Stratification occurs in every society that has produced a surplus. A society that produces no surplus provides a little opportunity to acquire wealth or prestige and the power based on them. Thus, stratification is intimately related to economics because the layering of people into social levels boils down to attempts to answer the question: who gets what, and why? That is, how shall the scarce resources in the societies be distributed and for what reason? Different societies (political regimes) answer these questions differently, according to these economic systems. Consequently, their stratification systems vary.

Dimensions of Stratification

We have discussed in the last lecture that the basis of all stratification systems is ranking of people according to their possession of things that are scarce and, therefore, highly prized. These scarce resources are popularly categorized as wealth, prestige and power, or in more sociological terms, class, status and power. It is according to these dimensions that people are assigned a rank in society and relegated to a stratum with others who are ranked similarly.

Class

All complex societies are characterized by some kind of structured social inequality (or stratification system). The totality of social stratification will made up of a number of different elements that will vary in their importance between different societies.

Class makes a significant contribution to structured social inequality in contemporary societies. However, it is a multifaceted concept with a variety of different meanings. There is no absolute definition of the concept, or any single absolute way of measuring it. Nevertheless, questions of both definition and measurement have been endlessly contested over the years. Broadly, three dimensions of class may be identified:

1. The economic;
2. The cultural; and
3. The political

The economic dimension has a focus on patterns and explanations of material inequality.

The cultural dimension focuses on lifestyle, social behaviour and hierarchies of prestige.

The political dimension addresses the role of classes and class action, in political, social and economic change.

Common to all sociological conceptions of class is the argument that social and economic inequalities are not natural or divinely ordained, but rather emerge as a consequence of social construction of human behaviour.

Modern ideas of class are inextricably associated with the development of capitalist industrialism. The development of capitalism was accompanied by the emergence of the two conflicting classes identified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as the bourgeoisie (the owners and controllers of capital or the means of production) and the industrial working class or proletariat (those without capital or access to productive resources who were forced to sell their labour in order to survive). This does not mean that industrial capitalism was ever a two-class society, as many other groupings, distinguished by a variety of relationships to both production and the market, have always existed in capitalist societies. For example, in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx identifies (in addition to the proletariat) finance, landholding and industrial capital (different fractions of the capitalist class) as well as the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie (shopkeepers and small owners of private capital), and the lumpenproletariat. Thus, Marx defined class in economic and political terms, and cultures and ideologies were held to be largely determined by class processes.