What Is Social Stratification? Continued

Why do some people seem stuck at the bottom of society no matter how hard they try? In this second half of the stratification story you meet two powerful answers. The first comes from labelling theory, which says the names society pins on people, scrounger, troublemaker, failure, can become a kind of trap that shapes how they are treated and even how they see themselves. The second comes from Marxism, which says inequality is no accident at all but a system in which one class lives off the labour of another and keeps the arrangement looking normal.

You will learn how stereotypes harden into a master status and trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy, and how Marxists explain poverty through exploitation, ideological control, the poverty trap and the reserve army of labour. Then you will tie these ideas to social mobility, the chance of moving up or down the layers, and see why movement is far harder than the idea of a meritocracy suggests. By the end you will be able to argue inequality from both the labelling and the Marxist side.