economic activities of their peers and further strengthen the bonds among themselves. The elite also established social clubs to forge and maintain ties. The first of these, the Philadelphia Club, came into being in 1834. Similar clubs soon formed in other cities and hosted a range of social activities designed to further bind together the leading economic families. Many northern elites worked hard to ensure the transmission of their inherited wealth from one generation to the next. Politically, they exercised considerable power in local and state elections. Most also had ties to the cotton trade, so they were strong supporters of slavery.

The Industrial Revolution led some former artisans to reinvent themselves as manufacturers. These enterprising leaders of manufacturing differed from the established commercial elite in the North and South because they did not inherit wealth. Instead, many came from very humble working-class origins and embodied the dream of achieving upward social mobility through hard work and discipline. As the beneficiaries of the economic transformations sweeping the republic, these newly established manufacturers formed a new economic elite that thrived in the cities and cultivated its own distinct sensibilities. They created a culture that celebrated hard work, a position that put them at odds with southern planter elites who prized leisure and with other elite northerners who had largely inherited their wealth and status.

Peter Cooper provides one example of the new northern manufacturing class. Ever inventive, Cooper dabbled in many different moneymaking enterprises before gaining success in the glue business. He opened his Manhattan glue factory in the 1820s and was soon using his profits to expand into a host of other activities, including iron production. One of his innovations was the steam locomotive, which he invented in 1827 ( [link] ). Despite becoming one of the wealthiest men in New York City, Cooper lived simply. Rather than buying an ornate bed, for example, he built his own. He believed respectability came through hard work, not family pedigree.

A photograph of a replica of the Tom Thumb steam locomotive is shown. On its side are painted the words “Peter Cooper’s ‘Tom Thumb’ 1829–30 Baltimore and Ohio R.R.”

Those who had inherited their wealth derided self-made men like Cooper, and he and others like him were excluded from the social clubs established by the merchant and financial elite of New York City. Self-made northern manufacturers, however, created their own organizations that aimed to promote upward mobility. The Providence Association of Mechanics and Manufacturers was formed in 1789 and promoted both industrial arts and education as a pathway to economic success. In 1859, Peter Cooper established the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a school in New York City dedicated to providing education in technology. Merit, not wealth, mattered most according to Cooper, and admission to the school was based solely on ability; race, sex, and family connections had no place. The best and brightest could attend Cooper Union tuition-free, a policy that remained in place until 2014.

THE MIDDLE CLASS

Not all enterprising artisans were so successful that they could rise to the level of the elite. However, many artisans and small merchants, who owned small factories and stores, did manage to achieve and maintain respectability in an emerging middle class. Lacking the protection of great wealth, members of the middle class agonized over the fear that they might slip into the ranks of wage laborers; thus they strove to maintain or improve their middle-class status and that of their children.

To this end, the middle class valued cleanliness, discipline, morality, hard work, education, and good manners. Hard work and education enabled them to rise in life. Middle-class children, therefore, did not work in factories. Instead they attended school and in their free time engaged in “self-improving” activities, such as reading or playing the piano, or they played with toys and games that would teach them the skills and values they needed to succeed in life. In the early nineteenth century, members of the middle class began to limit the number of children they had. Children no longer contributed economically to the household, and raising them “correctly” required money and attention. It therefore made sense to have fewer of them.

Middle-class women did not work for wages. Their job was to care for the children and to keep the house in a state of order and cleanliness, often with the help of a servant. They also performed the important tasks of cultivating good manners among their children and their husbands and of purchasing consumer goods; both activities proclaimed to neighbors and prospective business partners that their families were educated, cultured, and financially successful.

Northern business elites, many of whom owned or had invested in businesses like cotton mills that profited from slave labor, often viewed the institution of slavery with ambivalence. Most members of the middle class took a dim view of it, however, since it promoted a culture of leisure. Slavery stood as the antithesis of the middle-class view that dignity and respectability were achieved through work, and many members of this class became active in efforts to end it.

This class of upwardly mobile citizens promoted temperance, or abstinence from alcohol. They also gave their support to Protestant ministers like George Grandison Finney, who preached that all people possessed free moral agency , meaning they could change their lives and bring about their own salvation, a message that resonated with members of the middle class, who already believed their worldly efforts had led to their economic success.

THE WORKING CLASS

The Industrial Revolution in the United States created a new class of wage workers, and this working class also developed its own culture. They formed their own neighborhoods, living away from the oversight of bosses and managers. While industrialization and the market revolution brought some improvements to the lives of the working class, these sweeping changes did not benefit laborers as much as they did the middle class and the elites. The working class continued to live an often precarious existence. They suffered greatly during economic slumps, such as the Panic of 1819.

