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CHAPTER 1
HOW STRATIFICATION WORKS
A
ll human societies have a social structure that divides people into categories based on a combination of achieved and as- cribed traits. Achieved characteristics are those acquired in the course of living, whereas ascribed characteristics are set at birth. The categories defined within a social structure may be nominal or graduated—that is, they may assign labels to people on the basis of shared qualitative attributes, or they may rank people along some quantitative continuum (see Blau 1977). Ascribed social categories include nominal groupings such as gender, in which people are la- beled male or female on the basis of inherited physical traits (ulti- mately, the possession of one versus two X chromosomes), as well as graduated categories such as age, in which people are classified according to the amount of time elapsed since birth. Achieved sta- tuses may also be nominal—being a member of a fraternal lodge such as the Moose or Elks—or graduated—being a member of an income class. Stratification refers to the unequal distribution of people across social categories that are characterized by differential access to scarce resources. The resources may be material, such as income and wealth; they may be symbolic, such as prestige and social standing; or they may be emotional, such as love, affection, and, of course, sex. The term “stratification” comes from the Latin stratum , which in the geological sense refers to an identifiable layer of sedi- ment or material in the ground. Over time, changing environmen- tal conditions produce identifiable layers within the earth’s crust,
known as strata, which are distinctive in composition and can be associated temporally with different geological eras. In an analo- gous manner, societies may be conceptualized as having social strata, different layers that are distinctive in composition and char- acterized by more or less access to material, symbolic, and emo- tional resources. Stratification systems order people vertically in a social structure characterized by a distinct top and bottom. The distance from the top to the bottom of any society is indicated by the size of the gap in access to resources between those in the uppermost and lower- most social categories. As the distance between the top and the bot- tom of a social structure increases, and as the distribution of people across social categories shifts toward the extremes, a society is said to become more stratified—literally having more socially defined layers with more people distributed among them at greater dis- tances from one another. The degree of social stratification is often measured in terms of inequality, which assesses the degree of vari- ability in the dispersion of people among ranked social categories. Human societies differ greatly with respect to their degree of so- cial inequality. In general, small foraging societies in which people hunt and gather for a living tend to be quite egalitarian (Kelly 1995). Social categories are defined mainly on the basis of gender, age, and kinship, categorical perceptions that appear to be hard- wired into human social cognition (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000). Among hunters and gatherers there is little inequality in ac- cess to material resources. The stratification that does exist is mainly expressed as unequal access to symbolic or emotional re- sources. Among men, prestige and sexual access derive not simply from skill at hunting and successful food provision but also from generosity and sharing within the group. Selfishness and hoarding are discouraged through a variety of informal leveling mechanisms that involve ridicule, shaming, and humor, which are often en- forced through prescribed rituals (Gamble 1999). The most common form of stratification in foraging societies oc- curs on the basis of gender. Stratification between males and fe- males derives primarily from the amount of time that men spend alone together, typically on a hunt, and is thus determined by local Categorically Unequal
tween classes was minimal, the total amount of inequality was con- strained by the small size of the food surplus produced with a pre- industrial technology (Massey 2005a). In the world of agrarian ur- banism, which prevailed from 8000 B.C. to around 1800^ A.D., no more than 5 percent of the inhabitants within any society ever lived in cities, and among urban dwellers only a tiny fraction belonged to the ruling elite. The typical member of a pre-industrial agrarian so- ciety was an illiterate peasant whose access to resources was the same as that of most of the rest of the population. Despite the exis- tence of privileged classes, total inequality was actually quite mod- est by contemporary standards. Beginning around 1800, however, the industrial revolution breached the technological cap that had limited inequality for mil- lennia. Mechanization enabled a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity so that for the first time fewer than 5 percent of hu- mans could