HookOn the Titanic, your class decided whether you lived
When the Titanic sank in 1912, more than 1,500 people died — but not at random. Around 62% of first-class passengers survived; only about a quarter of those in third class did. Among women the gap was starker still: nearly every first-class woman lived, while more than half of the women in steerage drowned, many of them trapped behind gates below decks. The same freezing water, the same sinking ship, and your chance of seeing the morning depended on the price of your ticket. Max Weber had a word for this: life-chances — the idea that your position in the social hierarchy shapes everything from your health to your survival.
Stratification is the study of how societies sort people into layers — by class, gender, ethnicity and age — and hand out rewards, status and power unequally along them. The arguments are foundational: is this hierarchy a useful, inevitable ladder that motivates talent, or an engine of exploitation that keeps the powerful on top? Can you climb it, or is 'meritocracy' a comforting myth? Every question in this topic returns to one issue: why are societies unequal, and does that inequality do a job or just do harm?
ModelThree theories of why societies are unequal
Functionalists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued that stratification is universal because it is functional. Society must fill its most important roles (surgeon, pilot) with its most talented people, so it must offer unequal rewards — high pay and status — to motivate the long training and hard work those roles demand. Inequality, on this view, is a fair meritocratic incentive that benefits everyone.
Marx saw the opposite. Class is defined by your relationship to the means of production: the bourgeoisie own capital, the proletariat own only their labour and are exploited for the surplus value they produce. Stratification is not a ladder but a system of exploitation, masked by ideology and false consciousness, that will end only when the workers overthrow it. Weber agreed that inequality mattered but rejected Marx's single economic axis. He saw three separate dimensions: class (your market situation), status (social honour or prestige) and party (organised power). This multidimensional model explains awkward cases Marx cannot — a poorly paid but respected vicar has high status and low class; a rich but socially despised criminal has the reverse. For evaluation, Davis and Moore struggle to explain why nurses earn far less than footballers, while Weber's model has largely displaced Marx's binary in modern analysis.
ModelBeyond class — gender, ethnicity and age as fault lines
Class is only one axis of stratification; the spec insists on three more. Gender: feminists argue that society is stratified by patriarchy. Sylvia Walby identifies six overlapping structures — paid work, housework, the state, culture, sexuality and violence — through which women are subordinated, and the persistent gender pay gap and the 'glass ceiling' show inequality outlasting formal equal-rights law. Ethnicity: minority-ethnic groups face stratification through racism and discrimination in employment, housing and the justice system, though outcomes vary sharply between groups, which warns against treating 'ethnicity' as one thing.
Age: both the young and the old are stratified — the young through low pay, insecure work and dependence, the old through 'ageism', forced retirement and poverty in later life, with age inequality intersecting class (a wealthy pensioner and a poor one age very differently). The crucial concept here is intersectionality: these axes do not simply add up but combine, so a working-class minority-ethnic woman faces a distinctive disadvantage that class, gender or ethnicity alone cannot capture. For AO3, this is the standard critique both of Marxism's class-first model and of any single-axis theory of inequality.
MechanismMeasuring class — and the problem of women
If class shapes life-chances, sociologists need to measure it, and they use occupation as the proxy. The old Registrar-General's scale ranked jobs by perceived skill and status into manual and non-manual grades. Since 2001, official statistics have used the NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-economic Classification), based on John Goldthorpe's work, which sorts people by their employment relations and conditions — job security, autonomy, career prospects, whether you are on a salary or a wage — rather than a crude manual/non-manual split, and it includes the long-term unemployed.
Every occupational scale hits the problem of women's class. The 'conventional' approach classified a whole household by the man's job, which erases women's own careers and misclassifies dual-earner and single-parent households; the 'individualistic' approach classes each person by their own job but struggles with the unwaged. Feminists argue that occupation-based measures were built around men's full-time linear careers and fit women's interrupted, part-time patterns badly. A newer alternative, Mike Savage's Great British Class Survey (2013), measured economic, cultural and social capital together and produced seven classes, from a wealthy 'elite' to a 'precariat' — a Weberian, multidimensional picture that occupation alone misses.
