Key Concepts and Contemporary Approaches to Structured Inequality: Capital, Power and Status

By Carl Bankston III

This book presents an introduction to the concept of social inequality. It provides a theoretical and historical background to ways of approaching this topic and discusses classic and modern theories of stratification. After identifying the key concepts of this topic, the book lays out evidence on the nature and extent of contemporary social and economic inequality. It then considers categorical forms of inequality, notably, race, class, and gender. Finally, the book examines sources of social inequality and discusses political consequences of stratification and different policy responses. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839987786

Book preview

Introduction

HOW WE THINK ABOUT INEQUALITY

When I teach a course in social stratification, I usually begin the first class by asking students to list some of the ways in which people are unequal. Inevitably, their first answers are heavily freighted with moral judgements current in the modern university. People are unequal, they answer, because some grow up in privileged circumstances, while others do not. People are unequal because they suffer from racial discrimination, or benefit from it. People are unequal because some have less access than others to education or health care. Gender roles constrict opportunities for some and expand opportunities for others. Differences in treatment by police and the legal system have become increasingly common among the first answers in recent years.

I generally do not disagree with the moral orientations implicit in these examples. In fact, in most ways, I share the values dominant in contemporary academia. But the first answers my students give constitute a free association test. Our initial associations tell us as much about our own minds as they do about the realities surrounding us. Are there other ways in which people are unequal? With a little prodding, the students will move on to a host of individual characteristics. Some are physically stronger. Some can run faster. Some have musical talents or are good at writing or mathematics. Some are especially diligent at whatever they do.

As we talk about these ways in which people are unequal, the difference between structural inequalities, the kinds they view with suspicion or disfavor, and individual inequalities, the kinds they see as inevitable and even desirable, emerges. Is there some connection, though, between the two types? If someone shows exceptional musical skill and learns to play the piano at age three without lessons, might the fact that there is a piano in the house have something to do with the development of individual talent even in this extreme case?

If one argues that individual outcomes have nothing to do with abilities or personal characteristics, and that the outcomes are just reflections of positions in an unequal social structure, the obvious implication is that people have no agency. But if one argues that all variations in life circumstances could be attributed to individual abilities and efforts, then there would be no such thing as opportunity. The person with no piano in the house would have just as much of a chance to become an accomplished player as someone with an instrument, living in an ideal situation for developing musical talent.

The complicated relationship between individual action and social position is one of the fundamental topics of stratification, I suggest to the students. Connected to this is the question of why, apart from personal qualities, life chances can differ. What makes a piano more or less widely available or influences which homes will have them and which will not?

The issue of individual and structural inequalities leads to looking more carefully at those moral orientations. The word inequality immediately called up negative associations, but are most students (or most people) really opposed to all forms of inequality? Do they believe that everyone should have exactly the same income or live in homes of exactly the same value? Yes is a perfectly legitimate answer to questions like this, but only if one takes an ideological stance that few students actually accept. Most will say that inequality is acceptable, or even desirable, to the extent that it results from individual skills and actions, rather than from structural positions. But that returns to the recognition that what people can do is unavoidably linked to where they are in a society.

Two of the main kinds of equality, I suggest, are equality of opportunity and equality of condition. The few who would answer yes to the questions above would logically have to discard the former altogether. Opportunity is an inherently competitive idea, one that necessitates inequality of outcomes. But equal opportunity is also a problem. If we have unequal conditions, then we cannot compete on an equal basis. If we compete, then we create unequal conditions.

Equality of condition, moreover, often involves baselines. If we reject the goal of making everyone’s situation the same, we can still hold that there are some universal standards. Concerns about discriminatory treatment by police and the justice system derive from the view that all individuals should be equal under the law even if they are unequal in wealth or prestige. Assertions that health care, education, or a minimal standard of living constitutes human rights are claims that even in a stratified society there should be base levels. But who decides what these base levels should be and how can they be guaranteed? If people differ in power or in wealth, how can the differences be prevented from affecting actual treatment by the legal system or the quality of available health care?

