#12632 - Mann A Crisis In Stratification Theory - Sociological Theory

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 stratification

• Gender stratification may also reduce the ‘proletarianization’ of certain sectors e.g. lower white collar employment, by ‘dividing them from each other’ (dividing men from each other? can women and men not share workers’ solidarity?) and ‘preventing deskilling having a social significance for them’

  • seriously, though, divide and rule tactics?

Liberal Citizenship - enter the Person and the Nation

• 1600-1700-1800: bunch of nation states created of back of liberalist rhetoric

  • despite women being initially excluded from the public sphere, feminists kept up the liberal rhetoric, and hence when liberalism advanced, so did feminism

    • finally women achieved full legal and political citizenship, and retained it relatively easily

      • this represented another breakdown of the traditional private/public divide, or at least the admittance of women into the public sphere

      • political stratification became gendered

The Nation-State - Gender Politicized

• The development of the nation-state meant the politicization of everyday life in all areas

  • expansions in education and care/control of the poor reduced the privacy of the household, and expanded the occupations of teaching and social work

  • the expansion of education has played a substantial role in allocating class positions (has it? surely educational outcome is pretty much determined by original class position)

    • meritocratic ideology and credentialism has given a route up the hierarchy to the middle class, and women have benefited from this

    • education/care work means lots of job for women

  • the expansion of social welfare has mean the breaking down of the private walls of the household

    • this has led to a conflict between the state and patriarchy

      • patriarchy demands women’s dependence and submission to men

      • the state offers women means of subsistence independent of family

• Women earn quite a bit these days

  • though women receive less for their work in similar jobs to men

  • women do the domestic work, esp child...