The Process of Social Stratification
Create a 7 pages page paper that discusses the process of social stratification. A person is essentially a social creature, whose life is closely connected with cooperation and interaction with other people. Therefore, the society can be understood not only as a set of joint activities, but as a set of completely different forms of associations descended from them: primary and social groups, community organizations, and so forth. Every sphere of public life exists as a complex entity. Its elements represent the idea of society as a whole. A person enters into public life by means of collective communication and functions in it as a member of several groups (labour, union, sports and so forth) simultaneously. Diverse connections arising between social groups, nations and within them in the process of economic, social, political and cultural life and work are called public relations. The aim of this work is to view the process of social stratification and to describe the conditions, which influence its formation and development.Social stratification is one of the basic concepts of sociology, which indicates the system of features and criteria of public separation. “Essentially we mean by social stratification the arrangement of any social group or society into a hierarchy of positions that are unequal with regard to power, property, social evaluation and/ or physical gratification” (Tumin, M., 1967, 12).The term “stratification” came to the sociology from Geology. Initially, its meaning concerned the location of layers of the earth. Later people began to apply this meaning to the description of different public layers. Social stratification is the division of the people into the levels according to their positions in society. The division of the society is based upon the inequality of social distances between them. The separation takes place according to the ideas of prosperity, power, education and so forth. “In analyzing the function of stratification, functionalists see it as the mechanism through which society encourages men to seek to achieve the diverse positions necessary in a complex social system” (Curtis, J., 1979, 43). .
