Social class refers to the hierarchical distinctions between individuals or groups in societies or cultures. While anthropologists, historians and sociologists identify class as a social structure emerging from pre-history, the idea of social class entered the English lexicon about the 1770s. Social classes with more power usually subordinate classes with less power. Social classes with a great deal of power are usually viewed as elites, at least within their own societies.
Sociological class
Schools of sociology differ in how they conceptualise class. A distinction can be drawn between analytical concepts of social class, such as the Marxian and Weberian traditions, and the more empirical traditions such as socio-economic status approach, which notes the correlation of income, education and wealth with social outcomes without necessarily implying a particular theory of social structure. The Warnerian can also be considered empirical in the sense that it is more descriptive than analytical.
Traditions differ about which social traits are significant enough to define a class, although when sociologists speak of "class" in modern society they usually mean economically-based classes. The relative importance and definition of membership in a particular class differs greatly over time and between societies, particularly in societies that have a legal differentiation of groups of people by birth or occupation.
Weberian class
The seminal sociological interpretation of class was advanced by Max Weber. Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with class, status and party (or politics) as conceptually distinct elements.
- Class is based on economic relationship to the market (owner, renter, employee, etc.)
- Status has to do with non-economic qualities such as education, honour and prestige
- Party refers to factors having to do with affiliations in the political domain
Each of the three dimensions has consequences for what Weber called "life chances". His concept of class owes a lot to Marx's, though with some important differences, but he goes beyond Marx in delineating the status and political dimensions of stratification. For Marx, these dimensions are subordinate to class, but for Weber how they interact is a contingent question and one that will vary from society to society.
Dimensions of sociological class
This graphic shows a definition of social class proposed by the New York Times, using quintiles as measurement for class. The information was based on US Census data from the 2000 Census as well as the 2003 Economic census survey. The graphic show four different attributes which affect social class; professional prestige, educational attainment, income, and wealth.
The following traits are sometimes used to define social class:
Stratum models of class
Sociologists generally identify different classes as social strata in higher or lower order based on a class's measurable position on a dimensional scale. The number of models possible is dependent upon the analytical and statistical framework used in particular sociological studies. Some typical models include:
- Two-class models
- That divide societies between the powerful and weak.
- Three-class models
- That develop a two class model with a postulated middle class.
- Multi-stratum models
- Sociologists who seek fine-grained connections between class and life-outcomes often develop precisely defined social strata, like historian Paul Fussell's nine-tier stratification of American society.
Fussell's model classifies Americans according to the following classes:
- Top out-of-sight: the super-rich, heirs to huge fortunes
- Upper Class: rich celebrities and people who can afford full-time domestic staff
- Upper-Middle Class: self-made well-educated professionals
- Middle Class: office workers
- High Prole: skilled blue-collar workers
- Mid Prole: workers in factories and the service industry
- Low Prole: manual laborers
- Destitute: the homeless
- Bottom out-of-sight: those incarcerated in prisons and institutions
Warnerian social class model
Another example of a stratum class model was developed by the sociologist William Lloyd Warner in his 1949 book, Social Class in America. For many decades, the Warnerian theory was dominant in U.S. sociological theory.
Based on social anthropology, Warner divided American into three classes (upper, middle, and lower), then further subdivided each of these into an "upper" and "lower" segment, with the following postulates:
- Upper-upper class. "Old money." People who have been born into and raised with wealth.
- Lower-upper class. "New money." Individuals who have become rich within their own lifetimes.
- Upper-middle class. High-salaried professionals (i.e., doctors, lawyers, corporate executives).
- True-middle class. Professional with salaries and educational attainment higher than those found among lower-middle class workers (i.e.. professors, managerial office workers, architects)
- Lower-middle class. Lower-paid professionals, but not manual laborers (i.e., police officers, non-management office workers, small business owners).
- Upper-lower class. Blue-collar workers and manual labourers. Also known as the "working class."
- Lower-lower class. The homeless and permanently unemployed, as well as the "working poor."
To Warner, American social class was based more on attitudes than on the actual amount of money an individual made. For example, the richest people in America would belong to the "lower-upper class" since many of them created their own fortunes; one can only be born into the highest class. Nonetheless, members of the wealthy upper-upper class tend to be more powerful, as a simple survey of U.S. presidents may demonstrate (i.e., the Roosevelts; John Kennedy; the Bushes)
Another observation: members of the upper-lower class might make more money than members of the lower-middle class (i.e., a well-salaried factory worker vs. a secretarial worker), but the class difference is based on the type of work they perform.
