social inequalities- social class Flashcards
What elements should be considered?
- Employment
- Education
- Poverty
- Health
- Wealth
Employment:
What should be considered?
- Power and control
- job satisfaction
- status of job
Types of employment?
- Manual jobs- closely supervised, no career progression, less status
- Managerial/professional jobs- autonomy, skill development, promotion opportunities and higher satisfaction.
Education?
- At all stages WC kids achieve less than MC.
- Studies found- less likely to attend nursery and start school unable to read.
- Continues through GCSE, national stats shows WC kids always attain less.
Types of poverty?
Absolute and relative.
Poverty?
Wakeman-
- long-term food bank users increase risk of nutritional deficiencies.
- In London, there is a 25 year life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest 10%.
What is wealth?
The total ownership of all assets.
The office of national statistics (2014)?
- Richest 1% owned as much as the poorest 55% all together.
- Inequality increased 1979-1997
Why is it hard to measure wealth?
- Concealment
- Wealth changes in value overtime (E.G. land)
- Sometimes wealth is held by institutions not people.
Functionalist perspective?
Unequal rewards beneficial to society.
- Some deserve more/less.
Marxist perspective?
- High paid individuals have the power to create a culture of huge rewards, ordinary workers have to bargain for rewards.
Social mobility?
- UK holds strong correlation between parent and child status.
- Intergenerational and intragenerational.
- Factors- education, cultural capital, marriage, inheritance, economy.
What is an open society?
Achieved status (few barriers)
What is a closed society?
Ascribed status
What is a meritocracy?
A society where everyone has equal opportunities and status depends on ability (functionalist)
Why is it hard to measure social mobility?
- Classifying occupations (important/not)
- Hard to measure wealth (concealment)
- Mobility of women ignored in many studies.
- Contrast of very rich and rich, and very poor and poor.
- Cannot draw conclusions of mobility until established in life (requires longitudinal study)
Who researched social mobility and what did they say?
Goldthorpe (1980):
- developed the hope-Goldthorpe scale to study.
- Distinguished three main classes, further sub-divided into seven occupational classes.
- Service class:
- 1,. higher professionals, managers of large companies.
- Lower professionals, small business managers
- Intermediate class
- 3, Routine non-manual workers.
- 4, small proprietors, self-employed (craftsperson)
- 5, lower grade technicians, supervisors of manual workers.
- Working class
- 6, Skilled manual workers
- 7, Semi-skilled/unskilled manual workers.
New right?
- Murray (1989)
- Underclass
- Poorest members of society
- E.G. unemployed, lone-parent and the chronically sick
- Depended on welfare system
- Dependency culture
Life chances
Weber defined- how some members of society had much better opportunities than others to achieve the things in life that most see as desirable.
- E.G. healthy/long life, good education, well-paid job, own home, ECT.
- Life chances= linked to social class.
- E.G. women traditionally had worse life chances in terms of achieving high-paid and high-status jobs.
Income inequalities
- Income= the flow of money to a person or household over a time period- E.G. monthly or annually.
- Income affects ability to obtain desirable things.
- E.G. food they eat, value, quality, location of housing, ability to afford customer goods.
- Examples of income= salary, benefits, pension, investments/savings.
Income statistics/trends
- Britain one of the most unequal societies.
- More unequal over the past 30 years.
- 1950’s-70’s, slight narrowing of income inequality, then increased in 1980’s (during Thatcher as prime minister, gov cut income tax of very rich and cut link of earnings and benefits.
- Direct tax falls most heavily on the rich and indirect taxes fall most heavily on the poor. So, a poor person paying for petrol will pay the same as a rich despite it representing much larger proportion of their income.
- High pay centre (2012) reported total pay of chief executives of 100 largest companies on London stock exchange, rose by 49% over the last year compared to only 3% of employees. So, had average pay of £4.2M, 145X average pay of workers and 162X of British average.
