A social class is a group of people who occupy similar positions in an economic system. Social class includes factors such as power and wealth. William has neither power or wealth, only the dream to be a knight. To meet that goal, his only choice is to fake his social rank.
Social with No Class The words social class are defined as a division of a society based on one’s socioeconomic status. Different divisions of social class and their effects on other people play a big role in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and in Tate Taylor’s movie version of The Help. To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in Maycomb, Alabama during the Jim Crow era.
Class is a social system of hierarchy based on economic wealth. Joseph O. Jewell, author of Race, Social Reform, and the Making of a Middle Class: The American Missionary Association and Black Atlanta, 1870-1900, explains class as to “exist in large part as cultures-shared set of rules, ideologies, or
Social Class refers to a group of people with similar attributes such as, wealth, and status. A social class, or in other terms class society, is a group of personal opinions described concepts in the political theory and social sciences focused on copies of social stratification where people are set into a group of hierarchical social class, normally being the lower, working, middle and upper classes. Sociologist use different methods to determine social class, objective, subjective, and reputational method. Objective measures the hard facts, subjective measures what people think of themselves, and reputational measures what people think of others. The lower class is the people living in poverty, homelessness, and maybe unemployment.
The social classes in Maycomb in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are similar the rungs of a ladder. People like Miss Stephanie, Aunt Alexandra, and Judge Taylor stand on the topmost “rungs”, and the Cunninghams, the black people, and the Ewells stay at the bottom. Any individual who breaks the social class system is ostracized. Men like Dolphus Raymond, who disregard the bonds of social class, receive harassment from the other citizens of Maycomb who remain faithful to the system.
Discussion about Social class and poverty in America According to the textbook of Introduction to sociology, a social class is defined as a social ranking according to the economic position in which achieved characteristics can influence social mobility. Sociologist Daniel Rossides describes five social class: the upper class, the upper-middle class, the lower middle class, the working class and the lower class. Social class is decided by achieved and ascribed characteristics, and we can change our class by achieved work. Social class has powerful impacts on a person’s life.
In America after World War Two, citizens were split between classes based on their economic stability. Americans today still look at these classes and define these people as better off or worse off than the next person. Why do people judge others for having less money than them? Why do employers send lower class citizen away when they need the money the most? These are some question that citizens in the lower or middle class have when they are looking at their position in America’s economic system.
When talking about social class the sub theme that is also brought up is reputation, and how reputation can differ depending on your social class. For example Thomas Putnam states that “We vote by name in this society, not by acreage.” The second point that will be brought up in
social class can be hard to define. There is low status consistency which means have important jobs, but make moderate income. Social class can change during a person’s lifetime. It will either go up or down, but most of the time it stays the same. Social class can have effects on health, political attitudes, and prison rates.
How does social class affect people’s lives? Social class groups individual persons into class hierarchy which is determined by person’s income, education, wealth, social connection, and job profession. Social class classifies people into spectrum of class such as lower class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class. Depending on which class an individual falls in affects earnings, education, respect, success, status, family life, health, job occupation, and social connection. An individual that lies in higher part of class spectrum gets more opportunities and has better lives than an individual that lies in lower part of class spectrum that does not get opportunities and struggles in lives.
Social class is a group of people with similar levels of wealth, influence, and status. The influence of class has a great relationship with deviant labelling. There are five common social classes recognized in many societies which are the upper class, the upper-middle class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class. The upper class represent institutional leadership, heads of multinational corporations and capitalist elite such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Michael Eisner of Disney. Besides, the upper-middle class people are highly educated and has professional careers with sky-high incomes such as doctors, lawyers and midsized business owners.
I believe social classes have defined our society in many ways. In America, they separate people into three different classes: the upper class, middle class, and the lower or working class. Based on wealth and various occupations, social classes determine the population’s status in society. Social classes today define individuals and influence their actions. Although people born in a certain class may choose to stay there, they also have the choice of leaving.
Though social classes are based on culture, situation, and personal expectation, I also think our World’s habit of prejudging and grouping people based on appearance and not bank account plays into this. That is based on us, as sinful creatures, judging those around us based on what they own, but this does not change the definition of social economic class as much as my previous points do. Personal expectation: “Believing that something is going to happen or believing that something should be a certain way.” Situation: “The way something is positioned as compared to its surroundings, or the status of the circumstances, or the combination of circumstances at a specific point in time.” Culture: “A particular set of customs, morals, codes and traditions from a specific time and place.”
Social class contains a lot of significance in social sciences because it sets the basis for social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories. These categories further lead up to class conflicts and social problems which we see in society today. Since the main aim of social sciences is to explain the cause and effect of any social issue, sociologists tend to first explain the definition of class and their interpretation of the term followed by its effects in a society. Among these sociologists there were two very influential personalities who developed their work to explain the definition and the formation of the social class. Karl Marx, being an economist, believes that these social classes are a direct result of economic factors.
Social classes are a form of social stratification that refers to the existence of structured inequalities between individuals and groups in society. A social class is a group of people of comparable status, power and wealth which are usually classified as upper class, middle class, and lower class. For each class, there are some specific opportunities available that influence their social life. We can understand about the particularity of the chances through unequal distribution of these opportunities between individuals in social classes. In here belonging to a social class seems to be an obstacle for some individuals to obtain equal opportunity, unlike upper class people.