amazon.co.ukClass, status and party from Weber to Marxist, functionalist and feminist accounts of inequality, with NS-SEC measurement, life chances, Goldthorpe's mobility studies and 30-mark essay technique for AQA 7192 and OCR H580.
AQA 4.3, OCR H580 (Components 01 and 03) and Eduqas AC5.1 open with the historical forms of stratification: slavery (ownership of persons), caste (birth-ascribed and closed, e.g. the Hindu varna system), estate (feudal layers defined by law, e.g. nobility, clergy, commoners) and class - the open, achieved, market-based form characteristic of capitalism. Weber (1922) then splits class into three dimensions. Class is market position: economic power flowing from skills, qualifications and ownership, creating shared life chances. Status is social honour, which can cut across class - a black doctor suffers status discrimination despite class position, a poor aristocrat enjoys prestige without wealth. Party is organised political power, pursuing goals whether or not they serve economic interests.
Marx collapses this into one axis of ownership: capitalist society polarises into bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and proletariat (sellers of labour power), with exploitation producing ruling-class ideology that legitimises the system. AO3: the predicted polarisation never arrived - the middle class expanded ('embourgeoisement', Goldthorpe & Lockwood's affluent workers 1968) - so Weber's multi-dimensional model, and neo-Marxist refinements (Wright's contradictory class locations; Erikson & Goldthorpe's class schema), fit modern societies better. The strongest 30-mark answers deploy Weber against Marx and vice versa rather than treating them as rivals on one dimension.
Deepening the forms: the four forms differ in openness (can status be achieved?) and ascription (is position given at birth?): slavery and caste are closed and ascribed; estate is semi-open (law-defined but with mobility routes); class is open and achieved - the only form where inequality is theoretically justified by merit. Deepening Weber vs Marx: Goldthorpe & Lockwood's (1968) 'affluent workers' study found manual workers with middle-class incomes still held proletarian traditional norms - supporting Weber's distinction between market situation and consciousness. Wright (1985) tried to reconcile the two with contradictory class locations: managers and semi-autonomous employees occupy positions that are simultaneously capitalist and worker-like, explaining why polarisation never arrived. AO3: Weber's three dimensions overlap and are hard to operationalise separately (status and class blend in the professions), and Wright's locations are contested as arbitrary - use these as refinements, not refutations.
Davis & Moore (1945) argue stratification is functional: every society must allocate people to positions; the most important positions require scarce talent and long training, so unequal rewards ('differential functional importance') motivate sacrifice and ensure the best fill them - stratification is therefore universal and, in principle, efficient. AO3 - Tumin (1953) dismantles this: importance is impossible to measure objectively (nurses and cleaners matter more than their pay suggests); rewards reflect power, not function; stratification blocks the talent pool by restricting opportunity to the privileged (inheritance, private education); and it breeds resentment, not motivation - the exact opposite of a functional device.
Feminist theories insist stratification is gendered as well as classed. Walby (1990) identifies six patriarchal structures (paid work, household production, culture, sexuality, violence, the state) that systematically subordinate women; dual-systems theorists argue capitalism and patriarchy interlock, so women are exploited as both workers and unpaid domestic labourers. Evidence: vertical segregation concentrates women in junior roles, the gender pay gap persists (~13-14% for full-timers), and the glass ceiling holds despite formal equality. AO3: difference feminists warn against one universal 'women's' experience (intersectionality: class, ethnicity and gender interact), and liberal feminists stress measurable legal progress (Equality Act 2010). Dual-systems theory itself struggles to specify how two systems causally combine - a standard A* evaluation.
Deepening functionalism and its critique: the classic Davis & Moore example is the surgeon: long training, scarce talent and life-or-death importance justify high rewards. Tumin's rebuttal has five strands - two worth spelling out: (1) blocked opportunity - the talent pool is restricted by inheritance and private education, so the 'most talented' are partly the most privileged; (2) power not function - rewards reflect the bargaining power of positions, which is why functionally vital cleaners and nurses are paid little. Deepening feminism: vertical segregation concentrates women in the lowest grades even where they dominate the profession (teaching, medicine); intersectionality (Crenshaw) shows gender, class and ethnicity compound - minority women face the steepest ceilings. AO3: evidence of progress (Equal Pay Act 1970; Equality Act 2010; gender pay-gap reporting) supports liberal feminism's reformist claim, while the persistent gap supports the structural account.
Measurement: the NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-economic Classification) replaced the Registrar-General's scale in 2001 and classifies the population (8 classes, from higher managerial/professional to never-employed) by occupation, employment relations and conditions - contract, autonomy, promotion prospects. AO3: occupational measurement has well-known flaws: it ignores wealth (the fastest-growing divide), scores married women by their husband's or their own job inconsistently, misses the informal economy and underclass debates, and - as Weberians would note - captures only class, never status or party.
