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Social stratification is the hierarchical ranking of individuals and groups in a society based on unequal access to valued resources—wealth, income, power, and prestige. Every known society exhibits some form of stratification, though its basis and rigidity vary enormously across cultures and historical periods. Sociologists distinguish caste systems (ascribed, relatively fixed) from class systems (achieved, relatively open). Life chances—health outcomes, educational attainment, legal treatment—are systematically distributed along stratification lines, producing durable inequality across generations.
Examine wealth and income distribution data (e.g., Gini coefficients, quintile comparisons) alongside qualitative accounts of lived experience. Comparing intergenerational mobility rates across countries reveals how 'open' different class systems actually are versus their ideological claims.
Having studied social structure and agency, you understand that society has patterns, institutions, and forces that shape what people can do and become. Social stratification is one of the most fundamental of those patterns: the systematic ranking of individuals and groups based on unequal access to resources that society values — wealth, income, power, and prestige.
Every society that sociologists have studied exhibits some form of stratification. The resources that create hierarchy vary by context — wealth in market societies, ritual purity in caste societies, military prowess in warrior cultures — but hierarchical structure appears universal. What varies dramatically is how *rigid* the hierarchy is and on what basis rank is assigned. Sociologists distinguish between *ascribed* status (assigned at birth, as in traditional caste systems) and *achieved* status (earned through effort, education, and work, as class systems claim to operate). In practice, most societies blend both: class is nominally achieved, but the family you are born into shapes your education, health, networks, and opportunities in ways that make class position far stickier across generations than meritocratic ideology suggests.
The concept of *life chances* — a term from Max Weber — captures why stratification matters beyond wealth rankings. Your position in the stratification system predicts your likely health outcomes, life expectancy, educational attainment, likelihood of arrest and incarceration, quality of housing and neighborhood, and access to professional networks. These are not random. They cluster systematically along stratification lines and persist across generations. A child born into the bottom income quintile in the United States has roughly a 7% chance of reaching the top quintile as an adult — a figure that sits in sharp tension with ideological narratives about equal opportunity.
Social class is also multidimensional. Income is one component, but Pierre Bourdieu's framework adds cultural capital (educational credentials, cultural tastes, ways of speaking and presenting oneself) and social capital (who you know, the networks you can call on). Two people with identical incomes can have very different class experiences depending on their cultural and social resources. This is why sociologists resist reducing stratification to income alone: someone who wins the lottery gains economic capital but may lack the cultural and social capital that structure upper-class life.
Understanding stratification is the prerequisite for analyzing how race, gender, education, and urbanization operate as specific axes along which hierarchies are organized — topics you will examine next. The core takeaway is that inequality is not accidental or purely the result of individual differences in talent and effort. It is built into social structure and reproduced across generations through institutions, networks, and inherited advantages that operate independently of any individual's choices.
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