Social Stratification and Inequality
What this domain covers
This domain tests how societies rank people and groups, why inequality persists, and how it is measured. Expect comparisons of stratification systems, the Marx-Weber contrast, mobility types, poverty measures, and race, class, and gender inequality.
Core rules and concepts
- Systems: slavery, caste (closed, ascribed, endogamous), estate, and class (more open, achieved, fluid).
- Marx saw two main classes defined by relation to the means of production, with exploitation and false consciousness. Weber separated class (market situation), status (prestige), and party (power).
- Davis-Moore argued stratification is functional because unequal rewards draw talent to important roles; Tumin replied that it confuses importance with scarcity of talent and ignores inherited advantage.
- Mobility: vertical (up or down) versus horizontal; intergenerational (parent to child) versus intragenerational (within a career).
- Absolute poverty is deprivation of necessities; relative poverty is falling below a society's standard. The U.S. official poverty line derives from Orshansky's 1960s food-budget formula; the Supplemental Poverty Measure adjusts for taxes, transfers, and regional costs.
- Feminization of poverty, the gender pay gap, wealth versus income inequality, and intersectionality (Crenshaw) - overlapping disadvantages - recur as test items.
- Bourdieu: cultural and social capital transmit advantage across generations.
Worked example
Two children of equal tested ability enter school; one has books at home, museum visits, and parents who know how to work the system. Bourdieu would call this unequal cultural capital, a mechanism of social reproduction rather than evidence that stratification rewards raw talent.
Traps that cost marks
- Equating class with income alone.
- Confusing absolute and relative poverty.
- Mixing intergenerational and intragenerational mobility.
- Assuming a caste system permits the mobility a class system allows.