Life chances (Weber's term): class position systematically distributes access to life's goods. Health: the Black Report (1980) showed steep class gradients in morbidity and infant mortality that persist (professionals live roughly a decade longer in good health than routine workers). Wealth and income: the top decile holds a large multiple of the bottom decile's wealth, and inherited advantage compounds. Education and housing: class gaps in attainment and tenure underpin the cyclical reproduction of advantage. Townsend reframed deprivation as relative - lacking what society regards as normal - so life chances are measured against social standards, not subsistence. AO3 for essays: use life-chance evidence to adjudicate between theories - gradients across every domain support Marxist and Weberian accounts of durable class effect, and challenge both the functionalist claim that rewards track talent and the postmodern claim that class no longer matters.
Deepening measurement: the NS-SEC's eight classes range from 1 (higher managerial and professional) to 8 (never worked/long-term unemployed), and it underpins everything from exam results to mortality statistics - official statistics operationalise class. Its predecessor, the Registrar-General's scale, ranked occupations by prestige and was criticised as un-theoretical; the NS-SEC is explicitly Weberian (employment relations and conditions), showing how theory shapes measurement. Deepening life chances: relative poverty (households below 60% of median income) has hovered around a fifth of the UK population for decades, with children disproportionately affected; class gradients run through education (attainment gaps between FSM-eligible pupils and others), housing tenure and life expectancy. AO3: life-chance statistics are the strongest empirical adjudicator between theories - they sustain Marxist and Weberian claims of durable class effect, and directly challenge both functionalist meritocracy and the postmodern 'class is dead' claim.
Goldthorpe's Oxford Mobility Study (1972, replicated with Erikson 1992) remains the benchmark. Absolute mobility rose across the century - most men did better than their fathers - but Goldthorpe explains this as upward drift: the service class expanded as white-collar and professional jobs grew, so room opened at the top regardless of fairness. Relative mobility - the chances of one class compared with another - was stable: class of origin continued to shape destination, with long-range, 'unjustified' upward mobility into the service class still rare for working-class sons. Later evidence (Sutton Trust 2019; Blanden) confirms stagnant relative rates, and education reproduces rather than interrupts the pattern (Boudon: primary and secondary effects).
Critiques: feminist research (Stanworth 1984) showed Goldthorpe's classic study sampled men only, rendering women's mobility invisible - women's patterns differ, and marriage is itself a mobility route. The glass ceiling means upward mobility for women stalls below senior positions. Postmodern challenge: Pakulski & Waters (1996) and Bauman argue class is no longer the main source of identity or inequality - consumption and lifestyle stratify instead. AO3 response: Westergaard (1995) counters that inequality is still demonstrably class-shaped - wealth, life chances and mobility rates remain class gradients - so 'class is dead' mistakes changed language for changed reality. The A* judgement: absolute mobility rose through structural change while relative mobility froze, so the system grew more mobile without growing fairer.
Deepening Goldthorpe: the Oxford study used an 11-class schema and the concept of the service class (professionals and managers) with distinct career ladders and advantages; social closure (Parkin) explains why relative rates are stable - privileged classes monopolise positions by excluding others through credentials and culture. Boudon (1974) supplies the education mechanism: primary effects (class differences in attainment) plus secondary effects (class-differentiated choices at transition points) reproduce the class structure even as education expands. Women's mobility was later studied (Heath) showing similar relative rates but steeper ceilings. Deepening the postmodern debate: Bauman argues identity is now chosen through consumption in 'fluid' modernity, and Pakulski & Waters claim property and occupation no longer define the strata. AO3: Westergaard's rebuttal stands - mobility rates, wealth and life chances remain class gradients - and even Bauman concedes inequality persists. The judgement: Britain has become more mobile in absolute terms, not fairer in relative terms.
Exam technique: stratification questions reward adjudication between theories, not description. AQA 4.3 and OCR H580 give 30-mark 'outline and evaluate' essays (AO weighting roughly 8/8/14) and 10-mark 'outline and analyse two' items; OCR also asks 'assess the view that...' with an Item (e.g. Item: most people believe social mobility has declined). The A* skeleton: define the concepts (class, status, party; bourgeoisie/proletariat; life chances), deploy two or three competing perspectives each with a named study, evaluate each with a counter-theorist, and finish with a weighed judgement that answers the actual question - e.g. 'class remains the structural skeleton of inequality, but it now operates alongside gender, ethnicity and consumption'.