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Social Stratification
Social stratification is an abstract idea involving the “differentiation of people into
groups based on shared socio-economic conditions and also a relational set of
inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions.” When
variations lead to higher status, power or advantage for some groups over the other it
is called Social Stratification. It is a system by which society ranks categories of people
in a hierarchy. Social stratification is based on four basic principles which includes
Social stratification is a trait of society, not simply a reflection of individual differences;
Social stratification carries over from generation to generation; Social stratification is
universal but variable; Social stratification involves not just inequality but beliefs as
well. In modern Western societies, stratification is broadly organized into three main
layers: upper class, middle class, and lower class. Each of these classes can be further
subdivided into smaller classes. These categories are not particular to state-based
societies as distinguished from feudal societies composed of nobility-to-peasant.
Stratification may also be defined by kinship ties or castes. The concept of social
stratification is interpreted is differently enter by various theoretical perspectives of
sociology.

Systems of Stratification
Sociologists use the term social stratification to describe the system of social standing.
Social stratification refers to a society’s categorization of its people into rankings based
on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and power.
Stratification systems include class systems and caste systems, as well as meritocracy.
Sociologists use the term social stratification to describe the system of social standing.
Social stratification refers to a society’s categorization of its people into rankings based
on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and power.
In today’s world, three main systems of stratification remain: slavery, a caste system,
and a class system.

Functions of Stratification
One of the main functions of class stratification is to induce people to work hard to live
up to values. Those who best fulfill the values of a particular society are normally
rewarded with greater prestige and social acceptance by others.
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Social Structure and Social Change: Basic Concepts

In this lecture, we shall discuss basic concepts of social structure and social change.
Structure
Structure refers to any recurring pattern of social behaviour; or, more specifically, to
the ordered interrelationships between the different elements of a social system or
society. Social structure is generally agreed to be one of the most important but also
most elusive concepts in the social sciences (Sewell 1992). It is sometimes used rather
loosely to refer to any observable pattern “in social activities, and empirical
researchers, for example, have referred to statistical distributions of occupations and
employment as disclosing the social structure of a society. More typically, however, it
is seen as designating the actual arrangement of individuals and groups into those
larger entities that Durkheim saw as social facts. The term, “structure” originated as an
application of ideas from biology, where the structure of an organism is the
anatomical arrangement of its various organs. Social systems were seen as organized
around “institutional” arrangement of individuals that defined their actual relations to
each other. Most expounded in structural functionalism, the institutions of a society
are clusters of norms and meanings, drawn from the culture, that define the
expectations that people hold about each other’s behaviour. It is through these
expectations that specific roles and reciprocal role relationships are defined.
Social Structure
A social structure does not, however, consist only of such institutional connections.
People act upon the institutionalized role expectations and so come into definite and
recurrent relations with each other. Although there is rarely a perfect correspondence
between institutionalized expectations and actual social relations, the term, “social
structure” designates this crucial combination of institutions and relations as
constituting the “anatomy” of a society. Social structure, then, comprises both
“institutional structure” and “relational structure”.
Unlike the structure of a building or an organism, a social structure is not directly
visible. It is evidenced through observable movements and actions of individuals, but it
cannot be reduced to these. The core institutional norms and meanings are cultural
phenomena that exist only as shared ideas and representations in the minds of
individuals. For this reason, socialization into a culture is central to the maintenance of
a social structure.
The product of human agency, social structures express the fact that what people
intend should never be confused with what results.
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Premodern thought is basically structural in character. People act through social roles
that determine their action, and great stress is laid upon executing a particular role
according to the norms governing it. A male feudal lord is expected to act quite
differently from say, a female servant. These structures are seen as timeless, and are
usually ascribed to the creative interventions of higher divinity.
With the onset of modernity – ushering in of the Industrial Revolution, emergence of
modern science and critical thinking, such notions dramatically changed. People are
presented as individuals who can choose which role they play and change from one
role to another.
Structures
Seemingly dissolve into agency, so that what matters is the will of individuals to alter
the world in which they find themselves. The problem with this position is that not
only is agency presented abstractly – that is, as outside society – but the same abstract
force that enables some to be actors condemns others to passivity. Hence the classical
liberals limited their notion of the individual to men who owned property, were
Protestants (in the west) and upper castes (in India), and had the correct ethnicity.
Timeless structures had not disappeared – they were merely assigned to others.
Embodied structures are found in the habits and skills that are inscribed in human
bodies and minds and that allow them to produce, reproduce, and transform
institutional structures and rational structures – norms, values, interests, procedures
and social interaction. The emphasis upon agency and the individual is important, but
it needs to be linked dynamically and historically to the notion of structure. People
became conscious actors not simply because they had changed their ideas, but
because they acquired through the market the wealth that enabled them to command
the services of others. They may have imagined that social structures simply affected
others – women, the poor, backward castes, the residents of the colonies, and so
forth. But this is an illusion. The market is itself a social structure and, as such, dictates
to beneficiaries and victims alike how they are to conduct themselves. Social
structures are the product of agency. Without conscious action, there would be no
structures. But what makes a practice structural is that the patterning which results
has implications and imposes constraints that correspond only imperfectly to the
intentions of those who created them. The structural argument that people enter
social relations independent of their will cannot mean that these relations are the
product of automatons – creatures without intention and purpose. What it means is
that the result of activities undertaken is never the same as the intention of those who
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undertook these activities; it is this gap between intention and consequence that
creates the structural character of activity. It is not that these structures are brought
about by the will of some higher power, but human activity in which intention and
result hardly coincide. Being aware of this makes it possible to try and organize our
activities with greater consideration of their likely consequences. It is however, a
mistake to imagine that any society, no matter how enlightened and well regulated,
can extinguish the gulf between intention and result, since the fallibility of humans
and the complexity of social practices make it inevitable that agency and structure will
remain distinct. Social Change social change is one of the central research problems of
sociology, where change is not seen as a mere succession of separate events but as a
structured process in which it may be possible to identify a specific direction or
tendency.
All societies recognize social change. Three important questions arise in the context of
social change:

