Social structure and stratification

Each of us belongs to many overlapping groups at once: family and kin, peer group, class, gender, region, country. So each person has a location in society, and with it different levels of access to social resources: which school we go to (or whether we go at all), the clothes we wear, the food we eat, our leisure, our health care, our whole lifestyle. This book asks how far the individual is constrained by society, and how far free.

Social structure. Society is structured, organised in particular ways. Our social world is not a random set of events: there are underlying regularities, or patterns, in how people behave and relate to one another. These patterns are what social structure means.

• It is a little like a building, with walls, floor and roof giving it a shape. But the comparison must not be pushed too far: social structures are made of human actions and relationships, which take on a pattern because they are repeated over time and space.
• So social structure is closely tied to social reproduction. In a family, ways of behaving, marriage practices, duties and expectations are set and repeated; old members pass away and new ones are born, yet the institution continues. Changes still happen, too.
• Human societies are like buildings that are at every moment being rebuilt by the very bricks that compose them. People reproduce the structure while also changing it.
• Example (new): a neighbourhood cricket club keeps its rules, its annual tournament and its captain-and-vice-captain system for decades, though every player is replaced many times over; now and then members vote to change a rule.

Two views of structure:

• Emile Durkheim argued that society has primacy over the individual. Society has a 'firmness' or 'solidity' like material structures. Like the walls and doors of a room, which set the routes in and out, social structure constrains what we can do; it is external to us. Our duties as a brother, husband or citizen, the language we use and the money we pay with all existed before us and work independently of us.
• Karl Marx also saw the constraints of social structure, but stressed human creativity or agency to both reproduce and change it. In his words, human beings make history, but not as they wish or in conditions of their choice: within the limits and possibilities of their historical situation.

Social stratification is the existence of structured inequalities between groups in their access to material or symbolic rewards. Modern societies have wide differences in wealth and power; class divisions are the most visible, but race, caste, region, community, tribe and gender also matter.

• Inequality is not randomly distributed between individuals. It is systematically linked to membership of social groups, and privileged groups usually see to it that their advantage passes to their children. So stratification is a patterned structure of unequal groups that tends to persist across generations.
• Privileged groups may enjoy three kinds of advantage: life chances (material advantages that improve quality of life: wealth and income, but also health, job security and recreation); social status (prestige, high standing in others' eyes); and political influence (the ability to dominate others, to influence decisions, or to benefit from them).