produce enough food for everyone else (Berry 1973). Industrial societies urbanized, and the vast majority of people came to inhabit cities and work in non-agricultural occupations. As the share of workers employed in manufacturing and services grew, the number and range of occupations expanded rapidly to produce new social forms of differentiation. In the United States, for exam- ple, the variance in the distribution of people across occupational categories increased by a factor of four between 1850 and 1950 (Massey 2005a). Industrialization also enabled an unprecedented increase in ma- terial well-being, dramatically widening the absolute distance be- tween the top and the bottom of human social structures. Between 1850 and 1950, the total value of goods and services produced in the global economy rose from $939 trillion to $5,336 trillion (Maddison 2003), and the largest private fortune in the United States rose from $1 million to $1.6 billion (Phillips 2002). This increased distance be- tween the top and bottom of the social hierarchy and the prolifera- tion of categories in between made possible a new burst of stratifi- cation and inequality that lasted well into the twentieth century (Williamson 1980). In the United States the restructuring of the political economy in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War com- Categorically Unequal
pressed the distribution of earnings and substantially reduced lev- els of inequality, beginning in the 1930s (Goldin and Margo 1992). From 1945 to 1975, under structural arrangements implemented during the New Deal, poverty rates steadily fell, median incomes consistently rose, and inequality progressively dropped as a rising economic tide lifted all boats (see Burtless and Smeeding 2001; Danziger and Gottschalk 1995; Freeman 2001; Levy 1998; Smeed- ing, O’Higgins, and Rainwater 1990). During the 1970s, however, a new post-industrial economy arose, one based on the creation of knowledge and manipulation of infor- mation rather than the production of goods and services or the cul- tivation of food (Devine and Waters 2004; Svallfors 2005). Once again occupational differentiation increased and the distance be- tween the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy grew. Whereas the largest private fortune in the United States stood at $3.6 billion in 1968, by 1999 it had reached $85 billion, raising the distance be- tween the top and bottom of the social structure by a factor of 24 in just thirty years (Phillips 2002). Likewise, from 1975 to 2000 wealth inequality increased by 11 percent while income inequality rose by 23 percent (Keister 2000; Massey 2005a). At century’s end, the rich- est 1 percent of Americans controlled 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth.
Categorical Inequality
Despite the radical transformation of human societies over time— from foraging societies through agrarian urbanism into industrial urbanism and on to our current post-industrial world—the funda- mental mechanisms producing stratification have not changed much. Although the number and range of categories in the social structure may have risen dramatically, and the stock of material re- sources may have accumulated to new heights, the basic means by which people are granted more or less access to scarce material, emotional, and symbolic resources have remained remarkably sim- ilar through the ages. Indeed, all stratification processes boil down to a combination of two simple but powerful mechanisms: the allo- cation of people to social categories, and the institutionalization of How Stratification Works
from one social setting to another. The second is adaptation : social relations and day-to-day behaviors at the microsocial level become oriented toward ranked categories, so that decisions about who to befriend, who to help, who to share with, who to live near, who to court, and who to marry are made in ways that assume the exis- tence and importance of asymmetric social categories. In the words of Tilly (1998, 10): “Exploitation and opportunity hoarding favor the installation of categorical inequality, while emulation and adap- tation generalize its influence.” In the Jim Crow South, for example, if legislation to enforce racial segregation that was invented in one southern state was successful, it would be imitated by other southern states, such that by 1920 all the states of the former Confederacy came to have remarkably sim- ilar legal codes on the issue of race (Packard 2002; Woodward 1955; Wormser 2003). At the same time, faced with violence and coercion, blacks came to “know their place” in the southern social order and adapted to it in ways that reinforced their subjugation. Whites throughout the South likewise adapted their behaviors according to the formal and informal rules of Jim Crow, which allowed them to intimidate, victimize, and punish African Americans with im- punity. As a result, racial segregation was enforced not only for- mally in public settings but also informally in private practice through a racial etiquette negotiated daily by black and white southerners.
