social stratification is the central theme of sociology. It describes social inequality in society, the division of social strata by income level and lifestyle, by the presence or absence of privileges. In primitive society, inequality was insignificant, so stratification was almost absent there. In complex societies, inequality is very strong, it divided people by income, level of education, power. Castes arose, then estates, and later classes. In some societies, the transition from one social stratum (stratum) to another is prohibited; there are societies where such a transition is limited, and there are societies where it is completely allowed. Freedom of social movement (mobility) determines whether a society is closed or open.

1. Terms of stratification

The term "stratification" comes from geology, where it refers to the vertical arrangement of the Earth's layers. Sociology has likened the structure of society to the structure of the Earth and placed social strata (strata) also vertically. The basis is income ladder: the poor are at the bottom, the wealthy are in the middle, and the rich are at the top.

The rich occupy the most privileged positions and have the most prestigious professions. As a rule, they are better paid and are associated with mental work, the performance of managerial functions. Leaders, kings, kings, presidents, political leaders, big businessmen, scientists and artists make up the elite of society. The middle class in modern society includes doctors, lawyers, teachers, qualified employees, the middle and petty bourgeoisie. To the lower strata - unskilled workers, the unemployed, the poor. The working class, according to modern ideas, is an independent group, which occupies an intermediate position between the middle and lower classes.

The wealthy of the upper class have a higher level of education and a greater amount of power. The lower class poor have little power, income or education. Thus, the prestige of the profession (occupation), the amount of power and the level of education are added to income as the main criterion for stratification.

Income- the amount of cash receipts of an individual or family for a certain period of time (month, year). Income is the amount of money received in the form of wages, pensions, allowances, alimony, fees, deductions from profits. Incomes are most often spent on maintaining life, but if they are very high, they accumulate and turn into wealth.

Wealth- accumulated income, i.e., the amount of cash or embodied money. In the second case they are called movable(car, yacht, securities, etc.) and immovable(house, artwork, treasures) property. Wealth is usually transferred by inheritance. Inheritance can be received by both working and non-working, and only working people can receive income. In addition to them, pensioners and the unemployed have income, but the poor do not. The rich may or may not work. In both cases, they are owners, because they have wealth. The main wealth of the upper class is not income, but accumulated property. The salary share is small. For the middle and lower classes, income is the main source of subsistence, since the first, if there is wealth, is insignificant, and the second does not have it at all. Wealth allows you not to work, and its absence forces you to work for the sake of wages.

The essence of power- in the ability to impose one's will against the wishes of other people. In a complex society, power institutionalized those. protected by laws and tradition, surrounded by privileges and wide access to social benefits, allows you to make decisions that are vital for society, including laws that, as a rule, are beneficial to the upper class. In all societies, people who wield some form of power—political, economic, or religious—constitute an institutionalized elite. It determines the domestic and foreign policy of the state, directing it in a direction that is beneficial to itself, which other classes are deprived of.

Prestige- the respect that in public opinion is enjoyed by one or another profession, position, occupation. The profession of a lawyer is more prestigious than the profession of a steelworker or a plumber. The position of president of a commercial bank is more prestigious than that of a cashier. All professions, occupations and positions that exist in a given society can be arranged from top to bottom on ladder of professional prestige. We define professional prestige intuitively, roughly. But in some countries, primarily in the United States, sociologists measure using special methods. They study public opinion, compare different professions, analyze statistics and, as a result, get an accurate prestige scale. The first such study was conducted by American sociologists in 1947. Since then, they regularly measure this phenomenon and monitor how the prestige of basic professions in society changes over time. In other words, they build a dynamic picture.

Income, power, prestige and education determine aggregate socioeconomic status, i.e., the position and place of a person in society. In this case, the status acts as a generalized indicator of stratification. Previously, its key role in the social structure was noted. Now it turned out that he plays a crucial role in sociology as a whole. The assigned status characterizes a rigidly fixed system of stratification, i.e. closed society, in which the transition from one stratum to another is practically prohibited. Such systems include slavery and caste system. The achieved status characterizes a mobile system of stratification, or open Society, where people are allowed to move freely up and down the social ladder. Such a system includes classes (capitalist society). Finally, feudal society, with its inherent estate structure, should be reckoned among intermediate type, i.e., to a relatively closed system. Here, crossings are legally prohibited, but in practice they are not excluded. These are the historical types of stratification.

2. Historical types of stratification

Stratification, i.e. inequality in income, power, prestige and education, arose along with the birth of human society. In its embryonic form, it was already found in a simple (primitive) society. With the advent of the early state - the Eastern despotism - stratification becomes tougher, and with the development of European society, the liberalization of morals, stratification softens. The class system is freer than caste and slavery, and the class system that replaced the class system became even more liberal.

Slavery- historically the first system of social stratification. Slavery arose in ancient times in Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, Rome and has survived in a number of regions almost to the present day. It has existed in the United States since the 19th century.

Slavery- an economic, social and legal form of enslavement of people, bordering on complete lack of rights and an extreme degree of inequality. It has evolved historically. The primitive form, or patriarchal slavery, and the developed form, or classical slavery, differ substantially. In the first case, the slave had all the rights of the youngest member of the family: he lived in the same house with the owners, participated in public life, married the free, inherited the property of the owner. It was forbidden to kill him. At the mature stage, the slave was finally enslaved: he lived in a separate room, did not participate in anything, did not inherit anything, did not marry and had no family. You were allowed to kill him. He did not own property, but he himself was considered the property of the owner ("talking tool").

