James Littlejohn - Social Stratification

Volume 7

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

JAMES LITTLEJOHN

First published in 1972 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd

This edition first published in 2022

by Routledge

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1972 George Allen & Unwin Ltd

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ISBN: 978-1-03-207714-7 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-00-321960-6 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-210032-6 (Volume 7) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-03-210038-8 (Volume 7) (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-00-321333-8 (Volume 7) (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213338

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First published 1972

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2. Structure and Stratification

3. Slavery, Ancient and Modern

4. Caste Society

5. Modern Society

SOCIAL stratification is the name under which sociologists study inequality in society, i.e. the unequal distribution of goods and services, rights and obligations, power and prestige. These are all attributes of positions in society, not attributes of individuals. Individuals are unequally endowed as regards, for instance, health, strength and I.Q., but such differences do not provide the data from which studies in stratification start, although as we shall see later sociologists are interested in knowing to what extent and in what way individual differences in health and I.Q. are associated with the social inequalities which are our object of study. No sociological training is required to observe many of these latter differenceseveryone knows that wages in some occupations are low and salaries in others high, that Cabinet Ministers have more power than ordinary citizens, that doctors enjoy higher prestige than dustmen and so on. Most of us are indeed naturally curious about these differences and adopt some attitude towards them. In this respect sociologists are distinguished from fellow citizens only in wanting more, and more exact, information.

However, sociologists also want to know how these differences arise, what differences in behaviour are associated with them and what consequences for society follow from them. Simply collecting information on distributions of socially valued rewards or on deprivations is not what most sociologists mean by the study of stratification. When they say of a society that it is stratified they are referring to a feature of the structure of that society, and they mean that the society exhibits significant breaks or discontinuities in the distribution of one or several of the attributes mentioned above, as a result of which are formed collectivities or groups which we call strata. For example, of our own society we sometimes say that it has an upper class, a middle class and a working class. It is the relations between or among such strata, and the relation of the system of relations formed by the strata to institutional complexes, such as politics or education, in which the sociologist is primarily interested.

Sociologists have distinguished several general types of stratification. A major distinction has been formulated by T. H. Marshall as follows. On the one hand are systems in which the difference between one stratum and another is

expressed in terms of legal rights or of established customs which have the essential binding character of law. In its extreme form such a system divides a society into a number of distinct, hereditary human speciespatricians, plebians, serfs, slaves and so forth. Stratification is, as it were, an institution in its own right, and the whole structure has the quality of a plan, in the sense that it is endowed with meaning and purpose.

On the other hand is the kind of system which is not so much an institution in its own right as a by-product of other institutions; strata

emerge from the interplay of a variety of factors related to the institutions of property and education and the structure of the national economy.

Within the first of these general types sociologists have distinguished a few subtypes, particularly systems of estates and of castes, and some sociologists include as a distinct type those in which the most important discontinuity in the distribution of rights is that between slaves and freemen. Estates are strata distinguished from each other through differential immunities defined in law, e.g. immunities regarding taxation, or the kind of court in which the individual can be tried. A stratum of slaves is from some points of view an estate, since the important distinction between a slave and a freeman is that the former does not, or only to a limited extent, enjoy the protection of civil courts. However, as a particularly dramatic example of stratification we may consider slavery separately from estate systems. Caste denotes a kind of stratification most conspicuously, and according to some authorities exclusively, associated with Hindu society, in which the diffrences between strata are defined in the first instance in religious terms by degrees of purity and impurity.

Under the second heading come those systems of stratification characteristically found in industrial democracies such as our own. Societies exhibiting the previously described types of stratification are characterized by their acceptance of a general norm of inequality. People do not subscribe to the proposition that all men are equal, or at least not to the extent of ensuring that all are equally placed with regard to the law, or of allowing that all have equal access to grace or purity. Societies exhibiting the types under the second heading accept a general norm of equality and some, such as America, write it into their constitution. The norm is a major element in the modern conception of natural law, or natural right, which Weber defined as the sum total of all those norms valid independently of, and superior to, any positive law, and which provide the very legitimation for the binding force of positive law, for example, those laws which confer on all citizens the right to dispose of their private property or their labour without interference, or the right to vote.