Social Class (Ch. 5) Flashcards
socioeconomic status
- occupation, education, income - hierarchal arrangement of individuals based on wealth, power, and prestige (so even if your profession is prestigious, it may not pay well, so you may not really have power)
stratification
- insitutionalized inequality of distribution of scarce resources
Weber
- stratification - added income/wealth (not everyone can have $), status (if everyone had high status, it wouldn’t exist), and power (not everyone can have power) to stratification
Why don’t change theorists/Marxists like socioeconomic status and stratification?
- class and inequality are tied to struggle between opposing forces - class is determined only by relationship to production
status symbols
- assumed to be signs of class - ie. cars, clothes, vacations
status
- financed through debt
middle class
- is the working class -> all our labour produces profit for elites, even though conditions over labour are different and our control over our workday may be different
class consciousness
- understanding one has of their place in the class structure - working class have low class consciousness -> identify as middle class
how working relates to capitalism
get good education -> get high-paying job -> buy luxurious status symbols to show that you’ve “made it” -> contributes to capitalism
thinking dialectically about class
- class is relational yet hierarchal (middle class consumers depend on working class labour) - composed of objective (type of labour) and subjective (class consciousness) elements
What do the Council on Foreign Relations, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and the Bilderberg Group all have in common?
- All essentially secretive unions that support the upper class - examples of corporations that make major decisons that affect our lives, yet we don’t relaly know what goes on/how those decisions are made
Ruling class/corporate elites
- economic power -> social/political power to protect own class interest
income
wages or salary
wealth
- money minus debts - cash, property, boats, stocks, etc. - usually inherited
Why do some people have a lot of wealth, yet a small income?
Because they’ve inherited their wealth (income doesn’t really matter) -> contradicts social value that “if you work hard, you can make it big!” -> that value is a distraction for the real way people make it into owning class -> being born into it
who is the working class?
- 99% of Canadians -> earn a wage for their labour - survive by means of wage/income - “modern petite bourgeoisie”
proletarianization
lower-status jobs end up getting paid more than higher status jobs
how are waged workers fragmented?
- scarcity of work and declining wages - threat of job loss - lack of political/social influence - “common sense” beliefs (lucky to have job, lack of success is personal failure)
inter-class conflict
- intentional unemployment creates scarcity and competiton for secure jobs and wages -> forced competition by capitalism - willingness to work longer hours for less money -> greater productivity at less cost to employer
reserve army of labour
- group of people who are unemployed/underemployed - creates downword pressure on wages, used when labour demands are high to keep worker’s demands in check -> essential to workings of capitalism
demonizing unions
creating negative public opinion to restrict union rights (ie. striking)
racism and class
- migrant workers vs. Canadian citizens - unions vs. migrant workers - lower migrant workers’ pay -> all unemployed wages go down
material resources (ie.__) shape __ and __ that signal __
income, cultural practices, behaviours, social class
exclusivity between class
- shown in “People Like Us” - rich people can be exclusive/private (large hedges, etc.) - the poorer you are, the more visible you are (ie. homeless)
