What Is Social Class?

  1. 10.1 Explain the three components of social class—property, power, and prestige; distinguish between wealth and income; explain how property and income are distributed; and describe the democratic façade, the power elite, and status inconsistency.

If you ask most Americans about their country’s social class system, you are likely to get a blank look. If you press the matter, you are likely to get an answer like this: “There are the poor and the rich—and then there’s us, neither poor nor rich.” This is just about as far as most Americans’ consciousness of social class goes. Let’s try to flesh out this idea.

Our task is made somewhat difficult because sociologists have no clear-cut, agreed-on definition of social class. As was noted in the last chapter, conflict sociologists (of the Marxist orientation) see only two social classes: those who own the means of production and those who do not. The problem with this view, say most sociologists, is that it lumps too many people together. Teenage “order takers” at McDonald’s who work for $15,000 a year are lumped together with that company’s executives who make $500,000 a year—because they both are workers at McDonald’s, not owners.

Most sociologists agree with Max Weber that there is more to social class than just a person’s relationship to the means of production. Consequently, most sociologists use the components Weber identified and define social class as a large group of people who rank closely to one another in property, power, and prestige. These three elements give people different chances in life, separate them into different lifestyles, and provide them with distinctive ways of looking at the self and the world.

A photo shows Oprah Winfrey.

A mere one-half percent of Americans owns over a quarter of the entire nation’s wealth. Very few minorities are numbered among this 0.5 percent. An exception is Oprah Winfrey, who has had an ultra-successful career in entertainment and investing. Worth $3.0 billion, she is the 239th richest person in the United States. Winfrey has given millions of dollars to help minority children.

Let’s look at how sociologists measure these three components of social class.