This is how slavery becomes slavery. When one speaks of slavery as a historical type of stratification, one means its highest stage.

Castes. Like slavery, the caste system characterizes a closed society and rigid stratification. It is not as old as the slave system, and less common. If almost all countries went through slavery, of course, to varying degrees, then castes were found only in India and partly in Africa. India is a classic example of a caste society. It arose on the ruins of the slave system in the first centuries of the new era.

Castoy called a social group (stratum), membership in which a person owes solely to birth. He cannot move from one caste to another during his lifetime. To do this, he needs to be born again. The caste position of a person is fixed by the Hindu religion (now it is clear why castes are not widespread). According to its canons, people live more than one life. Each person falls into the appropriate caste, depending on what his behavior was in a previous life. If bad, then after the next birth he should fall into a lower caste, and vice versa.

In total, there are 4 main castes in India: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), Shudras (workers and peasants) and about 5 thousand non-main castes and podcasts. The untouchables (outcasts) are especially worthy - they are not included in any caste and occupy the lowest position. In the course of industrialization, castes are replaced by classes. The Indian city is becoming more and more class-based, while the village, in which 7/10 of the population lives, remains caste-based.

Estates. Estates are a form of stratification that precedes classes. In the feudal societies that existed in Europe from the 4th to the 14th centuries, people were divided into estates.

Estate - a social group that has fixed custom or legal law and inherited rights and obligations. The estate system, which includes several strata, is characterized by a hierarchy, expressed in the inequality of their position and privileges. A classic example of a class organization was Europe, where at the turn of the XIV-XV centuries. society was divided into upper classes (nobility and clergy) and an unprivileged third estate (artisans, merchants, peasants). And in the X-XIII centuries. There were three main estates: the clergy, the nobility and the peasantry. In Russia since the second half of the XVIII century. the class division into nobility, clergy, merchants, peasantry and philistinism (middle urban strata) was established. Estates were based on landed property.

The rights and obligations of each estate were determined by legal law and consecrated by religious doctrine. Membership in the estate was determined by inheritance. Social barriers between the estates were quite rigid, so social mobility existed not so much between as within the estates. Each estate included many layers, ranks, levels, professions, ranks. So, only nobles could engage in public service. The aristocracy was considered a military estate (chivalry).

The higher in the social hierarchy an estate stood, the higher was its status. In contrast to castes, inter-class marriages were completely allowed, and individual mobility was also allowed. A simple person could become a knight by purchasing a special permit from the ruler. Merchants acquired titles of nobility for money. As a relic, this practice has partially survived in modern England.

Russian nobility.
A characteristic feature of the estates is the presence of social symbols and signs: titles, uniforms, orders, titles. Classes and castes did not have state distinctive signs, although they were distinguished by clothing, jewelry, norms and rules of conduct, and a ritual of conversion. In feudal society, the state assigned distinctive symbols to the main class - the nobility. What exactly was it?

Titles are statutory verbal designations of the official and estate-generic position of their holders, briefly defining the legal status. in Russia in the 19th century. there were such titles as “general”, “state councilor”, “chamberlain”, “count”, “adjutant wing”, “secretary of state”, “excellency” and “lordship”.

Uniforms - official uniforms that corresponded to the titles and visually expressed them.

Orders are material insignia, honorary awards that complemented titles and uniforms. The order rank (cavalier of the order) was a special case of the uniform, and the actual badge of the order was a common addition to any uniform.

The core of the system of titles, orders and uniforms was the rank - the rank of each civil servant (military, civilian or courtier). Before Peter I, the concept of "rank" meant any position, honorary title, social status of a person. On January 24, 1722, Peter I introduced a new system of titles in Russia, legal basis which served as the "Table of Ranks". Since then, "rank" has taken on a narrower meaning, referring only to public service. The report card provided for three main types of service: military, civilian and court. Each was divided into 14 ranks, or classes.

The civil service was built on the principle that an employee had to go through the entire hierarchy from bottom to top, starting with the length of service of the lowest class rank. In each class it was necessary to serve a certain minimum of years (in the lower 3-4 years). There were fewer higher posts than lower ones. The class denoted the rank of the position, which was called the class rank. The name "official" was assigned to its owner.

Only the nobility, local and service, was allowed to public service. Both were hereditary: the title of nobility was passed on to the wife, children and distant descendants through the male line. Married daughters acquired the estate status of a husband. Noble status was usually formalized in the form of genealogy, family coat of arms, portraits of ancestors, legends, titles and orders. Thus, a sense of the continuity of generations, pride in one's family and a desire to preserve its good name gradually formed in the minds. Together, they constituted the concept of "noble honor", an important component of which was the respect and trust of others in a spotless name. The total number of the nobility and class officials (including family members) was equal in the middle of the 19th century. 1 million

The noble origin of a hereditary nobleman was determined by the merits of his family before the Fatherland. The official recognition of such merits was expressed by the common title of all the nobles - "your honor." The private title "nobleman" was not used in everyday life. Its replacement was the predicate "master", which eventually came to refer to any other free class. In Europe, other substitutions were used: "von" for German surnames, "don" for Spanish ones, "de" for French ones. In Russia, this formula has been transformed into an indication of the name, patronymic and surname. The nominal three-term formula was used only when referring to the noble estate: the use of the full name was the prerogative of the nobles, and the half-name was considered a sign of belonging to the ignoble estates.