Behind all of these considerations lies something much broader. What shapes the setting in which we compete or in which we live in relatively similar circumstances? What forces influence our opinions about the baselines should be and what are the debates about those baselines? How much control can people exercise over this setting and which people exercise that control?

The present text is inspired by fundamental questions like these. It is an effort to put the topic of social stratification into a concise volume that introduces readers to the main theories and concepts of this topic, to ways of analyzing existing inequalities, to developments in social stratification today, and to political and policy debates about social and economic inequality.

Stratification as a Social Construction

Stratification, or structured inequality, is a social construction in two senses. First, the positions that exist in every human society are results of social processes and differ across time and place. Second, the ways that we think about those positions are shaped by our participation in particular societies.

To illustrate the first sense, we can consider the difference between the organization of human societies and that of other social creatures. Ants and bees are also social creatures, and they live in communities characterized by hierarchical division of labor (see, e.g., the classic work on social insects by Edward O. Wilson, 1971). Within varieties of social insects, though, one can find few differences in social organization. Even among social animals that are more similar to us, such as gorillas and our close cousins, the two types of chimpanzees, social organization within species tends to vary relatively little. By contrast, though, there is such an enormous range of differentiation among present and past human societies that it is difficult to identify the limits of possible change in the future. One of the chief tasks of an overview of the subject of human social stratification, then, is to grapple with the question of what causes variation in the unequal structuring of societies. This is essential not just for understanding our current situation, but also for adopting policy responses to it.

The second sense in which stratification is socially constructed is a matter of the sociology of knowledge. In social science, we face the challenge of embedded subjectivity. Even as we try to describe our social world, our social world is shaping our perceptions and descriptions. For much of human history, people interpreted structured inequality as the given order of the world. This way of thinking about societies as divided into orders has also carried normative judgement: in a well-ordered society, people are supposed to stay within their orders, often circumscribed by sumptuary laws and norms defining how people in different levels should dress or carry themselves.

The vision of stratification that now dominates modern understandings and expectations is, no less than the feudal vision, a product of the society itself. Rapid social change, especially stimulated by the industrial revolution and the emergence of market societies, led us to emphasize the inherent changeability of social forms. The changeability applied to individuals, as well as to the positions of those individuals. A status became a place in society that one occupies, rather than an identity that one holds. This way of seeing social structure and the relationship between individuals and social structure bore its own normative judgements.

In the free association of my students’ responses to the question of inequality, there is a kind of implicit social contract perspective that entails a generally unconscious assumption of a sort of nonsocial state of nature. Individuals are inherently equal in identities undetermined by social forces. Because they can, in theory, move among statuses, they retain a true identity outside of any particular status. Inequality is acceptable to the extent that it results from the actions of individuals freely entering into social positions and unacceptable to the extent that it results from social forms that constrain and define individuals.

We can see our assumptions about the relationship between individuals and social structure reflected in the way we talk about social influences. Society teaches us that …. Or society tells us that …, with the things that society teaches us or tells us understood to be distorting the true nature of things. It is as if we could return to the paradise inside ourselves if only we would stop listening to the external voice of society.

Recognizing that the concepts and values of modern liberal democracy are socially constructed and often carry unexamined assumptions does not mean rejecting those concepts and values as mere illusions. To do so would be to discard the very possibility of any kind of knowledge or judgement. But it does necessitate introspection and reflexivity in order to clarify the influences on our own thinking.

In this book, I have tried to look at the difficult topic of structured inequality in a way that invites the reader to debate and clarify theoretical approaches to stratification and recognizes the reflexive nature of sociological thinking. Beyond that, though, I have tried to bring in empirical evidence on contemporary stratification. Based on theory and evidence, I have attempted to delineate what that contemporary stratification means for political life and what policy responses may be possible. Of course, I cannot stand in a place of perfect objectivity and, like every other observer, I wear blinders of background and experience. I encourage readers to take this text critically in a spirit of debate and reasoned discourse.

