Stratification and Politics

“In almost any community in every nation there is a high and a low, and in many societies, a big in-between. If we go behind what we can thus casually observe while standing on street corners, and begin seriously to observe in detail the 24-h cycle of behavior and experience, the 12-month cycle; the life-long biography of people in various cities and nations, we will soon be forced to classify. We might well decide to make our classification of people in terms of the social distribution of valued things and experiences; to find out just which people regularly expect to and do receive how many of the available valued things and experiences, and, on every level, why. Such a classification is the basis of all work in stratification”, Mills wrote in an early 1950s article (Mills, 1952/1963, p. 305). A self-avowed heir of the classical tradition, he conceived the social world as a universe of power relations, hierarchized by an unequal distribution of “valued things and experiences”, which obviously raises the question of what is meant by this. From Character and Social Structure to The Sociological Imagination, Mills developed a scheme that encompassed four main dimensions: occupation, class, status and power. Individuals are differentiated not only by the occupation giving them income and the amount of said income, but also, in a Weberian sense, by their degree of prestige (“status”) and their ability to impose their will on others (Gerth & Mills, 1953, p. 307).