Chapter 8 Flashcards
According to Weber, a large group of people who rank close to one another in property, power, and prestige; according to Marx, one of two groups: capitalists who own the means of production or workers who sell their labor.
Social class.
Material possessions: includes animals, bank accounts, bonds, buildings, businesses, cars, cash, commodities, copyrights, furniture, jewelry, land and stocks.
Property
The total value of everything someone owns, minus the debts.
Wealth
Money received, usually from a job, business or assets.
Income
The ability to carry out your will, even over the resistance of others.
Power
C Wright Mills’ term for the top people in US corporations, military and politics who make the nation’s major decisions.
Power elite.
Ranking high or low on all three dimensional of social class.
Status consistency
Ranking high on some dimensions of social class and low on others; also called status discrepancy.
Status inconsistency.
The position that someone occupies in a social group (also called social status)
Status
Respect or regard
Prestige
Durkheim’s term for a condition of society in which people become detached from the usual norms that guide their behavior.
Anomie
Erik Wright’s term for a position in the class tructure that generates contradictory interests.
Contradictory class locations.
A group of people for whom poverty persists year after year and across generations.
Underclass
The change that family members make in social class from one generation to the next
Intergenerational mobility
Movement up the social class ladder.
Upward social mobility
Movement down the social class ladder.
Downward social mobility
Movement up or down the social class ladder that is due more to changes in the structure of society that to the actions of individuals.
Structural mobility
A large number of people moving up the social class ladder, while a large number move down; it is as thought they have exchanged places and despite much social mobility the social class system shows little change.
Exchange mobility
The official measure of poverty; calculated to include incomes that are less than three times a low cost food budget.
Poverty line
A condition of US poverty in which most poor families are headed by women.
Feminization of poverty.
The assumption that the values and behaviors of the poor make them fundamentally different from other people, that these factories are largely responsible for their poverty and that parents perpetuate poverty across generations by passing these characteristics to their children.
Culture of poverty.
Going without something in the present in the hope of achieving greater gains in the future.
Deferred gratification
The belief that due to limitless possibilities anyone can get ahead if he or she tries hard enough.
Haratio Alger myth