Concise Overview of Stratification

This book begins with major theories of stratification and then proceeds to lay out the fundamental concepts of this area of social science. It then takes an empirical look at contemporary stratification, beginning with the influential race–class–gender orientation and with the evidence regarding this way of organizing facts about social inequality. It follows by describing the environmental setting of structured inequality today. It then moves to possible causes of inequality of individuals within social structures. In the final section, the text treats stratification as a political issue and then examines some of the major policy responses to structured inequality.

The first chapter deals with theories. The first section describes two pre-sociological views of sources of social inequality and a third view by a founder of sociology that expressed a program of intentional social design. The second chapter examines how the most important classic sociological theorists who were concerned with stratification set frameworks for thinking about structured inequality. The third chapter deals with the modern approaches of structural functionalism or order theory, of conflict theory, and it ends by discussing how ecological-evolutionary theory can provide a synthesis.

Chapter 2 follows theories of structured stratification by giving readers clear understandings of the main concepts and means of measurement. It lays out first the concepts of status, caste, and class. It then moves on to the related concept of mobility, placing particular emphasis on the distinction between individual and structural mobility, on how these two are connected. The distinction between individual and structural mobility sets the stage for a section on status attainment and class as ways of studying inequality. A section on the hotly debated concept of meritocracy follows from these two ways of studying and thinking about inequality. The chapter ends with an explication of measurements, looking at measurements of degrees of ownership and control and at the components of the commonly used index of socioeconomic status.

The third chapter opens the discussion of contemporary stratification with a discussion of the current social and economic setting of structured inequality. This chapter is essentially an application of a class analysis perspective to contemporary stratification. It begins with a section on increasing inequality as a characteristic of contemporary highly developed societies, and in particular of the United States and it then proceeds to present evidence regarding a growing socioeconomic division. Following this discussion of the division, the book looks at how globalization and the expansion of the importance of the financial and technological sectors resulting from globalization have affected social stratification. In the next section of the chapter, the book considers the movement of people as part of the same process as the movement of goods and services. It examines how immigration has contributed to change in the American population and links this change to the issue of ethnic stratification and to debates about the growing divide. It follows by putting economic and demographic developments into the broader context of globalization and the increasing dominance of technology and finance. A final section explores the issue of a cultural and ideological divide accompanying the socioeconomic divide, linking the cultural consequences of economic change with attitudes toward demographic change.

The fourth chapter follows this examination of the socioeconomic setting with a consideration of the topic of categorical inequality, the race–class–gender orientation that occupies a large part of current discourse in the social sciences. The chapter deals with how a race–gender–class view can provide insights into existing stratification, and also suggests that there are aspects of social inequality that may not receive attention from focusing exclusively on social categories of advantage and disadvantage. It begins with a section on racial and ethnic inequality, looking briefly at the historical background of this form of categorical stratification and providing a summary of the social movements that have brought race and ethnicity to the forefront of public attention. It gives evidence of the continuing influence of race and ethnicity in the distribution of resources and opportunities and in explicit and implicit discriminatory treatment.

A section on gender follows the one on race and ethnicity. It begins by briefly discussing the apparent origins of gender roles and in touching on historical and contemporary differences. It argues that contemporary demands for change in gender roles derive from the rise of the corporate society, the entry of women into the labor force, and the influence of the civil rights movement. It ends by discussing the broadening of the concept of gender and gender equality by looking at the extension of this concept to nonheterosexual categories.

Although the topic of class runs throughout the text, because this is an important kind of categorical equality, this topic receives special attention in a section in this chapter. Although class may be defined in different ways, as a social category, it generally refers to those who occupy the same economic situation. This section offers a brief summary of how relatively advantaged and disadvantaged economic categories influence life outcomes.

The chapter on categorical inequality ends with a section on intersectionality, on how categories of disadvantage may intersect and overlap. This section discusses how this kind of focus on interaction can be useful because it recognizes that race/ethnicity, gender, and class may work in different ways for people in different groups. The section gives examples to illustrate this point. However, an intersectional approach can also lead us to overlook aspects of stratification that cannot be readily resolved into questions of advantage versus disadvantage or oppressors versus oppressed.

