Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Caste Systems
A caste system is social stratification based on ascription or birth. Caste systems are typical of agrarian societies because the lifelong routines of agriculture depend on a rigid sense of duty and discipline Caste systems shape peoples lives in four crucial ways: Caste largely determines occupation. Caste systems generally mandate endogamy. Caste systems limit outgroup social contacts. Powerful cultural beliefs underlie caste systems.
crucial ways:
Caste largely determines occupation. Illustrations: India and South Africa. systems generally mandate endogamy. Caste systems limit outgroup social contacts. Powerful cultural beliefs underlie caste systems. Caste systems are typical of agrarian societies because the lifelong routines of agriculture depend on a rigid sense of duty and discipline.
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Caste in Japan
Feudal Japan was divided into several castes: Nobility. Samurai or warriors. Commoners. The burakumin or outcasts. Japan today consists of upper, upper-middle, lower-middle, and lower classes, and people move between classes over time. But they may still size up ones social standing through the lens of caste.
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Chinese Stratification
Sweeping political and economic changes are taking place in
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During the feudal era, British society was divided into three estates:
The first estate was the hereditary nobility. The second estate was the clergy. The third estate was the commoners. The United Kingdom today is a class society, but it retains important elements of its former caste system
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Children and the elderly account for nearly half of all Americans living in poverty.
Three theories predominate regarding poverty: The culture of poverty theory, poverty as situational poverty as a structural feature of capitalist societies
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Functional Analysis of Stratification The Davis-Moore thesis is the assertion that social stratification has beneficial consequences for the operations of a society.
It is difficult to specify the functional importance of a given occupation; some are clearly over- or underrewarded. Davis-Moore ignores how social stratification can prevent the development of individual talents. The theory also ignores how social inequality may promote conflict and revolution.
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Power is also unequally distributed. Occupational prestige. Occupation serves as a key source of social prestige since we commonly evaluate each other according to what we do. .Schooling affects both occupation and income. .Social Stratification and Birth. Ancestry. Family is our point of entry into the social system. Gender. On average, women have less income, wealth, and occupational prestige than men. Race and ethnicity. Race is closely linked to social position in the United States.
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Why Stratification ?
Explanations of social stratification involve value judgments.
The Bell Curve Debate: Are Rich People Really Smarter?: A series of claims made in The Bell Curve (Murray, Charles and Hernstein, Richard J., Free Press, 1994) that Race and class are related to intelligence.
Historical patterns of ideology. Ideology changes as a societys economy and technology change.
Is Getting Rich "The Survival of the Fittest"? Spencers view that people get more or less what they deserve in life remains part of our individualistic culture. Max Webers Protestant Ethic
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Social Mobility
The process of moving from one stratification level to another takes a number of forms: vertical horizontal intergenerational intragenerational. Intragenerational social mobility is a change in social position occurring during a persons lifetime; intergenerational social mobility is upward or downward social mobility of children in relation to their parents.
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Social Mobility
When sociologists speak of social mobility, they usually mean intergenerational occupational mobility.
More Americans are upwardly mobile than downwardly mobile across generations. Sociologists study the course of an individuals occupational status over the life cycle by looking at the socioeconomic life cycle. The processes of status attainment are different for women and blacks than for white males. Critics of status attainment research contend that it has a functionalist bias and that the dual labor market operates to sort people into core or periphery sector jobs. There is ongoing controversy about whether the American middle class is shrinking and whether the American Dream is history.
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Social Mobility
Social Classes in the United States. The upper class. Historically, though less so today, the upper class has been composed of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The upper-upper class includes less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. The lower-upper class are the working rich; earnings rather than inherited wealth are the primary source of their income. Color of Money: Being Rich in Black and White. The number of affluent African Americans has increased markedly in recent years, but well-to-do blacks differ from their white counterparts in significant ways.
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Social Mobility
Religion.
Historically, people of English ancestry have enjoyed the most wealth and wielded the greatest power in the United States. Throughout our history, upward mobility has sometimes meant converting to a higher-ranking religion
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Social Mobility
Education
Impact of formal schooling is even greater than that of family background Important means of intergenerational mobility Critical factor in development of cultural capital
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Social Mobility
Occupational Mobility
Common among males Most mobility is minor
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Life Chances
Max Weber saw class as being closely related to peoples life chances: their opportunities to provide themselves with material goods, positive living conditions, and favorable life experiences
In times of danger, affluent and powerful have a better chance of surviving than people of ordinary means Digital divide is recent aspect of social inequality 2009 The McGraw Hill 40
Companies
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Poverty
In 2006, 36.5 million people in U.S. 12.3 percent of the populationwere living in poverty One in five households has trouble meeting basic needs
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Defining Poverty
Absolute poverty: minimum level of subsistence that no family should be expected to live below
Common measure is federal governments poverty line
Relative poverty: floating standard of deprivation by which people at the bottom of a society are judged as being disadvantaged in comparison with the nation as a whole
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Note: Data are for 2000 except for Germany (2001) and Mexico (2002). Poverty threshold is 50 percent 2009 The McGraw Hill of nations median income. Source: Frster and dErcole 2005: 36. Companies
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Note: Data for 2006, as reported by the Bureau of the Census in 2007. 2009 The Source: DeNavas-Walt et al. 2007.
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Source: 2006 census data presented in Bureau of the Census 2007d: Tables R1701, 1901.
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Myth versus reality. Four general conclusions about social mobility in the United States: Social mobility over the course of the last century has been fairly high. The long-term trend in social mobility has been upward. Within a single generation, social mobility is usually small. Social mobility since the 1970s has been uneven. Mobility varies by income level. Mobility varies by race, ethnicity and gender. The "American Dream:" Still a reality? For many workers, earnings have stalled. Multiple job-holding is up. More jobs offer little income. Young people are remaining at home.
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CEOs Get Richer: The Great Mansions Return The Global Economy and U.S. class structure. Much of the industrial production that gave U.S. workers high-paying jobs a generation ago has moved overseas. In their place, the economy now offers service work, which often pays far less. Poverty in the United States. Relative poverty refers to the deprivation of some people in relation to those who have more. Absolute poverty is a deprivation of resources that is life-threatening. The extent of U.S. Poverty. In 2001, 11.7 percent of the U.S. population was tallied as poor. The typical poor family had to get by on about $10,873 in 2001.
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Who are the poor? Age. 2001, 16.3 percent of people under the age of eighteen (11.7 million children) were poor. Race and ethnicity. African Americans are about three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be poor. Gender and family patterns. The feminization of poverty is the trend by which women represent an increasing proportion of the poor. Urban and rural poverty. The greatest concentration of poverty is found in central cities.
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Explaining poverty. One view: The poor are mostly responsible for their own poverty. The poor become trapped in a culture of poverty, a lower-class subculture that can destroy peoples ambition. Another view: Society is primarily responsible for poverty. Most of the evidence suggests that society rather than the William Julius Wilson points out that while people continue to talk about welfare reform, neither major political party has said anything about the lack of work in central cities.
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Weighing the evidence. The reasons that people do not work seem consistent with the blame society position.
The working poor. Three percent of full-time workers earn so little that they remain poor. Homelessness. Counting the homeless. As many as 1.5 million people are homeless at some time during the course of a year. Causes of homelessness: Personality traits. Societal factors. Welfare reform has slashed the number of people receiving welfare, but it has done far less to reduce poverty.
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Social Mobility
Race and Ethnicity
Class system more rigid for African Americans than for other racial groups Typical Hispanic has less than 10 percent of the wealth that a White person has
Gender
Traditional mobility studies have ignored gender Women especially likely to be trapped in poverty
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