In his research, findings, Warner observed that American social class was largely based on these shared attitudes. For example, he noted that the lower-middle class tended to be the most conservative group of all, since very little separated them from the working class. The upper-middle class, while a relatively small section of the population, usually "set the standard" for proper American behavior, as reflected in the mass media.
Karl Marx defined class in terms of the extent to which an individual or social group has control over the means of production.
In Marxist terms a class is a group of people defined by their relationship to the means of production. Classes are seen to have their origin in the division of the social product into a necessary product and a surplus product. Marxists explain the history of "civilized" societies in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who actually produce the goods or services in society (and also developments in technology and the like). In the Marxist view of capitalism, this is a conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and wage-workers (proletariat). For Marxists, class antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production necessarily entails control over the class which produces goods -- in capitalism this is the exploitation of workers by the bourgeoisie.
Proletarianisation
The most important transformation of society for Marxists has been the massive and rapid growth of the proletariat in the world population during the last two hundred and fifty years. Starting with agricultural and domestic textile labourers in England and Flanders, more and more occupations only provide a living through wages or salaries. Private enterprise or self-employment in a variety of occupations is no longer as viable as it once was, and so many people who once controlled their own labour-time are converted into proletarians. Today groups which in the past subsisted on stipends or private wealth -- like doctors, academics or lawyers -- are now increasingly working as wage labourers. Marxists call this process proletarianisation, and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies in the rich countries of the "first world."
The increasing dissolution of the peasant-lord relationship (see pre-capitalist societies), initially in the commercially active and industrialising countries, and then in the unindustrialised countries as well, has virtually eliminated the class of peasants. Poor rural labourers still exist, but their current relationship with production is predominantly as landless wage labourers or rural proletarians. The destruction of the peasantry, and its conversion into a rural proletariat, is largely a result of the general proletarianisation of all work. This process is today largely complete, although it was arguably incomplete in the 1960s and 1970s.
Dialectics, or historical materialism, in Marxist Class
Marx saw class categories as defined by continuing historical processes. Classes, in Marxism, are not static entities, but are regenerated daily through the productive process. Marxism views classes as human social relationships which change over time, with historical commonality created through shared productive processes. A 17th-century farm labourer who worked for day wages shares a similar relationship to production as an average office worker of the 21st century. In this example it is the shared structure of wage labour that makes both of these individuals "working class."
Objective and subjective factors in class in Marxism
Marxism has a rather heavily defined dialectic between objective factors (i.e., material conditions, the social structure) and subjective factors (i.e. the conscious organization of class members). While most Marxism analyses people's class status based on objective factors (class structure), major Marxist trends have made excellent use of subjective factors in understanding the history of the working class. E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is a definitive example of this "subjective" Marxist trend. Thompson analyses the English working class as a group of people with shared material conditions coming to a positive self-consciousness of their social position. This feature of social class is commonly termed class consciousness in Marxism, a concept which became famous with Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness (1923). It is seen as the process of a "class in itself" moving in the direction of a "class for itself," a collective agent that changes history rather than simply being a victim of the historical process. In Lukacs' words, the proletariat was the "subject-object of history", and the first class which could superate false consciousness (inherent to the bourgeois's consciousness, which reified economic laws as universal (whereas they are only a consequence of historic capitalism).
Non-economic conceptions of class
In contrast to simple income--property hierarchies, and to structural class schemes like Weber's or Marx's, there are theories of class based on other distinctions, such as culture or educational attainment. At times, social class can be related to elitism, and those in the higher class are usually known as the "social elite".
For example, Bourdieu seems to have a notion of high and low classes comparable to that of Marxism, insofar as their conditions are defined by different habitus, which is in turn defined by different objectively classifiable conditions of existence. In fact, one of the principal distinctions Bourdieu makes is a distinction between bourgeois taste and the working class taste.
Class in different parts of the world
At various times the division of society into classes and estates has had various levels of support in law. At one extreme we find old Indian castes, which one could neither enter after birth, nor leave (though this applied only in relatively recent history). Feudal Europe had estates clearly separated by law and custom. On the other extreme there exist classes in modern Western societies which appear very fluid and have little support in law.
The extent to which classes are important differs also in western societies, though in most societies class as an objective measure has very strong empirical effects on life chances (e.g. educational achievement, life-time earnings, health outcomes). Only in the strongly social-democratic societies such as Sweden is there much long-term evidence of the weakening of the consequences of social class.
The effect of class on vote or life-style is more variable across countries and over time.
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