Essays
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Class, Cognition, and Face‐to‐Face Interaction - Rivera, Lauren A.
Social class—one's relative socioeconomic rank in society—plays a vital role in shaping individuals' future educational and occupational attainment, job satisfaction, and overall mental and physical well‐being. Although sociologists have studied macrolevel aspects of class formation and reproduction for over a century, how class distinctions are produced and reproduced on the ground in everyday social interactions has received far less empirical attention. Like other forms of stratification, class inequalities are driven not only by differential access to material resources but also how we fundamentally perceive ourselves, others, and appropriate behavior. Yet, the social sciences have yet to develop a clear and convincing theory of the microdynamics of social class. In this essay, I integrate contemporary research across disciplines to illuminate how social perception and interaction shape and are shaped by social class. I review classical and cutting‐edge research on the microdimensions of social class, discuss outstanding issues, and highlight promising directions for future research. -
Education for Mobility or Status Reproduction? - Lacy, Karyn
Everyone is familiar with the popular phrase, “education levels the playing field.” However, does public schooling really provide opportunities for everyone who is willing to work hard to succeed? This essay examines the scholarly debate that has emerged around this long‐standing maxim. At one end of the continuum, scholars draw on the experiences of white ethnic immigrants to make the claim that education is the ticket to upward mobility for students from poor families. However, critics point to the experiences of marginalized blacks, and increasingly, Latinos, to reject this claim. At the other end of the continuum, scholars depart from traditional debates about racial disparities per se, shifting their focus to an understudied disparity—the growing gap in achievement between middle‐class students and poor students. These scholars point to an important new trend in class inequality, one that has gained momentum in recent years, namely, the rising significance of the acquisition of cultural capital as a necessary prerequisite for upward mobility. Analysis of this trend is a promising step in the right direction for scholars concerned with helping disadvantaged students to climb out of poverty. -
Elites - Chu, Johan S. G.
By definition, individual elite actors have a disproportionately high level of resources at their disposal with which to influence society. The question is whether such elites are able to act in a unified and effective manner. During the twentieth century, scholars discovered mechanisms that led to elite cohesion and unified political action. In the early twenty‐first century, these mechanisms have ceased to function. Elite researchers are thus faced with the challenge of identifying alternative mechanisms capable of fostering elite influence. In addition to cohesion, mechanisms of elite institutional influence and durable dominance are promising areas for study. Against the current backdrop of popular interest in elites and the many theoretical avenues opened up by researchers doing related work in fields such as economics, organizational theory, business, and psychology, the twenty‐first century promises to be an important period for elite scholarship. -
Emergence of Stratification in Small Groups - Askin, Noah
Stratification within small groups is virtually inevitable. Understanding the precise mechanisms by which it occurs and the nature of its consequences is an important sociological endeavor. Individuals' preexisting qualities, as well as advantages emerging from intra‐group interactions, affect the flows of respect and deference accruing to each member of a group. Differences in these flows in turn create a hierarchy. In this essay, we first discuss foundational research on the causes and consequences of stratification before turning to more current trends. We focus on the ways in which status, the primary determinant of one's location in a group's hierarchy, is created and maintained or lost. We discuss the Matthew Effect—a process by which high‐status group members receive disproportionate credit for their contributions, and also more easily maintain their status. We also address the circumstances and activities that can curb the Matthew Effect. We then move to current research, which centers on two main concepts. First, we consider peer effects, discussing the various means by which an individual's closest peers shape his or her status; second, we take a broader perspective by examining small groups as open systems. This section considers how a group's external environment, including other nearby groups, affects the level and stability of within‐group stratification. We emphasize key issues and implications for future research on these topics. -
Emerging Trends: Social Classification - Pontikes, Elizabeth G.
Social classification influences how people interpret their surroundings. Classification helps organize people's knowledge and guide how they reason about new objects. Although people perceive classification as reflecting an objective, natural reality, to a large extent, it is constructed through contested social processes. Foundational research on classification focused on this social construction, on how actors conform to social categories, and on the penalties that accrue to actors who do not conform. Recent research has built on and questioned these foundations. Whether categorical boundaries are strong or weak affects how consequential categorization is; in some situations, there are rewards to categorical nonconformity, and for any classification there are multiple audiences with different perspectives on what social categories mean and how they confer value. This entry concludes by suggesting promising new directions for future research in social classification. -
Intergenerational Mobility - Durlauf, Steve N.