In the class hierarchy of Russia, achieved and attributed titles were very intricately intertwined. The presence of a pedigree indicated the status attributed, and its absence indicated the status achieved. In the second generation, the achieved (granted) status turned into ascribed (inherited).

Adapted from the source: Shepelev L. E. Titles, uniforms, orders. - M., 1991.

3. class system

Belonging to a social stratum in slave-owning, caste and estate-feudal societies was fixed by official legal or religious norms. In pre-revolutionary Russia, every person knew what class he was in. What is called people were attributed to one or another social stratum.

In a class society, things are different. The state does not deal with the issues of social consolidation of its citizens. The only controller is the public opinion of people, which is guided by customs, established practices, incomes, lifestyles and standards of behavior. Therefore, it is very difficult to accurately and unambiguously determine the number of classes in a particular country, the number of strata or layers into which they are divided, and the belonging of people to strata is very difficult. Criteria are needed, which are chosen rather arbitrarily. That is why, in a country as sociologically developed as the United States, different sociologists offer different typologies of classes. In one there are seven, in another six, in the third five, and so on, social strata. The first typology of classes was proposed by the USA in the 40s. 20th century American sociologist L. Warner.

upper-upper class included the so-called old families. They consisted of the most successful businessmen and those who were called professionals. They lived in privileged parts of the city.

Lower-upper class in terms of material well-being, it was not inferior to the upper - the upper class, but did not include the old tribal families.

upper-middle class consisted of owners and professionals who had less material wealth than those from the two upper classes, but they actively participated in the public life of the city and lived in fairly comfortable areas.

Lower middle class consisted of low-ranking employees and skilled workers.

upper-lower class included low-skilled workers employed in local factories and living in relative prosperity.

lower-lower class were those who are usually called the "social bottom". These are the inhabitants of basements, attics, slums and other places unsuitable for life. They constantly feel an inferiority complex due to hopeless poverty and constant humiliation.

In all two-part words, the first word denotes the stratum, or layer, and the second, the class to which this layer belongs.

Other schemes are also proposed, for example: upper-higher, upper-lower, upper-middle, middle-middle, lower-middle, worker, lower classes. Or: upper class, upper-middle, middle and lower-middle class, upper working class and lower working class, underclass. There are many options, but it is important to understand two fundamental points:

• the main classes, whatever they are called, are only three: rich, prosperous and poor;
• non-basic classes arise by adding strata, or layers, lying within one of the main classes.

More than half a century has passed since L. Warner developed his concept of classes. Today it has been replenished with one more layer and in its final form it represents a seven-point scale.

upper-upper class includes "aristocrats by blood" who emigrated to America 200 years ago and amassed untold wealth over generations. They are distinguished by a special way of life, high society manners, impeccable taste and behavior.

lower-upper class consists mainly of the “new rich”, who have not yet had time to create powerful tribal clans, who have seized the highest posts in industry, business, and politics.

Typical representatives are a professional basketball player or a pop star who receive tens of millions, but who do not have “aristocrats by blood” in their family.

upper-middle class consists of the petty bourgeoisie and highly paid professionals - big lawyers, famous doctors, actors or TV commentators. The lifestyle is approaching high society, but they cannot afford a fashionable villa in the most expensive resorts in the world or a rare collection of art rarities.

middle-middle class represents the most massive stratum of a developed industrial society. It includes all well-paid employees, medium-paid professionals, in a word, people of intelligent professions, including teachers, teachers, middle managers. It is the backbone of the information society and the service sector.

Half an hour before work starts
Barbara and Colin Williams are an average English family. They live in the suburbs of London, Watford Junction, which can be reached from the center of London in 20 minutes in a comfortable, clean train car. They are over 40, both work in the optical center. Colin grinds glasses and puts them into frames, and Barbara sells ready-made glasses. So to speak, a family contract, although they are hired workers, and not the owners of an enterprise with about 70 optical workshops.

It should not be surprising that the correspondent did not choose to visit the family of factory workers who for many years personified the most numerous class - workers. The situation has changed. Of the total number of British employed (28.5 million people), the majority are employed in the service sector, only 19% are industrial workers. Unskilled workers in the UK earn an average of £908 per month, while skilled workers earn £1,308.

The minimum base salary that Barbara can expect is £530 a month. Everything else depends on her diligence. Barbara admits that she also had "black" weeks when she did not receive bonuses at all, but sometimes she managed to receive bonuses of more than 200 pounds a week. So the average is about 1,200 pounds a month, plus "the thirteenth salary." On average, Colin receives about 1660 pounds per month.

It can be seen that the Williams cherish their work, although it takes 45-50 minutes to get to it by car during rush hour. My question, if they are often late, seemed strange to Barbara: “My husband and I prefer to arrive half an hour before work starts.” Spouses regularly pay taxes, income and social insurance, which is about a quarter of their income.

