For the sake of clarity, we will limit ourselves to the four social classes included in Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership”: the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class. Over the decades, sociologists have outlined as many as six or seven social classes based on such things as, once again, education, occupation, and income, but also on lifestyle, the schools people’s children attend, a family’s reputation in the community, how “old” or “new” people’s wealth is, and so forth (Coleman & Rainwater, 1978 Warner & Lunt, 1941). Recognizing these problems, conflict sociologists delineate social class on the basis of several factors, including the ownership of the means of production, the degree of autonomy workers enjoy in their jobs, and whether they supervise other workers or are supervised themselves (Wright, 2000).Īs should be evident, it is not easy to determine how many social classes exist in the United States. They thus do not fit neatly into either of Marx’s two major classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. These measures are closer to what Marx meant by the concept of class throughout his work, and they take into account the many types of occupations and workplace structures that he could not have envisioned when he was writing during the 19th century.įor example, corporations have many upper-level managers who do not own the means of production but still determine the activities of workers under them.
Here are some average prestige scores for various occupations: physician, 86 college professor, 74 elementary school teacher, 64 letter carrier, 47 garbage collector, 28 and janitor, 22.ĭespite SES’s usefulness, conflict sociologists prefer different, though still objective, measures of social class that take into account ownership of the means of production and other dynamics of the workplace. Over the years these scores have been relatively stable. Since the late 1940s, national surveys have asked Americans to rate the prestige of dozens of occupations, and their ratings are averaged together to yield prestige scores for the occupations (Hodge, Siegel, & Rossi, 1964). When occupation is used, sociologists often rely on standard measures of occupational prestige. Sometimes one of these three variables is used by itself to measure social class, and sometimes two or all three of the variables are combined (in ways that need not concern us) to measure social class. Functionalist sociologists rely on measures of socioeconomic status (SES), such as education, income, and occupation, to determine someone’s social class. Yet even here there is disagreement between functionalist theorists and conflict theorists on which objective measures to use. Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008. This problem leads most sociologists to favor objective measures of social class when they study stratification in American society. The trouble with such a subjective measure is that some people say they are in a social class that differs from what objective criteria might indicate they are in. For example, the General Social Survey asks, “If you were asked to use one of four names for your social class, which would you say you belong in: the lower class, the working class, the middle class, or the upper class?” Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership” depicts responses to this question. If we choose the subjective method, we ask people what class they think they are in. The researcher is the one who decides which social class people are in based on where they stand in regard to these variables. If we choose the objective method, we classify people according to one or more criteria, such as their occupation, education, and/or income. We can measure social class either objectively or subjectively.
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