Chapter Ten: Social Class & Social Inequality in the United States Chapter Summa

Chapter Ten: Social Class & Social Inequality in the United States
Chapter Summary
“There are the poor and the rich, and then there are you and I, neither poor nor rich.” This summarizes the level of consciousness most Americans have regarding social class. The fact is that sociologists have no clear-cut, agreed-upon definition of social class. However, most sociologists adopt Max Weber’s components of social class, defining it as a large group of people who rank close to one another in terms of wealth, power, and prestige.
Wealth and income are not synonymous. It is possible to have great wealth and little income or little wealth but a high income. Wealth and income are unevenly distributed in the United States with a large and growing gap separating the richest Americans from the poorest. The top 20 percent of the population receives almost half of all the income in the United States while the bottom 20 percent receives only slightly more than 4 percent of the nation’s income. An elite group of Americans, made up of the nation’s wealthiest people, wield extraordinary economic, social, and political power in the United States. Conversely, the poorest Americans face tremendous hardships because they lack the means to afford even the most basic necessities of life.
Jobs that pay more, require more education, entail more abstract thought, and offer greater autonomy are ranked higher than jobs that require less education, are lower paying, involve more physical labor, and are closely supervised. A chart of occupational prestige shows that physicians, college professors, and lawyers hold the most prestigious positions and bill collectors, factory workers, and gas station attendants are among the least prestigious positions.
Sociologists use the term, “status inconsistency,” to refer to people who rank higher on some dimensions of social class and lower on others. A study by Ray Gold showed that unionized apartment house janitors made more money than many of the tenants for whom they cleaned and carried out their garbage.
Although both Karl Marx and Max Weber proposed models of social class, both of these models have been modified to be more representative of the class structure as it now exists. Modifying Karl Marx’s model of social class, sociologist Erik Wright identified four classes: capitalists, petty bourgeoisie, managers, and workers. Sociologists Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl developed a social class model, which consists of six classes: the capitalist class, the upper middle class, the lower middle class, the working class, the working poor, and the underclass.
Among other things, social class affects and/or influences people’s health, family life, education, religion, and politics. The lower one’s social class, the more likely that individual will die before the expected age. People from the lower classes are also more likely to smoke, eat more fat, use drugs and alcohol excessively, become involved with violent crime, exercise less, and practice unsafe sexual behavior leading to higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, higher rates of
out-of-wedlock child births, higher infidelity rates, and higher divorce rates. Mental illness is also more closely associated with the lower class population.
Unlike other systems of stratification, class is the most fluid, offering opportunities and providing social mobility—both vertically and horizontally along the social class ladder. Sociologists have identified three basic types of social mobility: intergenerational mobility, structural mobility, and exchange mobility. The degree of mobility is significantly affected by many things including: access to technology, culture, race–ethnicity, gender, age, and, especially, by marital status and where people live.
To measure the degree of poverty a family faces, the government established a standard based on family size and income. The model is based on the factor of three times what the average family of a specific size would spend on food. Families making less than the calculated amount are considered to be below the poverty line and entitled to benefits specifically available to the poor.
The poor are not evenly distributed throughout the United States. There is a clustering of poverty in the South, among African Americans and Latinos, among individuals with less education, and among women. Children are the most adversely affected by poverty and are more likely than adults to live in poverty. The number of children living in poverty is disproportionately high among single-parent families.
The reason people are poor falls between two competing explanations: one stresses features of society that limit some people’s access to opportunities, the other focuses on people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. In an effort to encourage people in poverty to be more self-sufficient, the welfare system was restructured in 1996, requiring states to place a lifetime cap on welfare assistance and requiring welfare recipients to look for and take available jobs.
Portraying America as a land of limitless economic possibilities, the Horatio Alger myth equates hard work with upward social mobility. It suggests that all people who fail to achieve success in America fail because of their own shortcomings.
