Social stratification entails the ranking of categories of people in the society in a hierarchy. It is the process of categorizing the people in groups based on socioeconomic factors such as wealth, occupation, race, education, and social status and power (Beeghley, 2015).
Different symbols are associated with one’s status in society. Some of these symbols include power, wealth, social class, race, as well as cultural background.
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According to a functionalist, all societies have systems of social stratification because it is a way of representing fundamentally unequal value for different tasks and work. In every society, there have to be tasks that have different values (Beeghley, 2015). On the other hand, a conflict theorist proposes that social stratification is harmful and dysfunctional in society. It creates a system that ranks people according to their achievement, which might lead to conflicts between the resultant social classes.
Life changes influence the potential for upward social mobility. People in society have different opportunities, which leads to the varying potential to achieve increased power or status across the population. Besides, every individual and entity in society have various capacities to rise to higher economic or social positions, especially in consideration of their different endowment, especially in terms of resources that can be used to move from one social class to another (Beeghley, 2015).
Downward social mobility entails the lowering of an individual’s social class within society. It can be caused by the loss of resources or aspects that put an individual at a higher social position as compared to their counterparts in society (Beeghley, 2015). Some of the resources that one can lose to have downward social mobility include fame, money, or power.
The feminization of poverty refers to the widening of the gap between men and women that is achieved through a pattern of economic scarcity and deprivation. It occurs when income poverty is concentrated among women in the population at a higher level as compared to their male counterparts (Sawyer & Engblade, 2016).
References
Beeghley, L. (2015). The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States. Routledge.
Sawyer, L., & Engblade, A. (2016). Women and Positive Aging: An International Perspective. Elsevier Science.