This essay describes basic facts about intergenerational mobility as well as some of the mechanisms that have been proposed to explain levels of mobility or persistence of socioeconomic status across generations. Limits of current research are identified. -
Social Class and Parental Investment in Children - Gauthier, Anne H.
This essay critically reviews the literature on social class differences in parental investment in children including differences in (i) parenting practices or behavior; (ii) parenting styles, logics, and strategies; and (iii) parenting values and ideologies. The essay reveals how structural and cultural barriers contribute to creating social class differences in the ways parents interact with their children, as well as in the way they protect and promote their children's development and well‐being. This essay covers some of the foundational research in the field as well as newer research which has started to question the strict social class divide in parental investment. In particular, this essay discusses recent research on the resistance to the dominant ideology of good parenting, and studies of the complex interactions between social class, race and ethnicity, and gender. This essay concludes with a discussion of future research avenues including a call for a better empirical operationalization of the concept of parental investment. -
Stratification and the Welfare State - Moller, Stephanie
The welfare state is one of the most important predictors of inequality cross‐nationally, and research in this area is profuse. An expanding line of welfare state and stratification research focuses on the role of welfare states in addressing the needs created by increasing inequality, which has been generated by changing economic structures in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. This essay discusses the welfare state in light of changing economic structures and politics to explain why some countries have attenuated the rise in inequality, while others (notably the United States) have not. It concludes with suggestions for further research. -
Stratification in Hard Times - Gangl, Markus
This essay reviews current research on the relationship between economic inequality and social stratification. Stratification, that is, the intergenerational reproduction of the distribution of incomes and socioeconomic advantage, is likely to be related to the level of economic inequality because parental incomes and wealth are important resources in families' investment in children's earnings capacity. The relationship is likely to be moderated, however, by the fact that monetary resources are not the sole family resource of importance, and by counterbalancing effects of progressive policy, notably as far as educational policy is concerned. Also, the relationship between inequality and stratification is likely to exhibit considerable time lags, and empirical analyses of contemporaneous correlations are unlikely to be informative in consequence. Owing to the substantial data requirements, few convincing empirical studies on the inequality–stratification relationship are available at present. More reliable evidence is available from studies of the relationship between inequality and educational attainment, arguably the key interim process in stratification. Here, empirical results suggest rising inequality to cause rising inequality of educational achievement, notably because well‐off families are able to increase children's attainment in the face of rising economic incentives, whereas lower income families are less able to do so. The essay concludes by suggesting key areas of future research, likely to be spurred by the increasing sophistication of analytical models and the increasing quality of available intergenerational data on earnings, incomes and socioeconomic standing. -
The Emerging Psychology of Social Class - Kraus, Michael W.
The objective material conditions of our lives shape social perceptions and relationships in fundamental ways. In this essay, I survey research examining the influence of one's social class position in society on basic psychological processes—including conceptions of the self and relationships with others. Insights from this research indicate that relatively lower class individuals are characterized by contextualized selves—selves that are more intertwined with the social environment and other individuals—whereas relatively upper class individuals are characterized by solipsistic selves—selves that are independent from the environment, and instead linked with internal goals, wishes, and motivations. Understanding these class‐based differences in the social self—evidenced in social behavior, cognition, and emotion profiles—has the potential to inform interventions that reduce societal problems related to constrained social class mobility and rising economic inequality. -
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics - Stonecash, Jeffrey M.
Although the role of class has been extensively studied, this essay suggests several important matters that have been neglected and deserve more attention. The focus on occupational positions limits our understanding of the possible role of class. We need to devote more attention to household income and its impact on opportunity. We need to ask people about their aspirations and sense of fairness in American society and how that affects class voting. The presumption that class divisions have been reduced by racial and cultural issues has been embraced too quickly and needs more careful analyses. The use of nationally aggregated individual‐level surveys is limiting because it neglects how the distribution of classes across legislative districts and their representation through that matters for the emergence of class issues. Finally, the focus on multivariate analyses may satisfy academic notions of rigor but it removes analyses from having relevance for politicians.