Chapter 5 turns to the problem of causation, of what makes people unequal. While the previous chapter described the structural setting of stratification, this chapter connects that class analysis view to the question of status attainment. In separate sections, the chapter considers discrimination, culture, family structure and family relations, educational resources, and social networks as causes of unequal outcomes. The chapter ends by proposing a way of integrating these causes into a diagram that suggests a causal chain.

The final chapter turns to matters of politics and policy. Again, the study of stratification is not limited to describing the structure of society and identifying causes. It also entails evaluation and decisions about action. I suggest that stratification is a political issue for two main reasons. First, the type and degree of inequality in a society shape the distribution of power and influence among individuals and groups. Second, responding to inequality is unavoidably a matter of governmental policy, whether the response is one of promoting inequality, passive acceptance, or some form of active egalitarian intervention. The sections in this chapter describe political dilemmas posed by stratification and possible policy responses.

The first subsection treats the power elite problem, the tendency to concentrate control in a small number of actors. Related to this, but from a different perspective, a second subsection examines concerns about the managerial state. This is the Weberian- influenced view that bureaucracy concentrates control, and that even social reformist bureaucracies can become organizational oligarchies. The third subsection deals with what is sometimes a reaction to perceptions of bureaucratic concentration. This is the phenomenon of illiberal populism, an alliance between a leader and a mass power base.

A section on policy looks at some of the major policy responses to structured inequality. This includes government programs to promote upward mobility, affirmative action and categorical reparations, tax policies, and efforts to establish an economic floor through minimum wage and universal basic income. The subsections in this part of the book try to weigh arguments for and against each of these policy approaches.

The for and against strategy for considering specific policies leads to the final short chapter of the book. This is an effort to lay out general considerations in thinking about redistribution. It lays out the competing philosophical, political, and economic arguments for and against redistribution. This section emphasizes that most of us are neither radical egalitarians in all respects nor proponents of undisturbed laissez-faire inequality. In understanding how to think about structured inequality, readers must examine their own assumptions and the implications of their views.

At the end of each of these chapters, readers will find a discussion and debate section. These sections are intended to engage readers in the topics involved in structured inequality, to actively and critically summarize the main points in each chapter, and to encourage readers to think about their positions regarding these topics.

Chapter 1

THEORIES OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY

The Origins of Modern Thought on Stratification

Why do people find themselves in unequal positions in a society? Why do some have more power or more resources or more resources than others? Proposed answers to questions like these are causal explanations or theories of inequality. Some of the earliest modern efforts to explain why societies are arranged the way they are focused on the question of why inequality exists.

Relations among people, whether relatively equal or unequal, are arrangements of connections. One way to think about those connections, and therefore to think about society itself, is to consider what human life would be like outside of a social order. This approach to social thought is known as social contract theory. This does not necessarily require a belief that humans did live in a pre-social state at some point in the past. Contemporary social contract theorists often emphasize that thinking about people outside of society is simply a way of conceptualizing how relations among individuals allow them to live together or to judge the advantages and disadvantages of specific ways of organizing human societies. In the social contract approaches of the early modern theorists that we will consider in the following sections, one can see major trends in explanations of stratification that continue to characterize contemporary approaches. The most notable trends consist of explanations based on order and explanations based on exploitation.

Hobbes and the Problem of Order

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was one of the earliest and most influential social contract theorists. A man of wide-ranging interests, in the 1640s and 1650s, he focused his attention on human life, particularly on its civic aspects. His approach was geometric; beginning with essential premises, he attempted to derive comprehensive explanations. His best-known and most influential work was the 1651 book, Leviathan Or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, more commonly known simply as Leviathan. The book is divided into four parts: Of Man, 
Of Common-Wealth (i.e, civic society), Of A Christian Common-Wealth, and Of the Kingdom of Darknesse.

Hobbes begins, then, with an anthropology, with an account of the senses, of the nature of knowledge, and of consequent human nature. From this foundation, he derives the nature and function of civil order. In the last two parts, which generally receive less attention from modern readers than the first two, he discusses how a civil society produced by natural forces takes on specific characteristics in a Christian setting and how theological errors produce challenges to a Christian order.

At the heart of the anthropology of Hobbes lies every individual’s drive for self-interest.