The Psychology of Social Classification
Although obvious and glaring, in principle the mechanisms of stratification employed in the Jim Crow South are quite general and operate at some level in all human societies. They are ultimately so- cial in origin and predate the emergence of the market as a means of organizing human production and consumption (Massey 2005a). Instead, they follow naturally from the pursuit of core social mo- tives common to all human beings (Fiske 2004). What has changed dramatically is the societal context within which the core social mo- tives play out. Human interactions increasingly occur within urban How Stratification Works
environments of great size, density, and heterogeneity, and the eco- logical settings that individuals find themselves adapting to—psy- chologically, socially, culturally, and physiologically—vary greatly depending on whether the individuals are rich or poor, light or dark, male or female. In a very real way, stratification begins psychologically with the creation of cognitive boundaries that allocate people to social cate- gories. Before categorical inequality can be implemented socially, categories must be created cognitively to classify people conceptu- ally based on some set of achieved and ascribed characteristics. The roots of social stratification thus lie ultimately in the cognitive con- struction of boundaries to make social distinctions, a task that comes naturally to human beings, who are mentally hardwired to engage in categorical thought (Fiske 2004). Indeed, recent work shows that human intelligence works more through pattern recog- nition and inductive generalization than deductive logic or mathe- matical optimization (Dawes 1998). In contrast to the software and hardware of a digital computer, which work together to make deci- sions using a strict Boolean logic, the “wetware” of the human brain is messy, inconsistent, and often quite “illogical” in a strictly deductive sense (Dawes and Hastie 2001; Kahneman and Tversky 1973, 1979). Instead, human “rationality” has been shaped by evo- lution to depart in characteristic ways from strict adherence to the principles of logic and probability that are assumed by most ra- tional choice models (Dawes 1998; Kahneman and Tversky 2000). Our natural capacity for categorical thought evolved in this fash- ion because the human brain is an energy sink. Constituting just 2 percent of the body’s weight, the brain uses 20 percent of its total energy (Donald 1991). In the course of thousands of years of evolu- tion, therefore, human beings evolved ingrained mental shortcuts to conserve cognitive resources. Operating with deductive rigor to consider all possible combinations, permutations, and contingen- cies before making a decision is possible for a powerful electronic computer contemplating a single problem, but if the brain were to adopt such an approach to decide the myriad of choices that human beings face in daily life, humans would waste a lot of scarce energy pondering routine situations and everyday actions that have little Categorically Unequal
Social schemas do not exist simply as neutral mental representa- tions, however; they are typically associated with emotional va- lences. The human brain is composed of two parallel processors that, while interconnected, function independently (Carter 1998; Konner 2002; Panksepp 1998). The emotional brain is rooted in a set of neural structures that are common to all mammals and are known collectively as the limbic system, whereas the rational brain is centered in the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the neocortex (Damasio 1994, 1999). The two portions of the brain, labeled system 1 and system 2 by Daniel Kahneman (2003), are neurally intercon- nected, but the number and speed of the connections running from the limbic system to the neocortex are greater than the reverse, so that emotional memories stored in the limbic system, which are typically unconscious or implicit, greatly affect how human beings make use of categories that exist within the rational, conscious brain (LeDoux 1996; Zajonc 1998). Emotions stored in the limbic system may be positive or nega- tive, but when they are associated with particular classes of people or objects they contribute to prejudice , which is a predetermined emotional orientation toward individuals or objects (Fiske 2004). A prejudicial orientation for or against some social group thus con- tains both conscious and unconscious components (Bargh 1996, 1997). On the one hand, people may be principled racists who con- sciously believe that African Americans are inferior and thus ra- tionally seek to subordinate them, consistent with their explicit be- liefs. On the other hand, a person may quite sincerely believe in equal opportunity and racial justice and yet harbor unconscious anti-black sentiments and associations that were created through some process of conditioning (such as the repeated visual pairing of violent crime scenes with black perpetrators on television), even though this prejudice may be inconsistent with the person’s explicit beliefs. All human beings, whether they think of themselves as preju- diced or not, hold in their heads schemas that classify people into categories based on age, gender, race, and ethnicity (Stangor et al. 1992; Taylor et al. 1978). They cannot help it. It is part of the human condition, and these schemas generally include implicit memories Categorically Unequal
