Class, Status, and Social Mobility

Social stratification, the hierarchical arrangement of individuals and groups into layers or strata of unequal access to resources, power, and prestige, is a universal feature of complex societies and a central concern of sociology. Class is the most analyzed dimension of stratification. Marx's two-class model divides society into the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labor power. While powerful in its simplicity, this model has been criticized for failing to account for the complexity of modern class structures.

Weber's multidimensional approach distinguishes class, based on market position and life chances, from status, based on social prestige and lifestyle, and party, based on political power. For Weber, class is not defined solely by property ownership but by the ability to acquire goods, gain positions, and find satisfaction through the market. Skills, credentials, and organizational position matter alongside property. Erik Olin Wright's neo-Marxist class analysis synthesized Marx and Weber by identifying contradictory class locations.

Managers, for example, occupy a contradictory position between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: they exercise authority over workers like capitalists but are themselves employed and exploited by capital. Wright's framework identifies twelve class positions based on three dimensions of exploitation: ownership of means of production, organizational authority, and possession of scarce skills and credentials. John Goldthorpe's class scheme, widely used in European sociology, classifies occupations into classes based on employment relations: employers, self-employed, and employees, with employees further distinguished by whether their employment relationship is based on a labor contract involving direct exchange of effort for wages, or a service relationship involving autonomy, trust, and deferred compensation.

The service class of professionals and managers has different employment conditions, career prospects, and class interests than the working class of routine manual and non-manual workers. Pierre Bourdieu's approach transcends the economic focus of other class theories by analyzing class as multidimensional, involving economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and as embodied in the habitus that shapes tastes, dispositions, and lifestyles.