Barbara is not afraid that she might lose her job. Perhaps this is due to the fact that she used to be lucky, she was never unemployed. But Colin had to sit idle for several months, and he recalls how he once applied for a vacancy, which was claimed by another 80 people.

As someone who has worked all her life, Barbara speaks with undisguised disapproval of people on unemployment benefits without putting in the effort to find a job. “You know how many cases when people receive benefits, do not pay taxes and still work secretly somewhere,” she is indignant. Barbara herself chose to work even after the divorce, when, having two children, she could live on benefits that were higher than her salary. In addition, she refused alimony, agreeing with her ex-husband that he leaves the house with her children.

Registered unemployed in the UK is about 6%. Unemployment benefits depend on the number of dependents, averaging around £60 per week.

The Williams family spends about £200 a month on food, which is slightly below the average cost of food for an English family (9.1%). Barbara buys food for the family at a local supermarket, cooks at home, although 1-2 times a week she and her husband go to a traditional English "pub" (beer house), where you can not only drink good beer, but also have an inexpensive dinner, and even play cards .

What distinguishes the Williams family from others is primarily their house, but not in size (5 rooms plus a kitchen), but in low rent (20 pounds per week), while the “average” family spends 10 times more.

Lower middle class are made up of lower employees and skilled workers, who, by the nature and content of their work, gravitate rather not to physical, but to mental labor. A distinctive feature is a decent way of life.

The budget of the family of a Russian miner
Graudenzerstrasse in the Ruhr city of Recklinghausen (Germany) is located near the mine named after General Blumenthal. Here, in a three-story, outwardly nondescript house, at number 12, the family of the hereditary German miner Peter Scharf lives.

Peter Scharf, his wife Ulrika and their two children Katrin and Stefanie occupy a four-room apartment with a total living area of ​​92 m 2 .

In a month, Peter earns 4382 marks in the mine. However, the printout of his earnings shows a pretty decent deduction: DM 291 for medical care, DM 409 for a pension fund contribution, DM 95 for unemployment benefits.

So, in total, 1253 marks were retained. Seems like too much. However, according to Peter, these are contributions to the right cause. For example, health insurance provides preferential care not only for him, but also for his family members. And this means that they will receive many medicines for free. He will pay the minimum for the operation, the rest will be covered by the health insurance fund. For example:

removal of the appendix costs the patient six thousand marks. For a member of the cash register - two hundred marks. Free dental treatment.

Having received 3 thousand marks in his hands, Peter pays 650 marks monthly for an apartment, plus 80 for electricity. His expenses would have been even greater if the mine, in terms of social assistance, did not provide each miner annually with free seven tons of coal. Including retirees. Who does not need coal, its cost is recalculated to pay for heating and hot water. Therefore, for the Scharf family, heating and hot water are free.

In total, 2250 marks remain on hand. The family does not deny themselves food and clothing. Children eat fruits and vegetables all year round, and they are not cheap in winter. They also spend a lot on children's clothing. To this must be added another 50 marks for a telephone, 120 for life insurance for adult family members, 100 for insurance for children, 300 for car insurance per quarter. And he, by the way, is not new with them - a 1981 Volkswagen Passat.

1,500 marks are spent monthly on food and clothing. Other expenses, including rent and electricity - 1150 marks. If you subtract this from the three thousand that Peter gets his hands on at the mine, then there are a couple of hundred marks left.

Children go to the gymnasium, Katrin - in the third grade, Stefanie - in the fifth. Parents don't pay for education. Paid only notebooks and textbooks. There are no school lunches in the gymnasium. Children bring sandwiches with them. The only thing they are given is cocoa. Worth the pleasure of two marks a week for each.

Ulrika's wife works three times a week for four hours as a saleswoman in a grocery store. Receives 480 marks, which, of course, are a good help to the family budget.

Do you put anything in the bank?

- Not always, and if it weren’t for my wife’s salary, then we would go through zeros.

The tariff agreement for miners for this year states that each miner will receive the so-called Christmas money at the end of the year. And this is neither more nor less than 3898 marks.

Source: Arguments and Facts. - 1991. - No. 8.

upper-lower class includes medium and low-skilled workers employed in mass production in local factories, living in relative prosperity, but in behavior significantly different from the upper and middle class. Distinctive features: low education (usually complete and incomplete secondary, secondary specialized), passive leisure (watching TV, playing cards or dominoes), primitive entertainment, often excessive use of alcohol and non-literary vocabulary.

lower-lower class are the inhabitants of basements, attics, slums and other places unsuitable for life. They either do not have any education, or have only an elementary education, most often they are interrupted by odd jobs, begging, they constantly feel an inferiority complex due to hopeless poverty and humiliation. They are usually called the "social bottom", or underclass. Most often, their ranks are recruited from chronic alcoholics, former prisoners, homeless people, etc.

The working class in modern post-industrial society includes two layers: lower-middle and upper-lower. All workers mental labor, no matter how little they receive, they are never enrolled in the lower class.

