Social Class

Social class is a concept that is used to classify people on the basis of: 1) their opportunities for increasing their wealth; 2) the nature of their working conditions, including their autonomy and relationship with authority; and 3) their access to education and educational credentials. People belong to a certain social class when they attain certain material conditions, when they engage in a certain type of labor, when they embrace a certain lifestyle, and possibly when they live in a certain geographical area. People with these similar characteristics are often said to belong to the same social class.

Overview

The concept of social class first emerged in the quest to understand the inequalities generated by capitalism. Under capitalism, the upper class owns the means of production and thus has more authority and power over those who are employed as laborers in the production process. People in the working or lower class are capable only of selling their labor to the owners of the means of production. As a result, their labor is reduced to mechanical and repetitive functions that provide few opportunities for growth. To account for the psychological consequences of the inequalities that characterize the differences between the upper and lower social classes under capitalism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels articulated the concept of alienation. According to them, planning, creativity, and innovation are qualities that distinguish human beings from other animals. Therefore, working conditions that repress the creative potential of human beings by having them perform repetitive assembly line tasks alienate humans from an essential part of their humanity.

Many Western democratic countries believe in an ideal called meritocracy, which holds that people advance in society solely on the basis of the merit of their work. Under this ideal, social class is an irrelevant concept because merit is deemed to be the only significant factor in advancement. For example, it is often argued that public schools, by offering the same curricula and services to students universally, provide an equal opportunity to every individual child to maintain or improve their class status. This argument has contributed to a perspective that assumes that providing equal educational opportunity is all that is required to ensure that society operates as a meritocracy (i.e., one in which social advancement functions independently of social class). This perspective has been perpetuated by anecdotal stories of lower-class people who become rich or get ahead that have often been used as evidence of larger sociological trends. An alternative perspective holds that children from different social classes enter school with different experiences. Therefore, offering children with different experiences the same education will not enable children from less advantaged homes to overcome a lack of financial resources or time with parents. This perspective has argued that society needs to enrich the experiences of children from disadvantaged backgrounds to make their experiences in schools equitable.

Research has shown that the long-term outcomes for members of different social classes are themselves different. Students from the working classes drop out of school more often than students from the middle and upper classes. Evidence has also shown that children from different social classes receive significantly different educational experiences in terms of access to quality curricula, well-resourced schools, learning opportunities, and well-qualified and experienced educators. Low-income children and families are more likely to be exposed to physical risks and stressors and have fewer options for medical care, which negatively impacts both life span and quality of life. Research comparisons of giving and prosocial behaviors have seemed to differ between classes as well: members of the working classes tend to be more generous, charitable, trusting, and helpful when compared with their upper-class counterparts, perhaps an influence of their social class values.

Bibliography

Fiske, Susan T., and Hazel Rose Markus, editors. Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction. Russell Sage Foundation, 2012.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Lawrence, 1971.

Labaree, David F. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling. Harvard UP, 2010.

Lareau, Annette. “Introduction: Taking Stock of Class.” Social Class: How Does It Work? Edited by Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley, Russell Sage Foundation, 2008, pp. 3–24.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Regnery, 2009.

Miller, Gregory, et al. “Low Early-life Social Class Leaves a Biological Residue Manifested by Decreased Glucocorticoid and Increased Proinflammatory Signaling.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 34, 2009.

Piff, Paul K., Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, Bonnie H. Cheng, and Dacher Keltner. “Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 99, no. 5, 2010, pp. 771–84.

Stephens, Nicole M., Hazel R. Markus, and L. Taylor Phillips. “Social Class Culture Cycles: How Three Gateway Contexts Shape Selves and Fuel Inequality.” Annual Review of Psychology 65 (2014), n.p. Print.

Warren, Matthew. "How Social Class Is Reflected in Our Psychology." The British Psychological Society, 26 May 2022, www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/how-social-class-reflected-our-psychology. Accessed 10 Sept. 2024.

Weis, Lois, editor. The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family, and Economy. Routledge, 2008.