Sociology Class System

Class systems have been evident in society since the time of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, however many people only have a limited understanding of what these systems are and how they work. According to the Wikipedia page for ‘Social Classes’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class), a ‘class system’ can be defined as “a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.” But what exactly does this mean? What we can gather from this is that social classes are essentially status groups that people are placed into based on their socio-economic success. Another of my sources

Those in the lower classes are prevented from aspiring to climb higher, therefore their chance at economic success is restricted. According to my second source (http://www.sociologyguide.com/social-stratification/class-system.php) our common system is relatively open, providing oppurtunities for people to move up the class ranking but also for people to fall down to lower levels. This helps to answer the part of this focus question relating to fluidity of movement between class levels in class systems. In some systems there can be extremely strict boundaries restricting movement between classes, however in other classes there is no restriction keeping people from moving between classes. I think this is because in class systems where movement is restricted the characteristics of each class level are very specific. However in classes where movement is not restricted the exact characteristics of what determines a certain class are still to this day being debated and therefore someone could be positioned in a different class level based on the person examining the class