Social Stratification and Mobility

Running head: SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND MOBILITY
Social Stratification and Mobility
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1SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND MOBILITY
What is Social Stratification?
Social stratification is another form of social inequality. The societies generally
arrange the members of their community according to few criteria such as superiority,
inferiority and equality. Social stratification is distinguishing and differentiating the
individuals on the basis of ranks and standards and criteria. They are stratified or grouped
according to ranks or values or the levels of hierarchy. Social stratification can be classified
into few types, which implies that the human race is distinguished on the basis of caste, class,
estate or slavery. This could be perfectly related to the clarification of the bourgeois and the
working class people. In this stratification, people used to be categorized on the basis of
resource possession and power in the society (Anthias, 2013). The bourgeois exercised power
over the working class people since they had access to the various factors of production in the
society, and the working class used to be dependent on them to acquire their livelihood. It is
for this reason why there was a big gulf in the society, which in this context, refers to a thick
stratification in the society.
In today's modern society, social statistician comes in the form of there classes, in most of the
Western societies. These classes are the upper class, which has access to a major chunk of
resources in the society, the middle class, and the lower class, which has the least share of
resources in the society. Furthermore, each of these classes could be further stratified into
upper, middle and lower stratum.
Theories that depict social mobility.
One of the theories that help to depict social mobility is the theory of symbolic
interactionism. It uses everyday interactions of the individuals to explain the society. It
basically helps to explain and examine the social differentiation from the very basic level. It
helpsto explain how the individuals stand in the social standards and in the levels of social
hierarchy. This in turn affects the everyday interactions among the people.