Although most working-class men sought to emulate the middle class by keeping their wives and children out of the work force, their economic situation often necessitated that others besides the male head of the family contribute to its support. Thus, working-class children might attend school for a few years or learn to read and write at Sunday school, but education was sacrificed when income was needed, and many working-class children went to work in factories. While the wives of wage laborers usually did not work for wages outside the home, many took in laundry or did piecework at home to supplement the family’s income.

Although the urban working class could not afford the consumer goods that the middle class could, its members did exercise a great deal of influence over popular culture. Theirs was a festive public culture of release and escape from the drudgery of factory work, catered to by the likes of Phineas Taylor Barnum, the celebrated circus promoter and showman. Taverns also served an important function as places to forget the long hours and uncertain wages of the factories. Alcohol consumption was high among the working class, although many workers did take part in the temperance movement. It is little wonder that middle-class manufacturers attempted to abolish alcohol.

The Connecticut native P. T. Barnum catered to the demand for escape and cheap amusements among the working class. His American Museum in New York City opened in 1841 and achieved great success. Millions flocked to see Barnum’s exhibits, which included a number of fantastic human and animal oddities, almost all of which were hoaxes. One exhibit in the 1840s featured the “Feejee Mermaid,” which Barnum presented as proof of the existence of the mythical mermaids of the deep ( [link] ). In truth, the mermaid was a half-monkey, half-fish stitched together.

Illustration (a) depicts a creature with the head and upper torso of a young monkey and the bottom half of a fish. Photograph (b) shows crowds of people surrounding P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City.

Visit The Lost Museum to take a virtual tour of P. T. Barnum’s incredible museum.

Wage workers in the North were largely hostile to the abolition of slavery, fearing it would unleash more competition for jobs from free blacks. Many were also hostile to immigration. The pace of immigration to the United States accelerated in the 1840s and 1850s as Europeans were drawn to the promise of employment and land in the United States. Many new members of the working class came from the ranks of these immigrants, who brought new foods, customs, and religions. The Roman Catholic population of the United States, fairly small before this period, began to swell with the arrival of the Irish and the Germans.

Section Summary

The creation of distinctive classes in the North drove striking new cultural developments. Even among the wealthy elites, northern business families, who had mainly inherited their money, distanced themselves from the newly wealthy manufacturing leaders. Regardless of how they had earned their money, however, the elite lived and socialized apart from members of the growing middle class. The middle class valued work, consumption, and education and dedicated their energies to maintaining or advancing their social status. Wage workers formed their own society in industrial cities and mill villages, though lack of money and long working hours effectively prevented the working class from consuming the fruits of their labor, educating their children, or advancing up the economic ladder.

Review Questions

Which of the following groups supported the abolition of slavery?

Which social class was most drawn to amusements like P. T. Barnum’s museum?

What did Peter Cooper envision for the United States, and how did he work to bring his vision to life?

A successful northern manufacturer and inventor, Cooper valued hard work, thrift, and simplicity. He lived according to these values, choosing utilitarian, self-made furnishings rather than luxurious goods. Cooper’s vision of hard work leading to respectability led him to found the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; admission to this college, which was dedicated to the pursuit of technology, was based solely on merit.

Critical Thinking Questions

Industrialization in the Northeast produced great benefits and also major problems. What were they? Who benefited and who suffered? Did the benefits outweigh the problems, or vice versa?

What factors led to the Panic of 1819? What government regulations might have prevented it?

Would the Industrial Revolution have been possible without the use of slave labor? Why or why not?

What might have been the advantages and disadvantages of railroads for the people who lived along the routes or near the stations?

What were the values of the middle class? How did they differ from the values of those above and below them on the socioeconomic ladder? In what ways are these values similar to or different from those held by the middle class today?

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Social Divisions and Later Life: Difference, Diversity and Inequality

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1 Social divisions and social differences

Published: April 2020
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This chapter draws the distinction between social divisions that reflect structural patterns of inequality and social differences that express social identity and the articulation of communities of interest. It then goes on to consider some of the distinct features of such divisions and differences that help define the social locations of later life. These include the impact of the transition from working to post working life, the intersectionality that exists amongst these divisions and the growing salience of the body as both a site and source of division.

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What Is Social Class, and Why Does it Matter?

How Sociologists Define and Study the Concept

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Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
M.A., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
B.A., Sociology, Pomona College

Class, economic class, socio-economic class, social class. What's the difference? Each refers to how people are sorted into groups—specifically ranked hierarchies —in society. There are, in fact, important differences among them.