SOCIAL INEQUALITIES IN US & AROUND THE WORLD
Social inequality is characterized by the existence of unequal opportunities and rewards for different social positions or statuses within a group or society. It contains structured and recurrent patterns of unequal distributions of goods, wealth, opportunities, rewards, and punishments. There are two main ways to measure social inequality: inequality of conditions, and inequality of opportunities. Inequality of conditions refers to the unequal distribution of income, wealth and material goods. Housing, for example, is an inequality of conditions with the homeless and those living in housing projects sitting at the bottom of the hierarchy while those living in multi-million dollar mansions sitting at the top. Inequality of opportunities refers to the unequal distribution of “life chances” across individuals. This is reflected in measures such as level of education, health status, and treatment by the criminal justice system. For example, why do upper-class white males typically have more opportunities for wealth and success compared to lower-class black males, who have a higher chance of landing in the criminal justice system?
Two Main Theories of Social Inequality:
There are two main views of social inequality within sociology. One view aligns with the functionalist theory and the other aligns with conflict theory. Functionalist theorists believe that inequality is inevitable and desirable and plays an important function in society. Important positions in society
require more training and thus should receive more rewards. Social inequality and social stratification, according to this view, lead to a meritocracy based on ability. Conflict theorists, on the other hand, view inequality as resulting from groups with power dominating less powerful groups. They believe that social inequality prevents and hinders societal progress as those in power repress the powerless people in order to maintain the status. Positions are important so long as those in power consider them to be significant.
How Sociologists Study Social Inequality:
Sociologically, we can study social inequality as a social problem that encompasses three dimensions: objective structural conditions, ideological supports, and social reforms. Objective structural conditions include things that can be objectively measured and that contribute to social inequality. Sociologists study how things like educational attainment, wealth, poverty, occupations, and power lead to the social inequality between individuals and groups of people.
Ideological supports include things that support the social inequality present in a society. Sociologists examine how things such as formals laws, public policies, dominant values, etc. both lead to social inequality and help sustain social inequality. Social reforms are thing such as organized resistance, protest groups, and social movements. Sociologists study how these social reforms help shape or change social inequality that exists in a society. What impact do they have, how long does the change last (is it a temporary change or does it lead to permanent change), and how are these social reforms started and organized?
KEY TERMS
After studying the chapter, review the definition for each of the following terms.
anomie: Durkheim’s term for a condition of society in which people become detached from the norms that usually guide their behavior (270)
contradictory class locations: Erik Wright’s term for a position in the class structure that generates contradictory interests (270)
culture of poverty: the assumption that the values and behaviors of the poor make them fundamentally different from other people, that these factors are largely responsible for their poverty, and that parents perpetuate poverty across generations by passing these characteristics to their children (285)
deferred gratification: doing without something in the present in the hope of achieving greater gains in the future (288)
downward social mobility: movement down the social class ladder (278)
exchange mobility: about the same numbers of people moving up and down the social class ladder;
such that, on balance, the social class system shows little change (278)
feminization of poverty (the): refers to the situation that most poor families in the U.S. are headed by women (284)
Horatio Alger myth: the belief that due to limitless possibilities anyone can get ahead if he or she tries
hard enough (288)
income: money received, usually from a job, business, or assets (262)
intergenerational mobility: the change that family members make in social class from one generation
to the next (277)
poverty line: the official measure of poverty; calculated to include incomes that are less than three
times a low-cost food budget (281)
power: the ability to get your way, even over the resistance of others (266)
power elite: C. Wright Mills’ term for the top people in U.S. corporations, military, and politics who
make the nation’s major decisions (266) prestige: respect or regard (266)
property: material possessions: animals, bank accounts, bonds, buildings, businesses, cars, furniture, land, and stocks (262)
social class: according to Weber, a large group of people who rank close to one another in wealth,
prestige, and power; according to Marx, one of two groups: capitalists who own the means of
production and workers who sell their labor (262)
status: the position that someone occupies in a social group (268)
status consistency: ranking high or low on all three dimensions of social class (268)
status inconsistency: ranking high on some dimensions of social class and low on others; also called
status discrepancy (268)
structural mobility: movement up or down the social class ladder that is due to changes in the
structure of society, not to individual efforts (278)
underclass: a group of people for whom poverty persists year after year and across generations (273) upward social mobility: movement up the social class ladder (278)
wealth: the total value of everything someone owns, minus the debts (262)
KEY PEOPLE
Review the major theoretical contributions or findings of these people.
