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INEQUALITY
Power, prestige and wealth
Training Handout
A core topic in Sociology
INEQUALITY IN SOCIOLOGY
While inequality has been around
since the earliest human societies, it is the excess oppression and exploitation
of the workers by the factory owners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
which made it such an important topic in sociology.
Since the origin of
sociology up to to today it remains the core topic of the
discipline.
From earliest times, inequality has
been based on social extrapolations of physical differences. See: Age,
Race Sex.
THE THREE ELEMENTS
Today sociologists see the three
criteria of social class as:
Property (wealth),
Power, and
Prestige.
In society people are
unequal in all these three.
In smaller, simpler
societies, there is a shorter range from bottom to top in all
these.
In more complex, urban
industrial societies, there is a bigger range in all these
criteria.
Karl Marx defined class only in terms
of "relations to production" (he was not a sociologist, just a "father"
of sociology).
The two main classes
to him were the workers and the owners of the factories.
After Marx, who died in 1883, Durkheim
and Weber added power and prestige to make the three criteria of
inequality.
Modern sociologists prefer to use
"wealth" instead of property, but the meaning is the same.
In terms of the six cultural dimensions,
power belongs to the political dimension, wealth belongs to the economic
dimension and prestige belongs to the values and aesthetics
dimension.
STATUS INCONSISTENCY
Status inconsistency
is when these three are not aligned.
A rural preacher, for
example, may be very high in prestige but have very little
money.
A tricky lawyer may be rich, but despised.
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SOCIAL MOBILITY
Social mobility means
a change in level, upwards or downwards.
The three types of social mobility
are:
Inter generational (when an offspring achieves
a higher or lower position than her or his parents); Structural mobility (a change in society's structure
where large numbers shift up or down); and Exchange Mobility (overall society remains the
same but people move both up and down in it).
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––»«––Last update:
2011.08.16
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