Economic Class

Economic class refers specifically to how one ranks relative to others in terms of income and wealth. Simply put, we are sorted into groups by how much money we have. These groups are commonly understood as lower (the poorest), middle, and upper class (the richest). When someone uses the word "class" to refer to how people are stratified in society, they are most often referring to this.

The model of economic class we use today is a derivation of German philosopher Karl Marx 's (1818–1883) definition of class, which was central to his theory of how society operates in a state of class conflict. In that state, an individual's power comes directly from one's economic class position relative to the means of production—one is either an owner of capitalist entities or a worker for one of the owners. Marx and fellow philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) presented this idea in " The Manifesto of the Communist Party ," and Marx expounded in much greater length in volume one of his work called "Capital."

Socio-Economic Class

Socio-economic class, also known as socioeconomic status and often abbreviated as SES, refers to how other factors, namely occupation and education, are combined with wealth and income to rank a person relative to others in society. This model is inspired by the theories of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who viewed the stratification of society as a result of the combined influences of economic class, social status (the level of a person's prestige or honor relative to others), and group power (what he called "party"). Weber defined "party" as the level of one's ability to get what they want, despite how others may fight them on it. Weber wrote about this in an essay titled "The distribution of power within the political community: Class, status, party," in his 1922 book "Economy and Society," published after his death.

Socio-economic class is a more complex formulation than economic class because it takes into account the social status attached to certain professions considered prestigious, like doctors and professors, for example, and to educational attainment as measured in academic degrees. It also takes into account the lack of prestige or even stigma that may be associated with other professions, like blue-collar jobs or the service sector, and the stigma often associated with not finishing high school. Sociologists typically create data models that draw on ways of measuring and ranking these different factors to arrive at a low, middle, or high SES for a given person.

Social Class

The term "social class" is often used interchangeably with SES, both by the general public and by sociologists alike. Very often when you hear it used, that is what it means. In a technical sense, however, social class is used to refer specifically to the characteristics that are less likely to change, or harder to change, than one's economic status, which is potentially changeable over time. In such a case, social class refers to the socio-cultural aspects of one's life, namely the traits, behaviors, knowledge, and lifestyle that one is socialized into by one's family. This is why class descriptors like "lower," "working," "upper," or "high" can have social as well as economic implications for how we understand the person described.

When someone uses "classy" as a descriptor, they are naming certain behaviors and lifestyle and framing them as superior to others. In this sense, social class is determined strongly by one's level of cultural capital , a concept developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) in his 1979 work "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste." Bourdieu said that levels of class are determined by the attainment of a specific set of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that allow a person to navigate in society.

Why Does It Matter?

So why does class, however you want to name it or slice it, matter? It matters to sociologists because the fact that it exists reflects unequal access to rights, resources, and power in society—what we call social stratification . As such, it has a strong effect on the access an individual has to education, the quality of that education, and how high a level he or she can reach. It also affects who one knows socially, and the extent to which those people can provide advantageous economic and employment opportunities, political participation and power, and even health and life expectancy, among many other things.

Sources and Further Reading

Cookson Jr., Peter W. and Caroline Hodges Persell. "Preparing for Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools." New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Marx, Karl. " Capital: A Critique of Political Economy ." Trans. Moore, Samuel, Edward Aveling and Friedrich Engels. Marxists.org, 2015 (1867).
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. " The Communist Manifesto ." Trans. Moore, Samuel and Friedrich Engels. Marxists.org, 2000 (1848).
Weber, Max. "Economy and Society." ed. Roth, Guenther and Claus Wittich. Oakland: University of California Press, 2013 (1922).
What Is Social Stratification, and Why Does It Matter?
The Differences Between Communism and Socialism
Introduction to Sociology
What Is Cultural Capital? Do I Have It?
What is a Norm? Why Does it Matter?
The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
What Is an Industrial Society?
What You Need to Know About Economic Inequality
What Is Capitalism?
All About Marxist Sociology
The Challenges of Ethical Living in a Consumer Society
The Main Points of "The Communist Manifesto"
What Is the Meaning of Globalization in Sociology?
Understanding Socialization in Sociology
Famous Sociologists

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Black America and the Class Divide

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Feb. 1, 2016

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading scholar of the first half of the 20th century, defined the urgency of black social responsibility in his famous essay “The Talented Tenth” — 10 being the percentage of the African-American demographic needed to lead the race into an integrated, equal America. In “The Talented Tenth,” Du Bois called for “intelligent leadership” directed by “college-trained men” devoted to a “thorough understanding of the mass of Negroes and their problems” for the purpose of solving these problems, still so deeply entrenched a half century after the abolition of slavery.

