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Stratification

In general, all societies are stratified along one or more lines comprised of race/ethnicity, sex/gender, age, religion, disability, and SES or socioeconomic status, which is a combination of one’s income, education, and occupation. Stratification is the unequal ways in which the goods of society are distributed. Sociologist Craig Oettinger defines stratification as

who gets what and how much they get over time.
My definition is:
the unequal distribution of and unequal access to the goods of society: wealth power and status.
According to Abercrombie et. al.,
social differences become social stratification when people are ranked hierarchically along some dimension of inequality whether this be income wealth power prestige age ethnicity or some other characteristic.
The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology . Nicholas Abercrombie Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner. Penguin: London: 1994: pp. 413-414. Gerhard Lenski argues that stratification is based on distributive systems of who gets what and why? (p. viii) and that
social stratification [is equated with] the distributive process in human societies—the process by which scarce resources are distributed
(p. xxvi). Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. Gerhard Lenski. UNC Press. Chapel Hill. 1984. Italics in original. According to Marger Martin Marger, Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives: 4 th Edition , Wadsworth, Belmont, 1997. Chapter 5 “Foundations of the American Ethnic Hierarchy: Anglo-Americans and Native Americans, pp. 146-169. , there are four major conditions necessary for ethnic stratification to occur: contact. ethnocentrism, competition, and differential power.

An example of contact involves the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America who crossed the Bering Strait during the last great ice age approximately 35,000 years ago. It took these migrants another 12,000 to 15,000 years to populate both continents. Although exact population data is unknown it is believed that the indigenous population was about 75 million in the late 15 th century, with somewhere between 1 million and 18 million residing in territories North of the Rio Grande. The Europeans who sailed to the Americas were in search of trade goods and treasure to enrich themselves individually and to bring greater wealth to their nation-states and monarchs. Thus, they arrived as conquerors. The Americas were rich in natural resources that had long since begun to be depleted in Europe and so, the “explorers” set about to establish mercantilistic colonies and to subdue the native populations. The Europeans with their superior weapons, horses, and statecraft overwhelmed the Indians within a few years in South America. Subjugation took longer in North America due to the widely divergent lifestyles of the North American Indians. In South America, the people were an agrarian population largely tied to large urban centers and a highly centralized form of government wherein authority was vested in a small, extremely wealthy, and extremely powerful ruling class. Conquest of people with a form of government and social organization not unlike the city-states and nation-states of Europe was much less problematic overall than the conquest of widely divergent, unorganized, tribal groups of hunter-gatherers who widely scattered across a large geographic area. As Marger Ibid. makes clear, the Native Americans are the only minority group in the United States whose subjugation and subsequent minority group status was brought about solely through armed conflict and the use of coercive power.

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Source:  OpenStax, Minority studies: a brief sociological text. OpenStax CNX. Mar 31, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11183/1.13
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