Summary: The Purpose Of A Social Stratification System

Society has inequality built into its foundation whereas individuals are categorized into positions based on how they match certain criteria. This establishes a social stratification hierarchy with those achieving the most prestige and power can be located at the top while those who struggle with much less prestige possess less power and are found at the bottom. This ideal where people are given of their social position given to them by society and ranked upon that in which they were given is known as social stratification (Larkin, 2015a). Three of these stratification systems that will be focused on are slavery, class and caste. Each system differs in how the societies characteristics are carried out on the social hierarchy. The purpose of

This extreme system of stratification contains the most social inequality as it denies fundamental human rights, establishes people as property of others, and places said slaves at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Those who own the slaves are elevated higher on the social hierarchy as they have power over their slaves. Furthermore, those who fall into this system compared to other systems have the least flexibility in social mobility, which is defined as an individual’s ability within a stratified system to move down or up in their established social position. Due to the limited to nonexistent social mobility for slaves, this system is referred to as a closed system of stratification (Larkin, 2015a). Regrettably, this system is tolerated in certain societies as it follows their inherited rights and social norms which enforce their society’s s legality of slave

Stratification systems are able to do this through the use of organizing principles that are necessary for the proper functioning of a society. To fill needed social positions and roles in the USA, the organizing principles of class, race, and gender were established to lay a foundation of what individuals fill those roles and what they get in return (Larkin, 2015b). This foundation is shown to be prevalent to this day through collected data, revealing different social inequality patterns that each of the organizing principles have led to. The purpose of this section of the paper is to compare genders by the organizing principles held in the USA and describe which of the gender and race categories hold the most