that yield subconscious dispositions toward people and objects, leading to stereotypes (Fiske 1998). Moreover, although stereotypi- cal notions are always present, people are more likely to fall back on them in making judgments when they feel challenged, face un- certainty, or experience sensory overload (Bodenhausen and Licht- enstein 1987; Bodenhausen and Wyer 1985). In making stereotypical judgments about others, human beings appear to evaluate people along two basic psychological dimen- sions: warmth and competence (Fiske et al. 2002). Warmth is how likable and approachable a person is. We are attracted to people we view as high on the warmth dimension, and we seek to interact and spend time with them. We find people who are low on the warmth dimension to be off-putting, and we generally avoid them and seek to minimize the number and range of our social contacts with them; we don’t like them and find them “cold.” In addition to these sub- jective feelings of attraction and liking, we also evaluate people in terms of competence and efficacy—their ability to act in a purpose- ful manner to get things done. We may or may not like people who are highly competent, but we generally respect them and admire their ability to achieve. These two dimensions of social perception come together in the stereotype content model , which argues that human social cognition and stereotyping involve the cognitive placement of groups and in- dividuals in a two-dimensional social space defined by the intersec- tion of independent axes of warmth and competence (Fiske et al. 2002). As shown in figure 1.1, the social space for stereotyping has four quadrants. The top-right quadrant contains people within the person’s own group, along with members of groups perceived to be similar to one’s own. Naturally, we think of members of our own social group as warm and competent and, hence, approachable and worthy of respect. The relevant emotion associated with in-group social perceptions is esteem or pride. The intersection of the two dimensions yields three distinct kinds of out-groups, however, which vary in terms of approacha- bility and respect. The bottom-right quadrant contains those groups that are viewed socially as competent but not warm. They are respected but not liked, and the relevant emotion that people How Stratification Works
them and do not respect them. In a stable social structure, members of pitied out-groups tend to be looked after and cared for, but in times of social disorder they may suffer from neglect (as seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans), though they gen- erally do not become targets of intentional hatred or communal vi- olence. Finally, social groups occupying the bottom-left quadrant are perceived simultaneously as low in warmth and low in compe- tence. Being neither likable nor capable, people within these out- groups are socially despised, and the dominant emotion is disgust. This quadrant contains social outcasts such as drug dealers, lazy welfare recipients, sex offenders, and the chronically homeless. It also includes members of groups that have been subject to an ideo- logical process of group formation and boundary definition that questions their humanity. African Americans in the Jim Crow South were perceived by whites as neither competent nor warm. They were socially labeled as inferior, even subhuman, and because they were perceived as less than fully human, they could be exploited, segregated, humiliated, and killed with near impunity. Recent work in neuroscience has implicated a particular region of the brain as central to the process of social cognition (see Harris and Fiske 2006). Whenever individuals perceive a stimulus as a hu- man being and therefore a potential social actor, an area of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex lights up when observed under functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI). Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske (2006) pretested a number of photographic images of social actors to establish the quadrant into which they fell; then they showed these images to experimental subjects so that each person saw a total of eighty images—twenty of in-group members, twenty of envied out-groups, twenty of pitied out-groups, and twenty of despised out-groups. As they viewed the various social images, the brains of subjects were scanned under fMRI and centers of activity recorded. As ex- pected, the investigators found that images of people representing in-groups, envied out-groups, and pitied out-groups triggered clear reactions in the medial prefrontal cortex. Startlingly, however, How Stratification Works