Forty-five years later, Du Bois would lament, this call had been largely ignored. He worried aloud about the growing class divide within Black America and how the consequences of that divide might affect the task of “lifting as we climb,” the motto of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, describing the privilege and burden of the middle class to facilitate black upward mobility.

Indeed, by 1948 Du Bois felt that the new black middle class had forgotten this noble calling. There had been, even during his college days at Fisk, troublesome warning signs: “sharp young persons, who received the education given very cheaply at Fisk University, with the distinct and single-minded idea, of seeing how much they could make out of it for themselves, and nobody else.”

Du Bois knew, of course, that any black person at that time had to struggle to tear down barriers just to lift oneself and one’s family. But that was not enough: Successful black people, he said, must recognize that their place in life was merely a matter of opportunity. “If such opportunity were extended and broadened, a thousand times as many Negroes could join the ranks of the educated and able, instead of sinking into poverty, disease, and crime.”

Du Bois also knew that Black America had never consisted of one social or economic class. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War, about 11 percent of Black America was free, some born into families that had been free for generations. And in 1899, when Du Bois published his seminal sociological study, “The Philadelphia Negro,” he was already noting that these two classes had morphed into four: the middle class and above, working people (“fair to comfortable”), the poor and, in terms his Victorian contemporaries would have approved of, the “vicious and criminal classes.”

Du Bois would probably be astonished to see how these classes have fared, especially since the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, just as new affirmative action programs were beginning to expand drastically the ranks of black students on white campuses and thus to affect the class structure of Black America.

Black Activism on Campus

A review of campaigns since 1900 provides linear and ideological connections to today’s racial unrest.

The Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson calls the remarkable gains in black income “the most significant change” since Dr. King’s passing. When adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars, the percentage of African-Americans making at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more nearly quadrupled, to 13 percent (in contrast, white Americans saw a less impressive increase, from 11 to 26 percent). Du Bois’s “talented 10th” has become the “prosperous 13 percent.”

But, Dr. Wilson is quick to note, the percentage of Black America with income below $15,000 declined by only four percentage points, to 22 percent.

In other words, there are really two nations within Black America. The problem of income inequality, Dr. Wilson concludes, is not between Black America and White America but between black haves and have-nots, something we don’t often discuss in public in an era dominated by a narrative of fear and failure and the claim that racism impacts 42 million people in all the same ways.

What effect, many of us have worried, would this unprecedented rise in prosperity have on the New Millennials? Would they heed Du Bois’s call, as students like John Lewis and Julian Bond, Charlayne Hunter and Diane Nash did under the leadership of the “Negro Gandhi” presciently predicted by Du Bois back in 1948?

The class divide is, in my opinion, one of the most important and overlooked factors in the rise of Black Lives Matter, led by a new generation of college graduates and students. I hear about it from my students at Harvard, about the pressure they feel to rise, yes, but also the necessity to then look back to lift others.

I asked Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, a senior, what was behind the racial unrest on campus. Ms. Matsuda-Lawrence is co-founder of “I, Too, Am Harvard,” a multiplatform campaign that gives voice to students who often go unheard and that brought the concept of micro-aggressions into the light. She described the motivation as “our sense of responsibility to the black communities who do not have access to the universities we attend.” The goal: “to call out the ways our own institutions participate in and perpetuate structures of racism that affect the black communities we represent through our presence at places like Harvard.”

That is, the college campus is a microcosm of practices at work in the larger society, something of a laboratory in which America’s racial experiment might be altered.

Unlike the way they are framed in so many op-eds, modern-day activists, Ms. Matsuda-Lawrence says, are anything but “a bunch of oversensitive, privileged and coddled black college students complaining and whining that they don’t feel safe because of building names and house master titles.”

Race on College Campuses

New York Times journalists, student activists and college administrators discussed race on college campuses on Feb. 4.

Consider them, instead, the grandchildren of Du Bois’s “talented 10th,” taking their cues, wittingly or unwittingly, from the challenge that he and the civil rights activists of the ’60s issued to black leadership. Many of today’s black activists are the children of middle- and upper-middle-class parents — the affirmative action generation — and may be realizing, as Charlayne Hunter-Gault put it to me, “that privilege doesn’t always translate as they thought it would.”

