Social Stratification and Social Mobility
What this domain tests
This domain tests the forms and features of stratification, the caste-class distinction, theoretical perspectives on inequality, and the accurate classification of mobility as vertical or horizontal, intergenerational or intragenerational.
Stratification
- Social stratification is society's ranking of categories of people into unequal layers with unequal access to scarce resources such as wealth, power and prestige. It is social, persistent and often legitimated by ideology.
- Forms: slavery (ownership), estate (feudal legal orders), caste (ascribed, endogamous, hierarchical) and class (economic, achieved, relatively open).
- Caste features: birth-ascribed membership, endogamy, hereditary occupation, purity and pollution hierarchy, and caste panchayats. M. N. Srinivas described Sanskritization as lower castes adopting upper-caste rituals to claim higher status; it is not conversion.
- Class: based on economic position and social status; open in principle. Marx analysed class by relation to the means of production; Weber added status and party.
- Functionalists such as Davis and Moore see stratification as necessary for filling important roles; conflict theorists see it as inequality maintained by dominant groups.
Social mobility
- Vertical mobility is movement up or down the hierarchy. Horizontal mobility is a change of position without a change of rank, such as moving between similar posts.
- Intergenerational mobility compares a person with their parents; intragenerational mobility occurs within one lifetime.
- Open societies allow more mobility; closed societies such as caste restrict it.
- Factors include education, occupation, migration, marriage and state policy such as reservation and scholarships.
Worked example
The son of daily-wage labourers clears an exam and becomes a government officer. This is intergenerational vertical upward mobility. If he later moves between departments at the same rank, that is horizontal mobility. If his daughter becomes a professor, the comparison is again intergenerational. Reasoning: identify the two points of comparison and whether rank changes.
Traps
- Caste is not class; caste is ascribed and endogamous, class is economic and more open.
- Mobility can be downward; do not assume all mobility is upward.
- Sanskritization is not conversion or a legal change of caste.
- Social mobility is not physical migration, though migration can cause it.