Mann A Crisis In Stratification Theory Notes

Michael Mann - A Crisis in Stratification Theory? Persons, Households/Families/Lineages, Genders, Classes and Nations

• Society can’t be captured as neatly as as particle physics, though we attempt to make it so

  • Marxist and Weberian analyses define three nuclei of social stratification: social class, social status/ideology and political power

    • some aspects of stratification are difficult to fit to this model

      • e.g. ethnic, religious struggle, gender relations

    • the difficulty of fitting gender within a Marxist/Weberian analysis has led to families being treated as the basic unit of society, not individual

Patriarchy in Agrarian Societies

• Patriarchal society:

  • one in which male heads of households hold power

  • clear separation between public and private spheres

  • in the private sphere the head dominates women, junior males and children

  • in the public sphere power is shared between men according to the other principles of stratification that obtain (e.g. class)

    • ‘no female holds any formal public position of economic, ideological, military or political power’

    • hence women’s only access to power is through influencing their private patriarch

• In a patriarchal society:

  • women are protected to some extent by the law and custom

  • less was in the public sphere than is now

  • women and men belonged/belong to different households in their lifetimes, confusing power relations somewhat

• Because of the public/private division in patriarchal societies, we can examine political power/history (the public sphere) in patriarchal societies without referring to gender

  • that is to say, the internal structure of public stratification in a patriarchal society is not gendered

  • but we must acknowledge that women always existed in the private sphere

• As the particularism of agrarian society gave way to the universal, diffused stratification of modern society (i.e. as women were absorbed into the public sphere AND/OR the public/private divide broken down), stratification became gendered internally

Three Modern Transformations of Gender and Stratification

1. The Capitalist Economy - Neo-patriarchy and gendered classes

• As capitalism developed, women were absorbed in the labour force, despite the periodic successful efforts of men to deny them this access

  • their wages meant they were unable to support themselves or their families, hence they remained dependent on men

  • hence the simple public/private division gave way to a more subtle gender segregation - ‘neo-patriarchy’

    • this was characterised by occupational segregation

    • women’s lives now being divided into ‘private and part-public phases’

    • women not generally active users of capital

      • this means that in Marxist terms (ownership of capital) women’s position has remained relatively stable

• The development of capitalism also meant the development of universal classes, as opposed to particular networks of lineage under feudalism

  • this fact meant that women could now be of higher status than men

    • this fact, when combined with the breakdown of the public/private divide, meant that men could now be subordinate to women in the labour economy/wage hierarchy

• This observation led to hope that a single universal scale of occupational hierarchy could be created, including men and women (traditional orthodoxy treats the household as the unity i.e. assigns women a place based on their husband’s occupation)

  • this is difficult, because ‘men’s and women’s occupations cannot be combined meaningfully into a single scale’

    • different jobs, different career patterns

• Stratification is more than the sum of individuals, or households - there is significant clustering of women’s occupations

  • women often constitute a buffer group between similarly classed men (who have a higher position in the occupation hierarchy) and those men of the next class down

    • e.g. female clerical workers are a buffer between manual and non-manual male workers

  • hence gender is now integrated as a mechanism of economic...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Sociological Theory Notes.