Despite the highs — the escalating successes in finance, business, public service, education and entertainment (think beyond President Obama and sports figures to the American Express C.E.O. Kenneth Chenault, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, and the queen of Thursday-night TV, Shonda Rhimes) — there have been far too many lows, too many moments in which we as a country have come face to face with the deprivation, disenfranchisement, marginalization and flat-out abuse of African-Americans at the socioeconomic bottom.

The disparity of opportunity plagues Black America perhaps even more starkly now, given its extremes, than the economic reality that motivated Dr. King to transfer the focus of his movement from civil rights to economic justice, as exemplified in his last, tragically aborted effort to mount a “Poor People’s Campaign.”

The childhood poverty rate for African-Americans remains stubbornly close to what it was the day Dr. King was assassinated; unemployment for black Americans runs nearly double that of the national average; and the distrust between impoverished communities and the police continues to spiral (helped in no small part by the fact that blacks make up more than a third of the prison population, compared to only 13 percent of the overall population).

And we still confront the question that arose the moment the first slave ships arrived: Do black lives matter?

It is into this whiplash environment of economic inequality that college students have come of age. They were youngsters when Hurricane Katrina engulfed New Orleans — for a time the ultimate symbol of inequality of income and opportunity — and teenagers when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. They have been consumed by a roster of recorded police killings of unarmed black men and boys since August 2014, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., followed by similar assaults in Staten Island, Cleveland, Chicago and North Charleston, S.C.

Black women and girls haven’t escaped injustices, either. We need think only of the young girl in the Mall of America who was restrained by a security guard or the teenager in South Carolina who was thrown from her desk by a school resource officer, or the 13 black women who testified against the former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who was convicted of rape.

The nation’s African-American students are searching profoundly and visibly for a definitive end to racial injustice. College campuses, Du Bois’s proving grounds for the training and testing of social responsibility and leadership, have once again become a primary front in the battle against inequality — from “I, Too, Am Harvard,” a concept that has spread from Berkeley to New York University, to the principled protest of football players at the University of Missouri against racial insensitivity, to demonstrations at Brown and Brandeis, Princeton and Yale.

A number of administrators have voiced strong support for these protests as well as an institutional will to change, be it renaming buildings or re-evaluating the makeup of their student body and faculty.

Change, even at the symbolic level, is difficult, of course, and it remains to be seen what this current wave of protests will accomplish. Will the fight against police brutality, symbols of the Confederacy and society’s plethora of micro-aggressions become the basis of a broader movement for the improvement of underfunded public school education, for the right to a job with decent wages, and for the end of residential segregation that relegates the poor to neighborhoods with murder rates as alarming as those on the South Side of Chicago?

What is certain is that the outrage that led to Black Lives Matter and its spinoffs will be with us for years to come unless these legacies of slavery and Jim Crow become remnants of a racist past.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is co-author of “And Still I Rise: Black America Since MLK,” host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.

9.4 A New Social Order: Class Divisions

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the shared perceptions and ideals of each social class
Assess different social classes’ views of slavery

THE ECONOMIC ELITE

Economic elites gained further social and political ascendance in the United States due to a fast-growing economy that enhanced their wealth and allowed distinctive social and cultural characteristics to develop among different economic groups. In the major northern cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, leading merchants formed an industrial capitalist elite. Many came from families that had been deeply engaged in colonial trade in tea, sugar, pepper, enslaved Africans, and other commodities and that were familiar with trade networks connecting the United States with Europe, the West Indies, and the Far East. These colonial merchants had passed their wealth to their children.

After the War of 1812, the new generation of merchants expanded their economic activities. They began to specialize in specific types of industry, spearheading the development of industrial capitalism based on factories they owned and on specific commercial services such as banking, insurance, and shipping. Junius Spencer Morgan ( Figure 9.16 ), for example, rose to prominence as a banker. His success began in Boston, where he worked in the import business in the 1830s. He then formed a partnership with a London banker, George Peabody, and created Peabody, Morgan & Co. In 1864, he renamed the enterprise J. S. Morgan & Co. His son, J. P. Morgan, became a noted financier in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Click and Explore

Peter Cooper provides one example of the new northern manufacturing class. Ever inventive, Cooper dabbled in many different moneymaking enterprises before gaining success in the glue business. He opened his Manhattan glue factory in the 1820s and was soon using his profits to expand into a host of other activities, including iron production. One of his innovations was the steam locomotive, which he invented in 1827 ( Figure 9.17 ). Despite becoming one of the wealthiest men in New York City, Cooper lived simply. Rather than buying an ornate bed, for example, he built his own. He believed respectability came through hard work, not family pedigree.

