Class
A system of power based on wealth, income, and status that creates an unequal distribution of a society's resources.
Egalitarian Society
A group based on the sharing of resources to ensure success with a relative absence of hierarchy and violence. Example: hunters and gatherers
Reciprocity
The exchange of resources, goods, and services among people of relatively equal status; meant to create and reinforce social ties.
Ranked Society
A group in which wealth is not stratified but prestige and status are.
Example: being the Chief
Redistribution
A form of exchange in which accumulated wealth is collected from the members of the group and reallocated in a different pattern.
Potlach
Elaborate redistribution ceremony practiced among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest
Bourgeoise
Marxist term for the capitalist class that owns the means of production
Means of Production
The factories, machines, tools, raw materials, land, and financial capital needed to make things.
Marx identified labor as the key source of value and profit in the marketplace.
Proletariat
Marxist term for the class of laborers who own only their labor
Prestige
The reputation, influence, and deference bestowed on certain people because of their membership in certain groups.
Life Chances
Max Weber - An individual's opportunities to improve quality of life and achieve life goals. Life chances are determined by access to financial and social resources such as education, health care, food, clothing, and shelter. Class position - relative wea
Social Mobility
The movement of one's class position, upward or downward, in stratified societies.
Education is considered the key to upward social mobility within stratified societies.
Social Reproduction
The phenomenon whereby social and class relations of prestige or lack of prestige are passed from one generation to the next.
The educational system helped reproduce the social relations that already exist from generation to generation.
Habitus
Bourdieu's term to describe the self-perceptions and beliefs that develop as part of one's social identity and shape one's conceptions of the world and where one fits in it. Shapes expectations and aspirations and guides the individual in assessing his or
Cultural Capital
The knowledge, habits, and tastes learned from parents and family that individuals can use to gain access to scarce and valuable resources in society.
Public school systems are heavily influenced by cultural capital. (ex: Advanced Placement)
Intersectionality
An analytic framework for assessing how factors such as race, gender, and class interact to shape individual life chances and societal patterns of stratification.
Mullings said that class in the US cannot be studied alone, but must be considered with race
Income
What people earn from work, plus dividends and interest on investments, along with rents and royalties.
Medium income in 2010 was just over $50,000.
Top 20% received 50.2% of all income, while bottom 20% received 3.3%.
Wealth
The total value of what someone owns, minus any debt.
Wealth is even more unevenly distributed than income and the gap is widening.
Caste
A closed system of stratification in a society
Achieved Status
Social position established and changeable during a person's lifetime
Ascribed Status
Social position inherited, assigned at birth, and passed down from generation to generation
Dalits
Members of India's lowest caste; literally "broken people" - called "untouchables
How are class and inequality constructed in the US?
In the US, life chances are heavily influenced by the class position of one's family. Stratification by class significantly affects people's life chances.
Occupy Wall Street - brought issues of class and inequality to the forefront
Downward Mobility
Katherine Newman found many hard-working citizens for whom hard work does not pay off, who struggle to provide for their families, etc.
According to Newman, the main determinant of class position and social mobility is not one's work ethic, but structural
Key Theories of Poverty
1) Poverty as Pathology
-trace ongoing poverty to the personal failings of the individual, family, or community
-see these failings as stemming from a combination of dysfunctional behaviors, attitudes, and values that make and keep poor people poor
2) Pov
Why are class and inequality largely invisible in US culture?
#NAME?
What are effects of global inequality?
-Uneven development
-877 million people living in extreme poverty
-Hunger, malnutrition, health, education, vulnerability to climate change
-Health and mortality
-Uneven access to education