The middle class (with its layers) is always distinguished from the working class. But the working class is also distinguished from the lower one, which may include the unemployed, the unemployed, the homeless, the poor, etc. As a rule, highly skilled workers are included not in the working class, but in the middle, but in its lower stratum, which is filled mainly by low-skilled workers. mental labor - employees.

Another option is possible: skilled workers are not included in the middle class, but they make up two layers in the general working class. Specialists are included in the next layer of the middle class, because the very concept of “specialist” implies at least a college education.

Between the two poles of the class stratification of American society - the very rich (wealth - 200 million dollars or more) and the very poor (income less than 6.5 thousand dollars a year), which make up approximately the same share of the total population, namely 5% , is part of the population, which is commonly called the middle class. In industrialized countries, it makes up the majority of the population - from 60 to 80%.

It is customary to classify doctors, teachers and teachers, engineering and technical intelligentsia (including all employees), the middle and petty bourgeoisie (entrepreneurs), highly skilled workers, managers (managers) as the middle class.

Comparing Western and Russian society, many scientists (and not only them) are inclined to believe that in Russia there is no middle class in the generally accepted sense of the word, or it is extremely small. The basis is two criteria: 1) scientific and technical (Russia has not yet moved to the stage of post-industrial development and therefore the layer of managers, programmers, engineers and workers associated with high-tech production is smaller here than in England, Japan or the USA); 2) material (the income of the Russian population is immeasurably lower than in Western European society, so the representative of the middle class in the West will turn out to be rich, and our middle class drags out an existence at the level of the European poor).

The author is convinced that each culture and each society should have its own, reflecting national specifics, model of the middle class. The point is not in the amount of money earned (more precisely, not only in them alone), but in the quality of their spending. In the USSR, most workers received more intelligentsia. But what was the money spent on? For cultural leisure, education, expansion and enrichment of spiritual needs? Sociological studies show that money was spent on maintaining a physical existence, including the cost of alcohol and tobacco. The intelligentsia earned less, but the composition of the expenditure items of the budget did not differ from what the money was spent on by the educated part of the population of Western countries.

The criterion of a country's belonging to a post-industrial society is also doubtful. Such a society is also called an information society. The main feature and the main resource in it is cultural or intellectual capital. In a post-industrial society, it is not the working class that rules the show, but the intelligentsia. She can live modestly, even very modestly, but if she is numerous enough to set the standards of life for all segments of the population, if she has made it so that the values, ideals and needs she shares become prestigious for other layers, if the majority seeks to get into her ranks population, there is reason to say that a strong middle class has formed in such a society.

By the end of the existence of the USSR, there was such a class. Its boundaries still need to be clarified - it was 10-15%, as most sociologists think, or still 30-40%, as can be assumed based on the criteria stated above, this still needs to be discussed and this issue still needs to be studied. After Russia's transition to the full-scale construction of capitalism (which one is also a matter of debate), the standard of living of the entire population, and especially of the former middle class, dropped sharply. But has the intelligentsia ceased to be such? Hardly. A temporary deterioration in one indicator (income) does not mean a deterioration in another (level of education and cultural capital).

It can be assumed that the Russian intelligentsia, as the basis of the middle class, did not disappear due to economic reforms, but, as it were, hid and waits in the wings. With the improvement of material conditions, its intellectual capital will not only be restored, but also multiplied. It will be in demand by time and society.

4. Stratification of Russian society

Perhaps this is the most controversial and unexplored issue. Domestic sociologists have been studying the problems of the social structure of our society for many years, but all this time their results have been influenced by ideology. Only recently have the conditions appeared for an objective and impartial examination of the essence of the matter. In the late 80s - early 90s. sociologists such as T. Zaslavskaya, V. Radaev, V. Ilyin and others have proposed approaches to the analysis of the social stratification of Russian society. Despite the fact that these approaches do not converge in many ways, they still allow us to describe the social structure of our society and consider its dynamics.

From estates to classes

Before the revolution in Russia, the official division of the population was class, not class. It was divided into two main classes - taxable(peasants, philistines) and exempt(nobility, clergy). Within each estate there were smaller estates and layers. The state granted them certain rights enshrined in legislation. The rights themselves were guaranteed to the estates only insofar as they performed certain duties in favor of the state (they grew bread, were engaged in crafts, served, paid taxes). The state apparatus, officials regulated relations between estates. This was the benefit of bureaucracy. Naturally, the estate system was inseparable from the state. That is why we can define estates as social and legal groups that differ in the scope of rights and obligations in relation to the state.

According to the 1897 census, the entire population of the country, which is 125 million Russians, was divided into the following classes: nobles - 1.5% to the entire population, clergy - 0,5%, merchants - 0,3%, tradesmen - 10,6%, peasants - 77,1%, Cossacks - 2.3%. The first privileged estate in Russia was considered the nobility, the second - the clergy. The rest of the estates were not privileged. The nobles were hereditary and personal. Not all of them were landowners, many were in the public service, which was the main source of livelihood. But those nobles who were landowners constituted a special group - the class of landowners (among the hereditary nobles there were no more than 30% of the landowners).

