Social Stratification, Social Mobility and Social Inequality
What the exam tests
You must distinguish caste, class and estate, explain open and closed stratification, classify mobility, and analyse inequality as multidimensional.
Core rules and concepts
- Social stratification: ranked groups with unequal access to resources, power and prestige. Main forms: slavery, estate, caste and class.
- Caste: closed, ascribed, endogamous, hierarchically ranked, historically linked to purity and pollution. Class: relatively open, achieved, economically grounded; Weber added status and party as separate dimensions of stratification.
- Social mobility: movement between positions. Vertical mobility is up or down; horizontal mobility is a change without rank change. Intergenerational mobility compares parent and child; intragenerational mobility occurs within one lifetime.
- Social inequality: unequal distribution of income, wealth, education, health, gender and cultural recognition. Caste, class, gender and region often intersect.
Worked example
A daily-wage worker's daughter becomes a doctor. Reasoning: this is intergenerational upward mobility because the daughter's class position is higher than her father's. But the case also shows structural constraints: scholarships, family sacrifice and caste or gender barriers affect whether mobility is possible. Do not call it intragenerational mobility, which would compare one person's earlier and later jobs.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating caste and class as interchangeable; caste is ascribed and endogamous, class is achieved and relatively open.
- Defining mobility only as upward movement.
- Reducing inequality to income alone.
- Ignoring intersectionality: caste, class and gender together.