Class Analysis and Measurement

Class is the oldest and most contested concept in the sociology of stratification. Every major theorist has defined it differently; every empirical tradition has measured it differently; and the stakes are high, because the concept determines who counts as advantaged or disadvantaged and which social divisions matter most.

Karl Marx, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, defined class by relations of production. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production (factories, land, capital) and hires labor; the proletariat sells its labor power for wages. Class under capitalism is fundamentally an exploitative relation: surplus value extracted from workers funds profits to owners. Class conflict between these two main classes, Marx argued in Das Kapital (1867) and the Communist Manifesto (1848), drives history. The analytical payoff of the Marxian approach is structural: two people with identical incomes can occupy opposite class positions if one owns a firm and the other works in it, because their relationship to production differs.

Max Weber, writing three decades later, agreed that economic position matters but insisted on multiple dimensions of stratification. In Economy and Society (posthumous, 1922), Weber defined class situation as shared market position — opportunities for income and goods determined by what one brings to the market (capital, credentials, skills, labor). He added status situation (social honor, lifestyle, group membership) and party (organized political power) as analytically distinct dimensions. A wealthy merchant in medieval Europe might have high class but low status relative to an impoverished aristocrat; a tenured professor and a plumber may earn the same income but occupy different status positions. Weber's multi-dimensional framework has proven remarkably durable; contemporary sociology still largely works within it.

A third tradition, associated with functionalist theorists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945), argued that stratification is necessary because societies must motivate talented individuals to undertake demanding training for important roles. The Davis-Moore thesis has been extensively criticized — it cannot explain why hereditary wealth and discrimination persist, nor why some high-paying jobs are demonstrably less socially valuable than lower-paying ones — but it set the terms for debates about whether inequality is functional, exploitative, or some combination.

Contemporary sociology inherits all three traditions and has produced two dominant operational approaches to measuring class: the neo-Marxist scheme of Erik Olin Wright and the neo-Weberian EGP (Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero) schema. Each has distinct virtues, and both remain in active use in research on inequality, mobility, voting, health, and life chances.