social strat

• Feminism- Walby

  CHESS V – women oppressed in public and private by culture, household, economically, sexually, by the state, and with violence
• Functionalism- Davis and Moore

  Social stratification comes from role allocation and is meritocratic and normal
• Interactionism

  Labelling contributes to people continuing in the same class.
• Marxism- Marx

  Conflict theory of class struggle between bourgeoisie (owners of means of production) and proletariat (workers for the bourgeoisie). The bourgeoisie prevent the proletariat from rebelling by using institutions to give the proletariat “false class consciousness” – a false dream of meritocracy.
• Devine

  • Is “embourgeoisement” and “privatised instrumentalism” happening with the working class? Yes, working class can make good money, more likely to vote Conservative and have “privatised” family lives, but no, they still call themselves working class, think there is class inequality, and dislike the so-called middle and upper classes.
• New right- Murray


  Criticises welfare state as creating a cycle of dependency and poverty trap, keeping the poor, poor, and creates an underclass, below working class.
• Townsend

  • Relative deprivation is better measure of poverty than state standard of absolute or relative poverty – found 22% of UK live in relative deprivatio
  • Questionnaires to over 2,000 households and over 6,000 individuals.
• Weber

  Similar class background = similar life chances; but class = “market position” – earning power (because some skilled “working class” might earn more than university-educated “middle class”). A person’s place in social hierarchy is a complex mix of “market position”, and power – charismatic, traditional or legal/rational - (because a poor vicar who’s lost all their savings might still enjoy a better social position than a rich builder). Middle class is expanding and revolution is not inevitable.