THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN SOCIOLOGY

Abstract

The forces of social stratification and social problems have long been relegated to the sociological sidelines by class theorists of both Marxist and non-Marxist persuasions. In most versions of class-analytic theory, status groups are treated as secondary forms of affiliation, whereas class-based ties are seen as more fundamental and decisive determinants of social and political action. Social stratification as a cause of social problem is typically represented as vestiges of traditional loyalties that will wither away under the rationalizing influence of socialism, industrialism, or modernization. The first step in the intellectual breakdown of the model of stratification as a cause of social problem was the fashioning of a multidimensional approach to stratification. Whereas many class theorists gave theoretical or conceptual priority to the economic dimension of stratification, the early multi dimension approach emphasized that social behavior could be understood only by taking into account all status group memberships (e.g., race, gender) and the complex ways in which they interact with one another and with class outcomes. This paper traces the contours of current, practical explanatory problems in stratification theory showing how it creates social problems and the similarity of issues in apparently diverse approaches, of both Marxist and non-Marxist. There are two related purposes. The first is to show the specific nature of the current crisis, locating particular explanatory failures. The second is to illustrate the more general issue of the way in which the central epistemology of self-conscious social caste behaviours derives from and describes failures in social scientific practice. This is well illustrated in the response to current problems. Both purposes are served by laying bare the procedures by which attempts are made to convert the contradictions inherent in explanatory failures into contradictory features of social experience which could be explained by consistent theories. Contradiction is thus, apparently, removed from its role in specifying the need for theoretical development, to encapsulating the processes by which current social arrangements are reproduced. However, despite initial plausibility, such attempts merely displace explanatory contradictions rather than solve them. The attempts are justified by an explicit or implicit action frame of reference which, though it is central to abstract discussions of the nature of social stratification, is invoked in practical social science only in circumstances of explanatory failure in an unproductive attempt to insulate the theories from the consequences of their failure. Social stratification is a component of productive social science which encompasses the resolution of contradictions in the transformation of theoretical objects and relationships