Social Inequality and Social Stratification in U.S. Society

Christopher B. Doob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317344209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social Inequality – examining our present while understanding our past. Social Inequality and Social Statification in US Society, 1st edition uses a historical and conceptual framework to explain social stratification and social inequality. The historical scope gives context to each issue discussed and allows the reader to understand how each topic has evolved over the course of American history. The authors use qualitative data to help explain socioeconomic issues and connect related topics. Each chapter examines major concepts, so readers can see how an individual's success in stratified settings often relies heavily on their access to valued resources–types of capital which involve finances, schooling, social networking, and cultural competence. Analyzing the impact of capital types throughout the text helps map out the prospects for individuals, families, and also classes to maintain or alter their position in social-stratification systems.

Learning Goals

• Upon completing this book, readers will be able to:
• Analyze the four major American classes, as well as how race and gender are linked to inequalities in the United States
• Understand attempts to reduce social inequality
• Identify major historical events that have influenced current trends
• Understand how qualitative sources help reveal the inner workings that accompany people's struggles with the socioeconomic order
• Recognize the impact of social-stratification systems on individuals and families
  

Chapter 1 The Road to Social Inequality: A Conceptual Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315662800-1

In Raggedy Dick by Horatio Alger, Jr., the hero, a young bootblack, jumped from a ferry boat into turbulent waters after a small boy, who had fallen overboard. Dick nearly drowned but managed to save the boy and received praise for his courageous act. Shortly afterward the boy’s father, who conveniently owned a counting house (accounting firm), gave Dick a job at $10 a week—three times what he earned as a bootblack (Alger 1985, 127). The lad was on his way.

Such fortunate developments typically happened to Alger’s heroes. They were hardworking, ambitious, intelligent, generous, honest, street-wise, opportunistic boys determined to advance themselves from modest origins to elevated positions in society. Inner drive and talent were the primary reasons for their positive outcomes. In Struggling Upward, Alger indicated that his hero had elevated himself from poverty to wealth—that luck played a role, “but above all he … [was] indebted for most of his good fortune to his own good qualities” (Alger 1985, 280).

In the late nineteenth-century era of wide-ranging economic inequality, Alger’s host of well over a hundred novels about dedicated, high-minded poor young white boys relentlessly seeking fortune and fame was very popular. Many Americans firmly believed that they lived in a land of open opportunity, where the virtue of hard work inevitably produced the rewards of wealth, power, and prestige—“rags to riches” as the phrase goes.

But while such transformations have occurred, the position throughout this book is that select groups—higher-class members, whites, and males—have had better opportunities and, therefore, more extensive rewards—than lower-class people, racial and ethnic minorities, and women.

This text’s mission is to examine the processes that have produced and sustained those inequalities. Besides the conventional quantitative studies and statistics, the upcoming chapters contain both historical and qualitative sources, broadening and deepening the reader’s grasp of the topics at hand. In addition, the relentless use of certain concepts—social reproduction and four types of capital, which are introduced in this chapter—help to structure a coherent overall organization and to reveal “the fine print” of American social inequality and social stratification. At this juncture it is necessary to introduce the course’s most fundamental concepts.

Sociologists recognize the prevalence of social inequality, a situation in which individuals, families, or members of larger structures like neighborhoods or cities vary in access to such valued resources as wealth, income, education, healthcare, and jobs. Sometimes people’s inequalities can change—for instance, a large number of working-class individuals might obtain a substantial pay boost, raising their wages as well as their ranking among the nation’s earners. Like the members of all classes, however, their location in the class structure, which is a prominent type of social stratification, generally remains fairly stable when compared to the previous generation’s.

Any society displays social stratification, a deeply embedded hierarchy providing different groups varied rewards, resources, and privileges and establishing structures and relationships that both determine and legitimate those outcomes.

Most people within a given society consider that its social-stratification systems represent the natural order of things. Respondents in various studies have indicated that people possessing greater wealth and power tend to have a range of more desirable traits than those who are less affluent or powerful (Beeghley 2008; Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; Della Fave 1980). This text examines class, racial, and gender stratification. Within the American class system, middle-class individuals’ chances for advanced education and high-paying jobs have been better than working-class people’s opportunities. A persistent suspicion expressed throughout the text is that growing economic inequality between affluent members of the upper and upper-middle class, and people in other classes is a precursor of a stratification system featuring a smaller middle class and concomitantly a larger working class. All in all, systems of class, racial, and gender stratification provide the conceptual foundations for analyzing trends in social inequalities.

