Development And Maintenance Of Stratification In Society Essay Examples

Social stratification may be viewed as the ways in which individuals are groups of people are placed against social statuses. These may be in terms on one’s social class, gender, age, sexuality or even ethnicity. It has been a concern of social psychologist to study how the stratification being applied in am certain society affects the individuals and how these individuals in return affect the development and maintenance of stratification in the society.
Interactionists view the development and maintenance of stratification in three ways. For them, the basic stratification processes are: 1) The existing social structure in a society dictates whom we can interact with, 2) People in lower-status positions often tend to take the roles of other compared to their more powerful counterparts of higher status, and 3) Meaning-making itself is stratified; An individual with higher status has more power to define situations and to define himself.
The first view looks into the influence of the social structure in defining which part of the social structure or which level can people freely interact with and who among them needs especial connections to be able to interact with them. A typical example of this is in a school organization. The social structure in the organization is defined in the school’s organizational structure where the definite lines of interaction as already identified and set. A student in this sense usually has a direct interaction with the teacher, however, the student does not have a direct ‘interaction line” to the principal for example. In this case, all the things he wants to communicate with the principal needs to be coursed through the teacher first. An ordinary citizen, for example cannot just talk to the mayor unless a public forum is open. Usually, before the citizen can communicate with the mayor, he has to come through numerous channels. However, the mayor has still the final say whether he wants to talk to the citizen or not. These are some clear indications why the social structure is very influential and is continuously thriving because it exists in any society.
The second integrationist view focus on how individuals with higher status can create situations or definitions for them to feel superior over those individuals belonging to the lower class. However, in the process of doing so, the higher class man tend to downgrade the morality of those in the lower class. Michael Swalbe sees this specific process as an explanation why the inequalities in the society including the social classes are being sustained. A common example for this situation can be on a job application alone. An individual with higher status with more connections usually gets a job without undergoing the usual process of hiring compared to an individual with lower class, even if he has more experienced than the one with higher status. In return, this leaves a psychological effect to the lower class individual as he may conclude that there is no equality in the hiring process. It becomes a “whom you know” process not a “what you know” process which should be the ideal situation.
The third view is relevant to the second view as it also touches how the higher class individuals have the power to define advantageous situations for themselves while those who belong to the lower class relies mainly on what the society dictates for them. Individuals in the higher class, for example can create events where they can shine and show what they have so they can strengthen their status in the society because they had the power to do so. Individuals in the lower society often rely on opportunities that may come to have a chance to prove their worth. Once those opportunities come they have to grab them or else those opportunities may not come again.