No society can be absolutely open or closed
Pitrim Sorokin - "Social & Cultural Mobility 1927"
No society is absolutely open or closed, since every system permits or restricts mobility to varying degrees
Open system:
- Max Weber: interplay of CSP - social closure still exists
- CWMills: Power elite monopolize
- Frank Parkin: Closure Theory
- Andre Beteille - hierarchies persist thru class manners, cultural capital eg. British aristocracy
- Gender/Race hierarchies still in USA
Closed system:
- Louis Dumont: Homo Hierarchicus - rigid caste based system
- MN Srinivas: Sanskritization, Westernization - caste hierarchy also has mobility
- modernization, urbanization, education
Gender as dimension of stratification
What is gender?
socially constructed roles, behaviours, attributes, associated with being male or female
Ann Oakley
distinguished b/w sex (biological) & gender (socially constructed)
- cultural valuation of gender roles (Ortner & Whitehead)
- male roles public prestige
- female roles subsumed into male roles
- Domestic DoL
- Arlie Hoschild: Second Shift
- labour market
- occupational segregation, pink collar jobs
- wage gaps
- Catherine Hakim: Preference Theory
- Private patriarchy & public patriarchy (Sylvia Walby)
- Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality:
- eg. Dalit + Woman: caste, class gender
- Feminist challenges to Stratification theory:
- Heidi Hartmann: mainstream stratification theory ignored unpaid domestic labour as source of inequality
Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Conflict vs Functionalist theory of stratification
- basis
- view of society
- structure
- consequences
- universality, desirability
- criticism