Gradually, classes also appear within other estates. The once united peasantry at the turn of the century stratified into the poor (34,7%), middle peasants (15%), prosperous (12,9%), fists(1.4%), as well as small and landless peasants, who together accounted for one third. The philistines were a heterogeneous formation - the middle urban strata, which included small employees, artisans, handicraftsmen, domestic servants, postal and telegraph employees, students, etc. From their midst and from the peasantry came Russian industrialists, the petty, middle and big bourgeoisie. True, yesterday's merchants predominated in the latter. The Cossacks were a privileged military class that served on the border.

By 1917 the process of class formation not finished, he was at the very beginning. The main reason was the lack of an adequate economic base: commodity-money relations were in their infancy, as was the country's domestic market. They did not cover the main productive force of society - the peasants, who, even after the Stolypin reform, never became free farmers. The working class, numbering about 10 million people, did not consist of hereditary workers, many were semi-workers, semi-peasants. By the end of the XIX century. The Industrial Revolution was not fully completed. Manual labor was never supplanted by machines, even in the 80s. XX in. it accounted for 40%. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat did not become the main classes of society. The government created huge privileges for domestic entrepreneurs, limiting free competition. The lack of competition strengthened the monopoly and held back the development of capitalism, which never passed from an early to a mature stage. The low material level of the population and the limited capacity of the domestic market did not allow the working masses to become full-fledged consumers. Thus, per capita income in Russia in 1900 was equal to 63 rubles a year, while in England - 273, in the USA - 346. The population density was 32 times less than in Belgium. 14% of the population lived in cities, and in England - 78%, in the USA - 42%. There were no objective conditions for the emergence of a middle class acting as a stabilizer of society in Russia.

classless society

The October Revolution, carried out by non-class and non-class strata of the urban and rural poor, led by the combat-ready Bolshevik Party, easily destroyed the old social structure of Russian society. On its ruins it was necessary to create a new one. She was officially named classless. So it was in fact, since the objective and only basis for the emergence of classes - private property - was destroyed. The process of class formation that had begun was eliminated in the bud. The official ideology of Marxism did not allow restoring the estate system, officially equalizing everyone in rights and financial position.

In history, within the framework of one country, a unique situation arose when all known types of social stratification—slavery, castes, estates, and classes—were destroyed and were not recognized as legitimate. However, as we already know, society cannot exist without social hierarchy and social inequality, even the most simple and primitive. Russia was not one of them.

The arrangement of the social organization of society was undertaken by the Bolshevik Party, which acted as a representative of the interests of the proletariat - the most active, but far from the most numerous group of the population. This is the only class that survived the devastating revolution and bloody civil war. As a class, he was solidary, united and organized, which could not be said about the class of peasants, whose interests were limited to ownership of land and the protection of local traditions. The proletariat is the only class in the old society without any form of property. This is exactly what suited the Bolsheviks most of all, who planned for the first time in history to build a society where there would be no property, inequality, and exploitation.

New class

It is known that no social group of any size can spontaneously organize itself, no matter how much it wants to. Management functions were taken over by a relatively small group - the political party of the Bolsheviks, which had accumulated the necessary experience over the long years of the underground. Having carried out the nationalization of land and enterprises, the party appropriated all state property, and with it the power in the state. Gradually formed new class party bureaucracy, which appointed ideologically committed cadres to key positions in the national economy, in the sphere of culture and science, primarily members of the communist party. Since the new class was the owner of the means of production, it was the class of exploiters that exercised control over the whole of society.

The basis of the new class was nomenclature - the highest stratum of party functionaries. The nomenclature denotes a list of leadership positions, the replacement of which occurs by decision of a higher authority. The ruling class includes only those who are in the regular nomenclature of party bodies - from the nomenclature of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the main nomenclature of the district party committees. None of the nomenklatura could be popularly elected or replaced. In addition, the nomenclature included heads of enterprises, construction, transport, agriculture, defense, science, culture, ministries and departments. The total number is about 750 thousand people, and with family members the number of the ruling class of the nomenklatura in the USSR reached 3 million people, i.e. 1.5% of the total population.

Stratification of Soviet society

In 1950, the American sociologist A. Inkels, analyzing the social stratification of Soviet society, found 4 large groups in it - ruling elite, intelligentsia, working class and peasantry. With the exception of the ruling elite, each group, in turn, broke up into several layers. Yes, in a group intelligentsia 3 subgroups were found:

the upper stratum, the mass intelligentsia (professionals, middle officials and managers, junior officers and technicians), "white collars" (ordinary employees - accountants, cashiers, lower managers). Working class included the "aristocracy" (the most skilled workers), average-skilled rank-and-file workers, and lagging behind, low-skilled workers. Peasantry consisted of 2 subgroups - successful and average collective farmers. In addition to them, A. Inckels singled out the so-called residual group, where he enrolled prisoners held in labor camps and correctional colonies. This part of the population, like the outcasts in the caste system of India, was outside the formal class structure.

The differences in the incomes of these groups turned out to be greater than in the United States and Western Europe. In addition to high salaries, the elite of Soviet society received additional benefits: a personal driver and a company car, a comfortable apartment and a country house, closed shops and clinics, boarding houses, and special rations. The style of life, style of dress and manners of behavior also differed significantly. True, social inequality was leveled to a certain extent thanks to free education and health care, pension and social insurance, as well as low prices for public transport and low rents.