CaseHow inequality is changing — globalisation, the elite and the precariat
The shape of stratification is not fixed. Globalisation has, on many accounts, stretched inequality: Leslie Sklair argues that a transnational capitalist class now operates above nations — executives, financiers and their networks whose wealth and loyalties are global rather than national — while manufacturing jobs have migrated from Western working classes to cheaper labour abroad, hollowing out the traditional manual working class. The much-quoted claim that the richest 1% own more than the rest of humanity combined captures the concentration at the top.
At the bottom, two rival readings of poverty compete. Charles Murray's New Right thesis blames a work-shy underclass with deviant values transmitted through welfare dependency — a cultural explanation. Critics reply that the problem is structural: Guy Standing's precariat describes a growing class trapped in insecure, low-paid, zero-hours work by the way the economy is organised, not by their own values. Meanwhile the manual working class has shrunk and the workforce has feminised. For evaluation, note the tension: globalisation has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty worldwide even as it has widened relative inequality within rich countries — which reading you stress shapes the whole essay.
DataSocial mobility — is Britain really a meritocracy?
Social mobility is movement between strata. It can be intergenerational (comparing your class with your parents') or intragenerational (movement across your own career), and — the distinction that wins marks — absolute versus relative. Absolute mobility measures how many people move up in total; relative mobility measures whether someone born poor has the same chance of reaching the top as someone born rich.
John Goldthorpe's Oxford Mobility Study found high absolute mobility in post-war Britain — but that was mostly because the economy created many more middle-class jobs (more 'room at the top'), not because the class system became fairer. Relative mobility barely changed: the advantage of being born to professional parents persisted. Later work by the Sutton Trust and Savage confirms 'sticky floors and sticky ceilings' — the top of society recruits heavily from the privately educated, and children born poor tend to stay poor. This is the evidence against the functionalist claim that Britain is a meritocracy where talent rises. For AO3, it is the sharpest weapon against Davis and Moore: if rewards genuinely tracked merit, relative mobility would be high, and it is not.
A top-band 20-mark paragraph evaluating the functionalist view of stratification uses mobility evidence like this: 'Davis and Moore argue that stratification is meritocratic, because unequal rewards are needed to motivate the most talented people into the most functionally important roles. However, this can be undermined using evidence on social mobility. Goldthorpe's Oxford Mobility Study showed that although absolute mobility rose after the war, relative mobility — the chance of a working-class child reaching the top compared with a middle-class child — scarcely improved, and Sutton Trust data show that elite professions still recruit disproportionately from the privately educated. If rewards genuinely tracked talent, relative mobility would be high; the fact that it is not suggests the functionalist model mistakes inherited advantage for merit. Marxists would go further, arguing that the meritocracy is an ideology that legitimises class inequality by blaming the poor for their own position.' The examiner is looking for exactly this: the functionalist claim stated fairly, a named study used as evidence against it, an explicit piece of reasoning (relative, not absolute, mobility is the true test), and a second theory layered on to deepen the critique. The paragraph reaches a judgement — merit does not explain the hierarchy — rather than describing two views and stopping.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Stratification and Differentiation is a Paper 2 topic, marked on AO1 (knowledge of theories, concepts and evidence), AO2 (application to the question and the Item) and AO3 (analysis and evaluation), through a 10-mark 'Outline and explain two...', a 10-mark 'Applying material from the Item, analyse two...', and a 20-mark 'evaluate' essay. The 10-mark analyse answer must be anchored to the Item — take a hook from it and develop each of your two points; ignoring the Item caps the mark.
On the 20-marker the spine is theory against theory: functionalism (Davis and Moore) versus Marx versus Weber versus feminism, with the meritocracy debate as the battleground. The single most reliable AO3 move in this topic is the absolute-versus-relative mobility distinction — deploy it to show that rising living standards do not prove a fair society. Name your evidence (Weber's three dimensions, the NS-SEC, the Oxford Mobility Study, Savage's seven classes, Sklair's transnational capitalist class) and use intersectionality to critique any single-axis account. Because this is a synoptic paper, gain credit by questioning the methods behind the claims — how valid is occupation as a measure of class, and can official statistics capture women's or the elite's real position? End every essay with a judgement that discriminates between the theories, not a summary that lists them.