A third central concept is ideology, which is the complex of values and beliefs that support a society’s social-stratification systems and their distribution of wealth, income, and power. The American ideology, which emphasizes the centrality of individual achievement, equal opportunity, and the importance of hard work, receives politicians’, business leaders’, and media spokespeople’s frequent endorsement, but the actual workings producing social inequalities and social stratification tend to remain unexamined—the fine print hidden behind the ideology’s bold public claims. As the world’s wealthiest nation, one might expect that the United States would spend more on its impoverished members, resulting in less social inequality than in other developed nations. Such a conclusion, however, overlooks the powerful influence of the country’s ideology, which both lionizes individuals fixated on the pursuit of wealth and criticizes, even demonizes, the less successful, particularly the poor. The potency of American ideology will be apparent throughout the text, which provides various measures to show that among developed nations the United States has some of the highest levels of social inequality.

This chapter describes the development of the global economy and its impact on the American workforce. Then discussion focuses on certain central concepts, social reproduction and forms of capital, which analyze the process providing some people better opportunities and rewards than others. Finally sociological research comparing working-class and middle-class schooling illustrates these concepts.

Much of this chapter, in fact most of this text, focuses on the United States. As a foundation for understanding social inequality in American society, however, it is essential to lead off with a broader view of major developments since World War II. Then the discussion returns to a decidedly more sociological analysis.

The Rise of the Global Economy

Globalization is the increasing integration of nations in an age featuring highly reduced costs for communication and transportation along with the lowering of such “artificial barriers” as treaties or tariffs restricting the movement of goods, services, financial capital, and technology across borders (Stiglitz 2002, 9–10). Multinational corporations, many of which are American based, have been driving forces in globalization, demonstrating that the largely unregulated movement internationally of capital, goods, and technology leads to accelerated profit making.

Is globalization new? The term is fairly new, with the verb “globalize” first appearing in the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1944. However, early efforts toward globalization reach back thousands of years. For instance, in 325 bce, merchants established overland trade routes between the Mediterranean, Persia, India, and central Asia (Ludden 2008). Since the 1970s, however, a greatly expanded globalization process has developed. While globalization involves a variety of issues, including education, agriculture, or infrastructure, the current emphasis is on the economic dimension, which powerfully impacts social inequality.

Globalization has produced certain distinct economic changes. First, many nations once considered underdeveloped have begun producing quality goods. Computer-based manufacturing plants located in southeast Asia and Latin America have started to compete favorably with factories in developed countries in western Europe and North America, pressuring American corporate executives to downsize or close their plants. Second, at present advanced technology helps coordinate international economic activities. Because of the use of both modern computers and telecommunications, multinational corporations can decentralize their activities, locating subsidiaries around the world and effectively monitoring their activities from corporate headquarters. Finally the global economy has created an international workforce, with both white- and blue-collar jobs susceptible to being shipped overseas. The option to use alternative workers gives corporate executives greater clout when negotiating American employees’ wages and benefits.

The global economy has rapidly expanded trade over time, with the wealthier nations leading the way. The estimate is that about two thirds of international financial transactions involve the United States, western Europe, and Japan (Brecher, Costello, and Smith 2000, 2–3; Perrucci and Wysong 2008, 109).

At the end of World War II, the international economic picture was distinctly different. Most prominent nations possessed severely damaged economies and infrastructures that made them incapable of effectively providing food, shelter, and other basic necessities to their citizenry. The major exception to this outcome was the United States, which emerged from the war with its economy intact, ready to undertake a massive international business expansion. For nearly 30 years, the United States controlled three quarters of the world’s invested capital and two thirds of its industry. The government helped subsidize this dominance, developing a $22 billion foreign aid package to western Europe known as the Marshall Plan. The funding was earmarked for purchasing American agricultural and industrial products and bringing European nations into a global federation headed by the United States—both moves that helped solidify the preeminence of American business.

Global economics, however, has seldom been ...