THE MIDDLE CLASS

This class of upwardly mobile citizens promoted temperance, or abstinence from alcohol. They also gave their support to Protestant ministers like Charles Grandison Finney, who preached that all people possessed free moral agency , meaning they could change their lives and bring about their own salvation, a message that resonated with members of the middle class, who already believed their worldly efforts had led to their economic success.

THE WORKING CLASS

P. T. Barnum and the Feejee Mermaid

The Connecticut native P. T. Barnum catered to the demand for escape and cheap amusements among the working class. His American Museum in New York City opened in 1841 and achieved great success. Millions flocked to see Barnum’s exhibits, which included a number of fantastic human and animal oddities, almost all of which were hoaxes. One exhibit in the 1840s featured the “Feejee Mermaid,” which Barnum presented as proof of the existence of the mythical mermaids of the deep ( Figure 9.18 ). In truth, the mermaid was a half-monkey, half-fish stitched together.

Visit The Lost Museum to take a virtual tour of P. T. Barnum’s incredible museum.

Wage workers in the North were largely hostile to the abolition of slavery, fearing it would unleash more competition for jobs from free Black people. Many were also hostile to immigration. The pace of immigration to the United States accelerated in the 1840s and 1850s as Europeans were drawn to the promise of employment and land in the United States. Many new members of the working class came from the ranks of these immigrants, who brought new foods, customs, and religions. The Roman Catholic population of the United States, fairly small before this period, began to swell with the arrival of the Irish and the Germans.

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When the Emperor was Divine

Julie otsuka, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The novel opens with the family having achieved the economic prosperity and success associated with the “American dream.” Wealthy enough not to have to work, the woman ’s life is full of traditional American signs of prosperity and class. She owns her house in the suburbs, wears white gloves, and hires a maid to clean her house. For all intents and purposes, she has achieved the American dream of a secure, middle-class lifestyle.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that the woman’s class status and wealth cannot protect her or her family from racism and internment. As soon as the U.S. government turns on its Japanese-American citizens, the woman’s wealth and perceived security all disappear. Overnight, the government freezes her bank accounts and takes away the family’s civil liberties. This sudden and staggering injustice, especially compared to the family’s previous status in America, suggests that the “American dream” might only be a fantasy for minority groups. Because they don’t have the security of being a part of the dominant white majority, Asian-Americans and other minorities can easily be turned against and demonized as “other” or not “real” Americans.

Interestingly, at the internment camp class divisions within the Japanese-American community become more blurred. Businessmen become janitors and the wealthy have no access to their money, so there is no real way to back up any elite status they might want to maintain. In this way, institutional racism paradoxically equalizes the Japanese-American community by uniting everyone under the same shared struggle. There are still exceptions to this, however: even after the woman loses her wealth, her former maid—who is also interned at the camp—continues her social role as lower-class “help” when she helps carry the woman’s bucket of water to the barracks. This small interaction suggests that class divisions do not ever fully disappear, even when a community shares a common race, ethnicity, and living situation, and is also struggling against a single mutual oppressor.

When the family returns home after the war, the woman begins anew her pursuit of the American dream. With few job opportunities for Japanese-Americans after the war, the woman takes a job as a domestic worker in order to provide for her children. Having achieved the “dream” and then having had it snatched away from her, she is forced to begin again from the bottom. The novel ultimately suggests that for people of color, the American dream is something of a mirage, or perhaps a nightmare.

Social Class and the American Dream ThemeTracker

Social Class and the American Dream Quotes in When the Emperor was Divine

She took The Gleaners out of its frame and looked at the picture one last time. She wondered why she had let it hang in the kitchen for so long. It bothered her, the way those peasants were forever bent over above that endless field of wheat. “Look up” she wanted to say to them. “Look up, look up!” The Gleaners, she decided, would have to go. She set the picture outside with the garbage.

She was ten years old and she knew what she liked. Boys and black licorice and Dorothy Lamour. Her favorite song on the radio was “Don’t Fence Me in.”

Assimilation and Loss of Identity Theme Icon

One evening as the boy’s mother was hauling a bucket of water from the washroom she ran into her former housekeeper, Mrs. Ueno. “When she saw me she grabbed the bucket right out of my hands and insisted upon carrying it home for me…I tried to tell her that she no longer worked for me. ‘Mrs. Ueno,’ I said, ‘here we’re all equal,’ but of course she wouldn’t listen. When we got back to the barracks she set the bucket down by the front door and then she bowed and hurried off into the darkness. I didn’t even get a chance to thank her.”

