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social stratification
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society's categorization of its people into hierarchical groups based on socioeconomic factors
Social stratification is how society divides people into different ranked groups—typically based on income, education, occupation, and wealth—creating a hierarchy where some have more resources and opportunities than others. It matters because these divisions affect people's life outcomes, from health and education to career prospects, making some groups better off than others in systematic ways.
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Social stratification refers to a society's hierarchical categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors such as wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power (social and political). It is a hierarchy within groups that ascribe them to different levels of privileges. As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit. The concept of social stratification (as well as the concept of social mobility) was introduced by a Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in his book "Social Mobility" published in 1927.
In modern Western societies, social stratification is defined in terms of three social classes: an upper class, a middle class, and a working class; in turn, each class can be subdivided into an upper-stratum, a middle-stratum, and a lower stratum. Moreover, a social stratum can be formed upon the bases of kinship, clan, tribe, or caste, or all four.