Relevance: Sociology: paper I: Stratification
What are the elements of Social Stratification?
All stratification systems have some common elements. These elements have been identified as differentiation, ranking, evaluation and rewarding. Here Tumin has been referred to discuss the elements of social stratification.
- Status Differentiation: Status differentiation is the process by which social positions are determined and distinguished from one another by way Of associating a distinctive role, a set of rights and responsibilities such as father and mother. Status differentiation operates more effectively when:
Tasks are clearly defined.
Authority and responsibility are distinguished.
Mechanism for recruiting and training exists.
How Adequate sanctions including rewards and punishment exist to motivate persons?
Responsibilities, resources and rights are assigned to status not to particular individuals. For only by doing so societies can establish general and uniform rules or norms that will apply to many and diverse individuals who are to occupy the same status e.g. all the different women who will play the role of a parent.
Differentiation is not independent process in itself. The most important criteria for understanding the process of differentiation is ranking.
- Ranking: Ranking is done on the basis of:
- Personal characteristics that people are thought to need if they are to learn and perform the roles effectively such as intelligence, aggressiveness and politeness.
- The skills and abilities that are believed necessary for adequate role performance such, as surgical, numerical or linguistic skills.
- General qualities of the task e.g. difficulty, cleanliness, danger and so forth.
What is the Purpose of ranking is to identify the right person for the right position?
Ranking non-valuative i.e. jobs are rated as harder or easier, cleaner or dirtier, safer or more dangerous and people are judged slower, smarter or more skillful than others without implying that some are socially more important and others less because of these characteristic.
Ranking is a selective process in the sense that only some statuses are selected for comparative ranking and of all criteria of ranking only some are actually used in ranking process e.g. the status of Father-Mother is not ranked.
- Evaluation:
- Differentiation and ranking are further solidified by the evaluation process. Whereas the ranking procedure pivots about the question of more of or less of, the evaluation process centres in the question better and worse. Evaluation is both a personal and societal attribute.
- That is, individuals assign a relative worth, a degree of preference and a priority of desirability to everything. To the extent that evaluation is a learned quality, a consensus tends to develop within a culture individuals tend to share a common set of values. This value consensus is the societal dimension crucial to evaluation stratification.
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