Abstract
An approach to social stratification that draws on the work of Max Weber is outlined. This distinguishes between economically grounded class and the communal or influentially grounded status. It is argued that these jointly enter into the formation of social strata and underpin the distribution of political power.
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Notes
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Bourdieu (1979) can be read as showing that this relationship between market situation and work situation can be modelled as measures of the volume and composition of capital, where capital is understood to comprise marketable economic and cultural resources. Atkinson (2020) has shown that this holds only if ‘cultural capital’—mastery, ease, and familiarity with advantageous systems of symbols and signs—is operationalised as the amount and type of education that a person has undergone.
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‘Status’ has often been used in sociological work to refer to any social position or role in a social division of labour (see the critical view in Scott 1996: 93–94). It is for this reason that Tribe (2019) has argued that Weber’s term Stände should be translated as ‘rank’ rather than as status. Despite this recommendation, I feel that it is preferable to retain the usage common in stratification studies and to see status as the most general term for a position in a system of social honour. This leaves the term ‘rank’ available for use in strictly hierarchical status orders.
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Goode uses the term ‘prestige’ rather than honour, though his meaning is very much the same. I will return to this terminological question in Chap. 2 when I consider Parsons’ argument concerning the relationship between particular forms of honour and a generalised concept and measure of prestige.
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The term ‘hidden injuries’ is taken from Sennett and Cobb’s (1972) discussion of class, while the implications of stigmatisation have been explored by Goffman (1963).
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Samuel Clark (1995) has referred to this as ‘status power’.
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Abel and Cockerham (1993) have emphasised the importance of translating Weber’s term Lebensfuhrung as ‘way of life’, so as to distinguish it from a normatively codified ‘style of life’.
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Methods for identifying demographic boundaries have not been particularly well-developed in contemporary class analysis. Goldthorpe (1980) short-circuited this question by defining a limited number of economic classes and then attempting to confirm their identity as social classes by examining their patterns of association and interaction. More convincingly, Ronald Breiger (1981) worked directly on mobility relations among economic classes (see also Smith 2007). Ken Prandy and colleagues deepened this approach by working directly on unaggregated occupational categories and their associational relations (Prandy 1991; Prandy and Blackburn 1997; see also Blackburn et al. 1980). Most recently, Mike Savage and his colleagues (2015) used self-reported data on economic resources, social relations, and cultural preferences to identify boundaries, without any reference to occupational data.
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Runciman’s own argument rests on a view that there are three forms of power: economic, communal, and political. For reasons that I have already set out, I prefer to consider only the economic and communal forms as constitutive of social stratification. I also hold, following Parsons, that a wider understanding of power must recognise four forms of power (Scott 2021).
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The term ‘estate’ is sometimes restricted to the idea of a parliamentary estate, but it is the most linguistically consistent term. It also leaves available the term ‘order’ for more precise usage in later chapters of this book.
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Scott, J. (2024). From Max Weber. In: Class and Social Honour. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45948-1_1
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