Social Class Stratification

The almshouse was an institution of poor relief specifically targeted at the destitute members of the lowest social class, reflecting and reinforcing the broader stratification of a community.

Apartheid functioned as a legally codified system of social class stratification layered onto and enforced through racial categorization in twentieth-century South Africa.

The caste system is a hereditary, endogamous form of social stratification; a specific historical instance of the general institution.

Massey American Apartheid, with Nancy Denton, showed how residential segregation produced and hardened racial stratification in American cities.

Bonilla-Silva Racism without Racists theorized colorblind racism as the ideology sustaining racial stratification after the retreat of explicit Jim Crow rhetoric.

Wright neo-Marxist class analysis introduced contradictory class locations to describe positions, such as managers, that hold simultaneous exploiter and exploited relations within stratification.

Fernandes dependency-influenced sociology analyzed how Brazil class structure was shaped by its position in the international capitalist order.

Goldthorpe class schema, built from employment relations rather than income alone, became one of the most widely used empirical measures of social class stratification.

Davis, with Wilbert Moore, argued in the Davis-Moore thesis that social stratification is a functional necessity that channels the most qualified people into a society most important positions.

Weber's three-component model (class, status, power) is one of the two most influential classical theories of stratification, alongside Marx's two-class model.

Omi, with Howard Winant, developed racial formation theory, treating race as a shifting social category that organizes and is organized by broader stratification.

Lin social capital theory analyzed how access to resources embedded in social networks reproduces advantage across social class stratification.

A system of stratification organized by gender rather than by caste or economic class, but structurally comparable as a hierarchy that allocates authority and resources unequally.

Collins matrix of domination theorized how race, gender and class intersect as simultaneous, mutually reinforcing systems of social stratification.

Sorokin Social Mobility theorized the channels and mechanisms through which individuals and groups move between layers of social class stratification.

Plutocracy, rule by the wealthy, is a form of political power directly derived from and reinforcing a society's underlying class stratification.

Dahrendorf Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society reworked Marx stratification theory around authority relations rather than property ownership alone.

Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class analyzed conspicuous consumption as a mechanism through which the wealthy display and reproduce their position in social class stratification.

Pareto theory of the circulation of elites modeled social class stratification as a cyclical process in which one governing elite is eventually replaced by another.

Wilson The Truly Disadvantaged argued that economic restructuring, not culture alone, produced a concentrated urban Black underclass.

Meritocracy is proposed by its advocates as an allocation principle superior to inherited class position, though critics, including Young himself, argue it obscures rather than eliminates class advantage.