(a) Is this change natural and normal?

(b) What is the source of social change?
(c) What is the tempo – extent and intensity – of social change?

Premodern societies regard change as external and problematic. The way things have
been done in the past is a powerful indicator as to how they should be done in the
present, and this sense of continuity is understandable. To venerate others in the
contemporary world, one needs to venerate their ancestors, since each of us is a
product of the past – our parents and grandparents, and so on, physically and
culturally produced us – and therefore disrespect to them is also disrespect for their
progeny.
Such a position, despite its valid and valuable features, runs the risk of idealizing the
past, and it leads to a paralyzing relativism (whatever happened in the past was good)
and an authoritarian absolutism (in the past reflected a timeless truth that
contemporary society foolishly disregards).
It is important not to take these attitudes at face value, for veneration of the past is
linked to the needs of the present, and traditionalists may distort the past in order to
justify present practices. Change is seen as either the tragic disintegration of a golden
age or at best a cyclical process. In the middle of the 19 th century, the first attempts at
sociological analysis were prompted by the need to explain two great waves of change
that were sweeping across Europe:
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(i) Industrialization, and

(ii) Expansion of democracy and human rights in the wake of the American and
French Revolutions.

Auguste Comte, in his theory of social dynamics, proposed that societies progressed
through a series of predictable stages based on the development of human
knowledge.
Herbert Spencer offered a theory of change that was evolutionary, based on
population growth and structural differentiation.
Karl Marx contented that the most significant social changes were revolutionary in
nature, and were brought about by the struggle for supremacy between economic
classes.
In the 20th century, theories of social change proliferated and became more complex,
without ever wholly transcending these early formulations. In the modern world we
are aware that society is never static, and that social, political and cultural changes
occur constantly. Change may be initiated by governments, through legislative or
execution action (for example, legislating for equal pay or declaring a war); by citizens
organized in social movements (for example trade unionism, feminism); by diffusion
from one culture to another (as in military conquest, migration, colonialism); or by the
intended or unintended consequences of technology. Some of the most dramatic
social changes in modern times have been initiated by such inventions as the motor
car, antibiotics, television and computer. Change can also come through the impact of
environmental factors such as drought, famine and international shifts in economic or
political vicinity.