images of despised out-groups did not (Harris and Fiske 2006). Whereas out-groups triggering feelings of pity and envy were in- stantly perceived as human beings and social actors, those that were despised were not seen in social terms at all—at the most fun- damental level of cognition. Despised out-groups thus become de- humanized at the neural level, and those who harbor these feelings thus have a license, in their own minds, to treat members of these out-groups as if they are animals or objects. This basic feature of human social cognition provides the psy- chological foundations for exploitation and opportunity hoarding in the real world. It is reinforced by another characteristic feature of human psychology known as the fundamental attribution error , “the general tendency to overestimate the importance of personal or dis- positional factors relative to environmental influences” in account- ing for behavior (Ross, Greene, and House 1977, 184). In evaluating others, all human beings have a natural tendency to attribute be- havioral outcomes to characteristics of the people involved rather than the structure of the situation. Thus, the poor are poor because they are lazy, lack a work ethic, have no sense of responsibility, are careless in their choices, or are just plain immoral, not because they lost their job or were born into a social position that did not give them the resources they needed to develop. Because of the funda- mental attribution error, we are all cognitively wired and prone to blame the victim—to think that people deserve their location in the prevailing stratification system. In parallel fashion, human beings have an opposite bias when they make attributions about themselves, at least with respect to negative outcomes. Rather than blaming themselves—something about their disposition or character—they tend to attribute per- sonal misfortunes to specific features of the situation, a proclivity known as the actor-observer effect (Jones and Nisbett 1972). When someone else ends up on welfare, it is because he or she is lazy, care- less, or irresponsible; when I end up on welfare, however, it is through no fault of my own but because of events beyond my con- trol: I lost my job, got sick, was injured, got pregnant accidentally, got divorced, was widowed. Because of the actor-observer effect, Categorically Unequal
(Barth 1969). Those subject to exploitation by a particular framing of social reality work to oppose it and substitute an alternative framing more amenable to their interests. Likewise, when they en- counter categorical boundaries that prevent them from accessing a desired resource, people work actively to resist and subvert the so- cial definitions as best they can. Members of subjugated groups have their own expectations about how they should be perceived and treated, and even if they outwardly adapt to the social precon- ceptions of more powerful others, they generally work inwardly to undermine the dominant conceptual and social order in small and large ways. Through such two-way interactions, however asymmetric they may be, people on both sides of a stratified social divide actively participate in the construction of the boundaries and identities that define a system of stratification. No matter what their posi- tion in the system, people seek to define for themselves the con- tent and meaning of social categories, embracing some elements ascribed to them by the dominant society and rejecting others, si- multaneously accepting and resisting the constraints and oppor- tunities associated with their particular social status. Through daily interactions with individuals and institutions, people con- struct an understanding of the lines between specific social groups (Barth 1981). The reification of group boundaries within human social struc- tures creates two important resources that are widely deployed in the process of social stratification: social capital and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). In classical economics, of course, capital refers to anything that can be used in the production of other resources, is human-made, and is not fully consumed in the process of produc- tion (Ricardo 1996). Common examples are financial capital , which can be invested to generate income, and physical capital , which can be applied in production to increase output. Economists later gen- eralized the concept by defining human capital as the skills and abil- ities embodied in people, notably through education and training (Schultz 1963). By investing in education, parents and societies thus create human capital in their children, and when individuals forgo Categorically Unequal
income and incur costs to gain additional training, they invest in their own human capital. Individuals recoup this investment through higher lifetime earnings; societies recoup it through higher taxes and enhanced productivity; and parents recoup it by enjoying the economic independence and financial security of their adult children (Becker 1975). Sociologists have broadened the concept of capital to embrace re- sources derived from social ties to people and institutions (Bour- dieu 1986; Coleman 1988). Social capital comes into existence when- ever a social connection to another person or membership in a social organization yields tangible benefits with respect to material, symbolic, or emotional resources, such as getting a job that offers higher income, greater prestige, and more access to attractive sex- ual partners. Most “good” jobs are not found through formal mech- anisms such as paid advertisements but through informal connec- tions with other social actors who provide information and leads (Granovetter 1974). Because ties to friends and family do not ex- tend very far and mostly yield redundant information, weak ties to casual acquaintances are generally more important in getting a job than close relationships to close friends or kin (Granovetter 1973). The use of framing and boundary work to construct an advan- taged social group with privileged access to resources and power creates the potential for social