“I lost an earring on the train. Did I ever tell you that?” He shook his head… “What did it look like?” “It looked like a pearl,” she said. “It was a pearl.” “Maybe it rolled behind the seat.” “Or maybe,” she said, “it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s not getting the back. That’s just how it is…I had no business wearing those earrings in the first place,” she said after a while. “No business at all.”

Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out old classmates…We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

Social Dimension: Division of Students Into Races and Classes Essay

Race refers to an ideological and social concept that perceives certain people as superior to others based on geographical background and human external features. The race is a concept that influences people’s social lives. For example, teacher-student interaction in learning institutions would vary, depending on people’s social-economic status. For instance, school course works of learning institutions in poor societies are different from schools in wealthy regions. Race can be comprehended upon variations based on religion, language, skin color, nationality, and physical traits. Race s a concept, which is portrayed as an ethic intensifier; it is a fixed concept that does not embrace open-mindedness. Various schools in human society offer various educational experiences and various types of knowledge to learners of different social statuses. Schools that serve the rich have different curriculum programs from schools, which serve the poor people.

Students who come from poor working-class families attend schools that prepare them for routine and mechanical wage labor (Blue Collar Jobs). Learners who come from middle working-class families go to school that prepares them to get White Collar Jobs. Learners who come from upper-middle-class families attend schools that prepare them to become professional individuals like their parents; to acquire scientific, linguistic, and artistic knowledge. Learners who come from rich families are prepared in learning institutions, which enable students to acquire essential skills to control and own production means and capitalism in society. The race is a concept that fulfills ideological needs; its effectiveness is based on the need to reconcile slavery and freedom. Natural rights and liberty are important concepts when addressing social inequities. Improvement of social structures and institutions can minimize racial disparities; improving people’s Social-economic status can reduce racism cases.

Creation of Vignette

Vignette can be utilized in the teaching profession. Vignette is used to address matters of social justice in school programs. The use of vignette is an initiative that is adopted in educational teaching reforms; it aims at improving the impacts of teacher education and education for social justice. This assessment tool is focused on assessing the effects of teacher education whereby an assortment of complementary studies assembles confirmations from various viewpoints. This is meant to investigate the effects of teacher education from educators and their learners, and the great aim of education. Vignette provides a valid and reliable measure of the disposition, attitude, social justice, and beliefs of teachers. A vignette is an assessment tool used to measure facets of education for social justice; it documents transformation in the perception of teachers concerning social justice in education.

Social justice is one of the great aims of education. Social justice in education comprises significant cultural pedagogy and multicultural education that provide a high expectation for every student in the education system. Teacher education is aimed to provide civic and activism involvement; teachers have political responsibility to perform in a learning experience. Vignette aims to instill equity to eradicate inequitable contexts in education programs. Vignette is a theoretical measurement for teacher education focused to drive social change; it is a principle used in learning how to educate learners to benefit from social justice. Assessing social justice seems to be a complicated aspect, which is amalgamated by interpersonal correlations and changeable school perspectives. However, teachers are qualified icons and vastly sensitive who possess reflecting ethical values; hence are capable to instill social justice.

Vignette is an assessment device used for addressing matters of social justice in teaching experience; it is a measurement tool that trains teachers to embrace social justice. Social justice aims to attain issues of equity and social diversity. In addition, teachers are liable to challenge what is perceived as successful in the education system to assess the validity of such achievement. Truth relies upon reliable and valid approaches that would achieve social justice.

