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Erik Wright's Sociological Model Of Social Class

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According to many sociologists, social class is referred to the people who belong to the same class have similar characteristics and are close to each other in terms of power, prestige and wealth. Wealth basically includes the property possessed by an individual and the income or money he receives in his job etc. income alone does not define the wealth of a person. There can be cases where people own a lot of property but their income is less or vice versa. But income and wealth go hand in hand. More the income or property more is the wealth. The property owned by the people is not distributed evenly among all. A less section of society own the maximum property whereas a large population shares a little left property which includes shares, …show more content…

One is the based on Marx and the other is based on Weber. According to Marx’s model, there are two broad classes of capitalists and workers. Erik Wright, a sociologist though explains that there are some people who do not fall in either of the two categories. For example, even though supervisors, executives etc fall under the workers’ category, they more accurately resemble to the capitalists. Thus, Wright stated that people can belong to more than a single category. He termed this case as contradictory class locations. According to him, there were four classes including those who owned large enterprises who were the capitalists, those who owned small businesses named as petty bourgeoisie, those employees who have power or authority over rest of the workers named as managers and those who worked as laborers classified as the workers. Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl who were the sociologists developed a model based on the framework of Weber to define the structure of class in the United States and other few capitalist countries. Just 1% of the population is the capitalist class which comprises of heirs, investors etc. it is divided into two categories that are ‘old’ money and ‘new’ money. The wards of ‘new’ money families enter the families of ‘old’ money by marrying them or by attending right kind of schools. 15% of the population consists of the upper middle class which comprises of upper managers, professionals etc who are mostly postgraduates and have attended good colleges or universities. This class is the one class that has most of its people groomed up by education. 34% of the population comprises of the lower middle class which consists of low level managers, foremen etc having a high school education at the least. Another 30% of the population is the working class comprising of low paid white collar workers and factory workers

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“A man can be rich, but only a nation can be wealthy. And if anyone suffers from poverty, our whole country bears the shame.” (Mosley para. Intro) In the article “Show Me the Money” by Walter Mosley, he talks about the three economic classes, who makes up these classes, and what defines them.

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The more money the wealth has the less middle class there is. The more people that influences the wealthy the higher the social equality will grow. Krugman says “A society with highly unequal results is more or less inevitably a society with highly unequal opportunity, too (592).” Middle class is being denied for all the help that there is, while the wealth is getting help. They are force to live this way because of inequality in the world.

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The structural barriers created by the upper middle class is not a recent development. Structural barriers can date back to the time of Benjamin Franklin. For example, name meant everything back in the early years of the United States. It was all about who you knew-even the American dream underlyingly was based on connections you had with people who were deemed “higher up” (Isenberg,

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According to Marx society was divided into two classes that were in eternal conflict in the battle for resources, or as Marx coined; “the means of production”. The first class were the bourgeoisie, which Marx described as the sole owners of the means of production as well as the media. The bourgeoisie used their power and influence to exploit the second class, which Marx called the proletariat which consisted of all the workers of the world. Marx rejected the idea that the wealthy pulled themselves from their own bootstraps, which he called “false consciousness” and in return coined the term “class consciousness”, which referred to a persons awareness of their own social status, especially in terms of class conflict. Overall, Marx concluded that social order is created maintained by domination and power.

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They have the money to pay for expensive schools that poor people don’t have. Income refers to earnings made from investments or work. Wealth refers to the total value of money and other assets minus debt. Wealth includes stocks, bonds, and real estate. Income is more evenly distributed than wealth.

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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.

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For Marx, he considered class in relation to the means to production. He saw a shift from a feudal society on agriculture, where the land owning classes are classified from the peasant class. Scribes, information dealers, intelligencia and civil servants, who did not contribute to the production in the economy, are considered of no use and ar classless. On the other hand, Weber saw class on several layers (Bartle, 2007). Such differences can be understood in a sociological perspective.

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According to Edwards et al. (2006) Marx thought that within capitalism there would be an increased divide between the bourgeoisie class and the proletariat class in the future. The proletariats are lower of the two classes, the people who have to work for wages in order to survive. The bourgeoisie are the people in society who controlled and owned the means of production in a capitalist system.

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