William Domhoff: Drawing upon the work of C. Wright Mills, Domhoff states that the power elite is so powerful that no major decision in the U.S. government is made without its approval. (266, 271)
Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl: These sociologists developed a more contemporary stratification model based on Max Weber’s work. (270-272)
Ray Gold: In research on status inconsistency, Gold studied tenant reactions to janitors who earned more than they did. He found that the tenants acted “snooty” to the janitors, and the janitors took pleasure in knowing the intimate details of the tenants’ lives. (268)
Daniel Hellinger and Dennis Judd: These sociologists identified the average citizen’s belief that he/she exercises political power through the voting process as the “democratic façade” that conceals the real source of power in the United States. (266)
Elizabeth Higginbotham and Lynn Weber: These sociologists studied the mobility patterns for women. They found that those women who experienced upward mobility were most likely to have strong parental support to defer marriage and get an education. (278-279)
Steph Lawler: This sociologist interviewed British women who had achieved upward mobility through education or marriage. (279)
Elliot Liebow: Back in 1967, this sociologist studied black street-corner men. He noted that their circumstances made it difficult for them to save for the future, since whatever funds they had were needed to survive in the present. (288)
Gerhard Lenski: Lenski noted that everyone wants to maximize their status, but that others often judge an individual on the basis of his lowest status despite the individual’s efforts to be judged on the basis of his highest status. (268)
Karl Marx: Marx believed that there were only two social classes- the capitalists and the workers. Membership is based on a person’s relationship to the means of production. (270, 288)
C. Wright Mills: Mills used the term “power elite” to describe the top decision-makers in the nation. (266)
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb: Sennett and Cobb studied the impact that a child’s upward mobility had on his relationship with his parents. They found that the parents’ sacrifices in order to afford the educational costs for their children were rarely appreciated; with increased education the child grew distant from the parents’ world. (279)
Max Weber: Weber developed the definition of social class that is used by most sociologists. He noted that social class is made up of a large group of people who rank close to one another in terms of wealth, power, and prestige. (270-273, 288)
Erik Wright: Wright proposed an updated version of Marx’s theory of stratification. (270) You should do ( your response should be one page & on TNR12 only): STUDENT APPLICATION PROJECTS
I. What social class were your parents? What social class are you now? How did your social class impact your choice of a college or university? Explain. Do you think your college educational experiences will lead to a change in your social class? Why?
II. What images come to mind when you hear the word poverty? List these images. Did your list include images of children without food, clothing, or shelter? Why do many social analysts argue that it is time to stop blaming the victim? What do you think needs to happen to reduce the negative effects of childhood poverty?
III. Choose two social classes and do some research beyond what is in your textbook. How is life different for people in these classes in terms of jobs or careers, family life, health, leisure time, etc?
IV. Sociologists use income, education, and occupational prestige to measure social class. The resulting six categories of social classes are presented in Figure 10.5 on page 277. These three elements used by sociologists may not be the best means of classification for all members of society. If you were to create your own model of the U.S. social class ladder, what elements would you use to classify individuals? Why do you believe that these elements would be appropriate, and how might they provide a better understanding of social stratification in the U.S.?
Suggested Films
Being There. 1979, 107 min. (Video).
A satirical film starring Peter Sellers that looks at power and stratification in business and government.
Economic Systems. Insight Media. 1991, 30 min. (Video).
The film looks at macroeconomic forces, particularly multinationals, that influence
community and family.
Social Class. Insight Media. 1991, 30 min. (Video).
The program explores the views of Weber and Marx on social class.
The Okies: Uprooted Farmers. Films Inc. 1940, 24 min. (16 mm).
Excerpts from the film The Grapes of Wrath. Shows the life of American farmers forced off their land by drought and foreclosure.
This is your opportunity to apply the sociological perspective & chapter concepts to the world around
you, & everyday life .

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