capital formation. Having a tie to a member of a privileged elite increases the odds of being able to ac- cess resources and power oneself. Elites implicitly recognize this fact and generally take steps to restrict social ties to other members of the elite. Marriage outside the group is discouraged; friendships are turned inward through exclusive organizations such as clubs, fraternities, and lodges; and rules of inheritance conserve elite sta- tus along family lines. To the extent that group members are suc- cessful in confining social ties to other group members, they achieve social closure. Outsiders trying to break into elite circles are labeled bounders or interlopers, and they are derided for acting “uppity” or “above their station.” Social closure within elite networks and institutions also creates the potential for another valuable resource known as cultural capital How Stratification Works
through a systematic process of segregation, then the fundamental processes of stratification become considerably more efficient and effective (Massey 2005a). If out-group members are spatially segregated from in-group members, then the latter are put in a good position to use their so- cial power to create institutions and practices that channel re- sources away from the places where out-group members live, thus facilitating exploitation. At the same time, they can use their social power to implement other mechanisms that direct resources sys- tematically toward in-group areas, thus facilitating opportunity hoarding. Spatial segregation renders stratification easy, conven- ient, and efficient because simply by investing or disinvesting in a place, one can invest or disinvest in a whole set of people (Massey and Denton 1993). Stratification thus becomes more effective to the degree that so- cial and spatial boundaries can be made to overlap. When members of an out-group are well integrated spatially, stratification is more difficult and costly because disinvestment in the out-group must occur on a person-by-person, family-by-family basis. Throughout history, therefore, whenever the powerful have sought to stigma- tize and subordinate a particular social group, they have endeav- ored to confine its members to specific neighborhoods by law, edict, or practice (Wirth 1928). The overlapping of social, cultural, economic, and spatial bound- aries yields what Peter Blau (1977) calls a consolidation of parameters. When social parameters are consolidated—when social, economic, and spatial characteristics correlate strongly with one another—the process of stratification becomes sharper and more acute. Within a hypothetical social space made up of cells defined by the intersec- tion of spatial status, social status, economic status, and cultural status, within-cell relations intensify and between-cell interactions attenuate. Over time, inter-cell mobility withers, social categories reify and reproduce themselves, and the social structure as a whole grows rigid. A society defined by consolidated parameters is thus one in which the categorical mechanisms of inequality operate very effectively and social boundaries are salient and difficult to cross, yielding “durable inequality,” a structural state wherein stratifica- How Stratification Works
tion replicates and reproduces itself more or less automatically over time.
Markets and Stratification
The mechanisms of stratification described so far do not presup- pose any particular economic system. They can function in a com- mand economy, where property is owned by the state and deci- sions about production and consumption are made by central planners, or in a capitalist economy, where property is privately held and decisions about production and consumption are made by free and autonomous agents working through markets. Stratifi- cation and inequality are not created by capitalism, and the exis- tence of markets does not guarantee inequality; nor does their ab- sence preclude it. Markets are a human invention, and until recently most transactions occurred outside the market. Stratifica- tion has been with us, however, for millennia (Massey 2005a). Markets are basically competitions between people that occur within socially constructed arenas according to socially defined rules using a socially accepted medium of exchange (Massey 2005b). By building the competitive arenas, defining the rules of play, and defining the media of exchange, societies bring markets into existence to facilitate the production, consumption, and distri- bution of goods and services. If markets are socially constructed by actors within the societies in which they are embedded, then there is no inherently correct number, distribution, or nature of markets. As societies change socially, demographically, and culturally, as new technologies emerge, and as new knowledge is created, the na- ture and number of markets change. For transactions to occur, buyers and sellers must come together within a mutually accepted arena. Sometimes the arena is delim- ited physically (such as the trading pit in the New York Stock Ex- change), and at other times it is geographically diffuse (as with NASDAQ, where securities are traded electronically in hyper- space). But competitive arenas are always defined socially by mutu- ally agreed-upon rules, both formal and informal, that govern transactions. As markets have evolved and expanded, the rules Categorically Unequal
