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Sociology Final Exam

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1.) Define social class. Identify three criteria used to conceptualize social class placement.

1.)Social class is a “class society, 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”( Grant,2001,p.161). The most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes. The upper class consist of people or families that represent institutional leadership, heads of multinational corporations, foundations, and universities. They are people who have finical stability and are well educated due to their finical income. Most commonly in American society today people fall in the middle class category. Middle class is made
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People are divided into different levels of social status according to their wealth. Wealth is usually associated with prestige, but not always. For example, a plumber makes more money than a professor, but a professor has more prestige than a plumber because a plumber is a blue collar worker. When coming up with the division between people there is a system that put individuals in place to categorize ones social stratification. Four major classifications of social stratification is slavery, caste, estate and class. These four major social stratifications come together and form some type of people systematically experience advantages in society while other types of people are systematically disadvantaged in our society. Some members of our society are thought of as haves, and others are thought of as have-nots. It determines who is socially advantaged and who is included among the ranks of the socially disadvantaged is based, in part, on certain characteristics these individuals possess and, in part, on how society values or devalues these characteristics. Slavery is the one characteristic that faces the most disadvantage. Slavery is a system of stratification in which one person owns another, as he or she would own property, and exploits the slave’s labor for economic gain. Slaves are one of the lowest categories in any stratification system, as they possess virtually no power or wealth of their own. Many
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