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COMMENTS

Social divisions
This page of the essay has 2,181 words. Download the full version above. Within societies social groups there are divisions that occur divisions. These often occur due to social inequalities that are present amongst these different social groups as well as the way that these groups interact and treat each other (Anthias 2005: 27).
8.3 Social Class in the United States
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Social Class
Social Class refers to divisions in society based on economic and social status. People in the same social class typically share a similar level of wealth, educational achievement, type of job and income. Social Class is one of the most important concepts within AS and A Level Sociology because of the relationship between social class background and life chances (or lack of them) and the ...
Social Class in the United States
The American Class Structure. As should be evident, it is not easy to determine how many social classes exist in the United States. Over the decades, sociologists have outlined as many as six or seven social classes based on such things as, once again, education, occupation, and income, but also on lifestyle, the schools people's children attend, a family's reputation in the community, how ...
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In writing a book about the divisions of later life, it is necessary to begin by examining these terms and their employment within the social sciences. 'Social divisions' has been used in a number of ways to describe or represent the structuring of society and its social relations (Carling, 1991; Morris 1995; Anthias, 1998; Payne, 2007).
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A New Social Order: Class Divisions
The profound economic changes sweeping the United States led to equally important social and cultural transformations. The formation of distinct classes, especially in the rapidly industrializing North, was one of the most striking developments. The unequal distribution of newly created wealth spurred new divisions along class lines.
Division Of People Into Social Classes
Social class refers to a class of people, based on social power, wealth or another criterion. I agree with Helen Keller's quote on the role which social class plays in the being of a person from childhood up to adulthood. Social class also known as social stratification is mostly divided into three common classes being lower, middle and upper ...
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Designed as a testimonial volume for Ilya Neustadt, Social Class and the Division of Labour provides a comprehensive discussion of the central issues of this debate. All the essays in this volume attempt to integrate theoretical debate and empirical investigation: some focus directly on the division of labour, considering especially Marxist ...
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Theories of social class were fully elaborated only in the 19th century as the modern social sciences, especially sociology, developed.Political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau discussed the issues of social inequality and stratification, and French and English writers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries put forth the idea that the nonpolitical ...
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In such a case, social class refers to the socio-cultural aspects of one's life, namely the traits, behaviors, knowledge, and lifestyle that one is socialized into by one's family. This is why class descriptors like "lower," "working," "upper," or "high" can have social as well as economic implications for how we understand the person described.
Black America and the Class Divide
In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading scholar of the first half of the 20th century, defined the urgency of black social responsibility in his famous essay "The Talented Tenth" — 10 being ...
The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts
Below I organize the social psychological literature on social class in terms of the impact of class on three types of outcome: thought, encompassing social cognition and attitudes; emotion, with a focus on moral emotions and prosocial behaviour; and behaviour in high‐prestige educational and workplace settings. I will show that these impacts ...
Brave New World By Aldous Huxley: Social Class Division
In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, social status is given at birth, and this depends on how much a person does. Nobody can control what social class they are actually into, it is all up to fate. Traditional birth is not how new life is formed in the novel though, instead, humans are artificially created with certain qualities that affect how ...
9.4 A New Social Order: Class Divisions
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(PDF) Education and Social Class: Highlighting How the Educational
This chapter considers the idea that the educational system participates in the (re)production of social inequality. After outlining and discussing the sociological hypothesis that institutions ...
Social Class and the American Dream Theme Analysis
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When the Emperor was Divine, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The novel opens with the family having achieved the economic prosperity and success associated with the "American dream.". Wealthy enough not to have to work, the woman 's life is full of traditional ...
The Outsiders: the Theme of Social Classes
Cite this essay. Download. In The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, there is a common theme of class divide rich vs poor and greasers vs socs. In the novel The Outsiders is about two gangs on each side of a town. The socs and the greasers, who have a destructive rivalry and are very different. However throughout the course of the novel their true ...
Class Division In Society Essay
A main issue in society is the division of class within communities. This leads to individuals being divided into select social classes based on their economic standing within the society itself. Due to this division, there are individuals whom are neglected, and others who are praised and followed. However, over the years, select people ...
Social Dimension: Division of Students Into Races and Classes Essay
Social Dimension: Division of Students Into Races and Classes Essay. Race refers to an ideological and social concept that perceives certain people as superior to others based on geographical background and human external features. The race is a concept that influences people's social lives. For example, teacher-student interaction in ...

Essay: Social divisions

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8.3 Social Class in the United States

Measuring Social Class

The American Class Structure

The Upper Class

The Middle Class

The Working Class

The Lower Class

Social Mobility

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Social Class – An Introduction to the Concept

Common Conceptions of Social Class

The Registrar General’s Social Class Scale (1911)

Strengths and Limitations of the Registrar General’s Social Class Scale

The New British Class Survey

Strengths and Limitations of the New British Class Survey

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Social Class in the United States

Measuring Social Class

The American Class Structure

The Upper Class

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The Working Class

The Lower Class

Social Mobility

Key Takeaways

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A New Social Order: Class Divisions

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THE ECONOMIC ELITE

THE MIDDLE CLASS

THE WORKING CLASS

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1 Social divisions and social differences

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What Is Social Class, and Why Does it Matter?

Economic Class

Socio-Economic Class

Social Class

Why Does It Matter?

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Black America and the Class Divide

Black Activism on Campus

Race on College Campuses

9.4 A New Social Order: Class Divisions

THE ECONOMIC ELITE

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THE MIDDLE CLASS

THE WORKING CLASS

P. T. Barnum and the Feejee Mermaid

When the Emperor was Divine

Social Class and the American Dream ThemeTracker

Social Class and the American Dream Quotes in When the Emperor was Divine

Social Dimension: Division of Students Into Races and Classes Essay

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