Inequality and Conflict

Announcements

A. Introduction to Social Inequality

1. Social Structure:

Relationships develop in the social group that establish how we relate to one another, both within the family unit and among family units. As we shall see in a few weeks, the family unit is the basic unit in the society, here our concern is with the social structure and how one unit or group of units relates to another. We can imagine a network or giant web with each family being a node in that web. The web is the structure of the society. The web will also be multidimensional, linking not just families but also churches, schools, businesses, communities and so on. All of this taken together is the structure of the society

2. Stratification or inequality as Social Structure

Within this overall set of relationships there will be some relationships that have importance in terms of ranking and in terms of establishing other relationships within the web -- this is what we call the system of stratification or inequality. These rankings relate to the distribution of goods and services by the units in the society, to access to those goods and services and to power to dispose of them. This is ultimately the system of social stratification. The system may take a number of forms -- class, estates, castes or status groups.

3. What the system of inequality provides for the social system

This system of inequality establishes who get what goods and has access to what kinds of services within the society. For this reason the structure of inequality and the system of stratification are very important characteristics of the society. Differences in the rules that apply to the distribution and access give rise to the different types of stratification systems noted above.

Inequality and Conflict Topics

Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Richard H. Anderson, the Department of Sociology and the University of Colorado at Denver.

This page last revised: January 12, 1999. Please contact Richard H. Anderson (randerso@carbon.cudenver.edu) if you experience any problems or have comments about these pages.