Summarizing the 70-year period of development of Soviet society, the famous Soviet sociologist T. I. Zaslavskaya in 1991 identified 3 groups in its social system: upper class, lower class and separating them layer. basis upper class constitutes the nomenklatura, uniting the highest strata of the party, military, state and economic bureaucracy. She is the owner of national wealth, most of which she spends on herself, receiving explicit (salary) and implicit (free goods and services) income. lower class wage-workers of the state are formed: workers, peasants, intelligentsia. They have no property and political rights. Characteristic features of the lifestyle: low incomes, limited consumption patterns, overcrowding in communal apartments, low level of medical care, poor health.

social interlayer between the upper and lower classes form social groups that serve the nomenklatura: middle managers, ideological workers, party journalists, propagandists, social science teachers, medical staff of special clinics, drivers of personal vehicles and other categories of servants of the nomenklatura elite, as well as successful artists, lawyers, writers, diplomats, commanders of the army, navy, KGB and MVD. Although the service stratum appears to occupy a place that usually belongs to the middle class, such similarities are misleading. The basis of the middle class in the West is private property, which ensures political and social independence. However, the serving stratum is dependent on everything, it has neither private property nor the right to dispose of public property.

These are the main foreign and domestic theories of the social stratification of Soviet society. We had to turn to them because the issue is still debatable. Perhaps in the future new approaches will appear, in some way or in many ways refining the old ones, because our society is constantly changing, and sometimes this happens in such a way that all the forecasts of scientists are refuted.

The peculiarity of Russian stratification

Let us sum up and, from this point of view, define the main contours of the current state and future development of social stratification in Russia. The main conclusion is the following. Soviet society never been socially homogeneous, there has always existed social stratification, which is a hierarchically ordered inequality. Social groups formed a kind of pyramid, in which the layers differed in the amount of power, prestige, and wealth. Since there was no private property, there was no economic basis for the emergence of classes in the Western sense. Society was not open, but closed like a caste. However, estates in the usual sense of the word did not exist in Soviet society, since there was no legal consolidation of social status, as was the case in feudal Europe.

At the same time, in Soviet society there really existed class-like And class-like groups. Let's consider why this was so. For 70 years, Soviet society was most mobile in the world society along with America. A free education available to all strata offered everyone the same opportunities for advancement that existed only in the United States. Nowhere in the world did the elite of society literally form from all strata of society in a short time. According to American sociologists, the most dynamic Soviet society was not only in terms of education and social mobility, but also in terms of industrial development. For many years, the USSR held the first place in terms of the pace of industrial progress. All these are signs of a modern industrial society, which have put forward the USSR, as Western sociologists have written, among the leading nations of the world.

At the same time, Soviet society must be classified as a class society. Class stratification is based on non-economic coercion, which persisted in the USSR for more than 70 years. After all, only private property, commodity-money relations and a developed market can destroy it, and they just didn’t exist. The place of legal consolidation of social status was occupied by ideological and party. Depending on the party experience, ideological loyalty, a person moved up the ladder or fell down into the "residual group". Rights and obligations were determined in relation to the state, all groups of the population were its employees, but depending on the profession, membership in the party, they occupied a different place in the hierarchy. Although the ideals of the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with feudal principles, the Soviet state returned to them in practice - significantly modifying them - in that. which divided the population into "taxable" and "non-taxable" layers.

Thus, Russia should be classified as mixed type stratification, but with an important caveat. Unlike England and Japan, feudal remnants were not preserved here in the form of a living and highly venerated tradition, they were not layered on a new class structure. There was no historical continuity. On the contrary, in Russia the estate system was first undermined by capitalism, and then finally destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The classes that did not have time to develop under capitalism were also destroyed. Nevertheless, the essential, although modified elements of both systems of stratification have been revived under a type of society that, in principle, does not tolerate any stratification, any inequality. It is historically new and a unique type of mixed stratification.

Stratification of post-Soviet Russia

After the well-known events of the mid-1980s and early 1990s, called a peaceful revolution, Russia turned towards market relations, democracy and a class society similar to the Western one. Within 5 years, the country has almost formed the highest class of owners, accounting for about 5% of the total population, formed the social ranks of society, whose standard of living is below the poverty line. And the middle of the social pyramid is occupied by small entrepreneurs, with varying degrees of success trying to get into the ruling class. As the standard of living of the population rises, the middle part of the pyramid will be replenished with an increasing number of representatives not only of the intelligentsia, but also of all other strata of society focused on business, professional work and career. From it will be born the middle class of Russia.

The basis, or social base, of the upper class was still the same nomenclature, which, by the beginning of economic reforms, occupied key positions in the economy, politics, and culture. The opportunity to privatize enterprises, transfer them to private and group ownership came in handy for her. In fact, the nomenklatura only legalized its position as a real manager and owner of the means of production. Two other sources of replenishment of the upper class are the businessmen of the shadow economy and the engineering stratum of the intelligentsia. The former were in fact the pioneers of private enterprise at a time when it was prosecuted by law. They have behind them not only the practical experience of managing a business, but also the prison experience of those persecuted by the law (at least for some). The second are ordinary civil servants who left the research institutes, design bureaus and hard currency in time, the most active and inventive.

