Social class in the United States. We will look later at social class in the United States and discuss the extent of vertical mobility in American society. Weber defined social class as... a large group of people who rank closely to one another in property, power, and prestige. Chapter Eight: Social Class in the United States Learning Objectives Understand social class. Here we need to distinguish between two types of vertical social mobility. Mishel, L., Bernstein, J., & Shierholz, H. (2009). Introduction to Sociology (11th ed.). Social Class in the United States Learning Objectives ... Sociologists disagree on the number of social classes in the United States, but a common view is that the United States has four classes: upper, middle, working, and lower. Depending on how it is defined, the upper class consists of about 4% of the U.S. population and includes households with annual incomes (2009 data) of more than $200,000 (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2010). Chapter 8: Social Class in the United States Multiple-Choice Questions TB_Q8.1.1 _____, according to Weber, is (are) a large group of people who rank close to one another in property, power, and prestige. The article starts by saying that placement in a certain class may initiate through ascription, which correlates to an individuals’ sex, birthplace, race and family background. Nazareth College – Commencement 2013 – CC BY 2.0. Many of the poor lack high school degrees, and many are unemployed or employed only part time in semiskilled or unskilled jobs. As should be evident, it is not easy to determine how many social classes exist in the United States. Figure 8.4 “Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007” vividly shows the difference that education makes for Americans’ median annual incomes. Learn faster with spaced repetition. 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. 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. Promoted by elites to legitimize and perpetuate their power. As should be evident, it is not easy to determine how many social classes exist in the... Social Mobility. Many of them live at risk for unemployment as their companies downsize by laying off workers even in good times, and hundreds of thousands began to be laid off when the U.S. recession began in 2008. Hardly anyone starts at the bottom of the ladder and ends up at the top. Although subcategories exist within some of these broad categories, they still capture the most important differences in the American class structure (Gilbert, 2011). As we see later in this chapter, recent trends in the U.S. economy have made it more difficult to move up the ladder and have even worsened the status of some people. Chapter 8 Social Stratification 245 of the top 1 percent of the population increased by 115 percent. 8.3 Social Class in the United States Measuring Social Class. •Each of the layers of social stratification is a social class ... Chapter 8 Section 3: Social Classes in America. However, the payoff of education is often higher for men than for women and for whites than for people of color. The upper-middle class in the United States consists of about 4.4% of all households, with incomes ranging from $150,000 to $199,000. View full document. similar rank on all three dimensions- property, power, prestige. Green, C. A., & Ferber, M. A. As a recent analysis summarized the evidence, “There is considerably more mobility in most of the other developed economies of Europe and Scandinavia than in the United States” (Mishel, Bernstein, & Shierholz, 2009, p. 108). Social Stratification ... Social Classes in the United States . Warner, W. L., & Lunt, P. S. (1941). Kerbo, H. R. (2009). 34% of US Population; Jobs require that they follow orders by upper class members. A short summary of this paper. Although subcategories exist within some of these broad categories, they still capture the most important differences in the American class structure (Gilbert, 2011). SOCL 151, PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY CHAPTER EIGHT, SOCIAL CLASS in the UNITED STATES LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. Chapter 8: Stratification and Social Mobility in the United States Systems of Stratification; Sociological Perspectives on Stratification Learn faster with spaced repetition. This problem leads most sociologists to favor objective measures of social class when they study stratification in American society. DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B. D., & Smith, J. C. (2010). These three elements give people different chances in life, separate them into different lifestyles, and provide them with distinctive ways of looking at the self and the world. 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). Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab. Many have college degrees, usually from the less prestigious colleges, but many also have 2-year degrees or only a high school degree. They live somewhat comfortable lives but can hardly afford to go on expensive vacations or buy expensive cars and can send their children to expensive colleges only if they receive significant financial aid. Start studying Sociology: chapter 8. Source: Data from General Social Survey, 2008. Although lower class is a common term, many observers prefer a less negative-sounding term like the poor, which is the term used here. Subjective measures of social class, which rely on people rating their own social class, may lack some validity. C. The structuring of the different jobs people hold. Working-class families are far less likely than their wealthier counterparts to own their own homes or to send their children to college. But if you start out from business school as an upper-level manager and get laid off 10 years later because of corporate downsizing, you have experienced downward intragenerational mobility. Chapter 8 Social Stratification 245 of the top 1 percent of the population increased by 115 percent. Social standing in America. Social mobility describes a shift from one social class to another. Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States: 2009 (Current Population Report P60-238). Personas Net Worth. The researcher is the one who decides which social class people are in based on where they stand in regard to these variables. Although, as noted earlier, all societies except perhaps for the simplest … Study SOC Chapter 7: Global Stratification AND Chapter 8: Social Class in the United States flashcards from Jeff Ellis's Carrington College class online, or in Brainscape's iPhone or Android app. We can measure social class either objectively or subjectively. Start studying Chapter 8 Social Class in the United States Test 9. For better or worse, the focus on males occurred because the initial research occurred when many women were still homemakers and also because women back then were excluded from many studies in the social and biological sciences. The early research on males found that about half of sons end up in higher-prestige jobs than their fathers had but that the difference between the sons’ jobs and their fathers’ was relatively small. 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. 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. To the extent vertical social mobility exists in the United States, then, it is higher for men than for women and higher for whites than for people of color. If children from poor parents end up in high-paying jobs, the children have experienced upward intergenerational mobility. Outline the functionalist view of the American class structure. Study Chapter Eight Social Class in the United States Flashcards at ProProfs - Chapter Eight Social Class in the United States Social classes are groupings of individuals in a hierarchy, usually based on wealth, educational attainment, occupation, income, and membership in a subculture or social network. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. They generally work in blue-collar jobs such as factory work, construction, restaurant serving, and less skilled clerical positions. 2. People in the upper-middle class typically have college and, very often, graduate or professional degrees; live in the suburbs or in fairly expensive urban areas; and are bankers, lawyers, engineers, corporate managers, and financial advisers, among other occupations. Explain your answer. Figure 8.3 “Subjective Social Class Membership”, Chapter 7 “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control”, Figure 8.4 “Education and Median Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers, 2007”, Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality”, Figure 8.5 “Parents’ Education and Percentage of Respondents Who Have a College Degree”, Next: 8.4 Economic Inequality and Poverty in the United States, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 9.1 The Nature and Extent of Global Stratification 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). They tend to rent apartments rather than own their own homes, lack medical insurance, and have inadequate diets. Download Full PDF Package. How much in-equality in wealth exists in the United States? We will discuss the poor further when we focus later in this chapter on inequality and poverty in the United States.
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