Opportunities for vertical mobility for the majority of the population opened very unexpectedly and closed very quickly. It became almost impossible to get into the upper class of society 5 years after the start of reforms. Its capacity is objectively limited and amounts to no more than 5% of the population. The ease with which large capitals were made during the first "five-year plan" of capitalism has disappeared. Today, access to the elite requires capital and capabilities that most people do not have. It happens like top class closure, he enacts laws that restrict access to his ranks, creates private schools that make it difficult for others to get the right education. The entertainment sphere of the elite is no longer available to all other categories. It includes not only expensive salons, boarding houses, bars, clubs, but also holidays in world resorts.

At the same time, access to the rural and urban middle class is open. The stratum of farmers is extremely small and does not exceed 1%. The middle urban strata have not yet formed. But their replenishment depends on how soon the "new Russians", the elite of society and the country's leadership will pay for skilled mental labor not at the subsistence level, but at its market price. As we remember, the basis of the middle class in the West are teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, writers, scientists and average managers. The stability and prosperity of Russian society will depend on success in the formation of the middle class.

5. Poverty and Inequality

Inequality and poverty are concepts closely related to social stratification. Inequality characterizes the unequal distribution of society's scarce resources—money, power, education, and prestige—between different strata, or strata of the population. The main measure of inequality is the number of liquid values. This function is usually performed by money (in primitive societies, inequality was expressed in the number of small and large cattle, shells, etc.).

If inequality is presented in the form of a scale, then on one of its poles there will be those who own the largest (rich), and on the other - the smallest (poor) amount of goods. Thus, poverty is the economic and socio-cultural condition of people who have a minimum amount of liquid values ​​and limited access to social benefits. The most common and easy-to-calculate way to measure inequality is to compare the lowest and highest incomes in a given country. Pitirim Sorokin thus compared different countries and different historical eras. For example, in medieval Germany the ratio of upper to lower income was 10,000:1, and in medieval England it was 600:1. Another way is to analyze the share of family income spent on food. It turns out that the rich spend only 5-7% of their family budget on food, while the poor spend 50-70%. The poorer the individual, the more he spends on food, and vice versa.

Essence social inequality is the unequal access of different categories of the population to social benefits, such as money, power and prestige. Essence economic inequality that a minority of the population always owns most of the national wealth. In other words, the smallest part of society receives the highest incomes, and the majority of the population receives the average and the smallest. The latter can be distributed in different ways. In the United States in 1992, the smallest incomes, like the largest, are received by a minority of the population, and the average - by the majority. In Russia in 1992, when the exchange rate of the ruble collapsed sharply and inflation swallowed up all the ruble reserves of the vast majority of the population, the majority received the lowest incomes, a relatively small group received the average incomes, and the minority of the population received the highest. Accordingly, the pyramid of incomes, their distribution among population groups, in other words, inequality, in the first case can be depicted as a rhombus, and in the second - a cone (diagram 3). As a result, we get a stratification profile, or an inequality profile.

In the United States, 14% of the total population lived near the poverty line, in Russia - 81%, the rich were 5% each, and those who can be classified as prosperous, or the middle class, were respectively

81% and 14%. (For data on Russia, see: Poverty: A View of Scientists on the Problem / Edited by M. A. Mozhina. - M., 1994. - P. 6.)

Rich

Money is a universal measure of inequality in modern society. Their number determines the place of the individual or family in social stratification. The wealthy are those who own the most money. Wealth is expressed in terms of money, which determines the value of everything that a person owns: a house, a car, a yacht, a collection of paintings, stocks, insurance policies, etc. They are liquid - they can always be sold. The rich are so named because they hold the most liquid assets possible, whether they be oil companies, commercial banks, supermarkets, publishing houses, castles, islands, luxury hotels, or art collections. A person who possesses all these is considered rich. Wealth is something that accumulates over many years and is inherited, which allows you to live comfortably without working.

The rich are also called millionaires, multimillionaires And billionaires. In the US, wealth is distributed as follows: 1) 0.5% of the super-rich own $2.5 million worth of valuables. and more; 2) 0.5% of the very rich own from 1.4 to 2.5 million dollars;

3) 9% of the rich - from 206 thousand dollars. up to 1.4 million dollars; 4) 90% belonging to the class of the rich own less than 206 thousand dollars. In total, 1 million people in the United States own assets worth more than $1 million. These include the "old rich" and the "new rich". The former accumulated wealth over decades and even centuries, passing it on from generation to generation. The second created their well-being in a matter of years. These include, in particular, professional athletes. It is known that the average annual income of an NBA basketball player is $1.2 million. They have not yet managed to become hereditary nobility, and it is not known whether they will be. They can disperse their fortune among many heirs, each of whom will receive an insignificant part and, therefore, will not be classified as rich. They may go broke or lose their wealth in some other way.

Thus, the “new rich” are those who did not have time to test the strength of their fortune with time. On the contrary, the “old rich” have money invested in corporations, banks, real estate, which bring reliable profits. They are not scattered, but multiplied by the efforts of tens and hundreds of such rich people. Mutual marriages between them create a clan network that insures each individual against possible ruin.

The layer of "old rich" is made up of 60 thousand families belonging to the aristocracy "by blood", that is, by family origin. It includes only white Anglo-Saxons of the Protestant faith, whose roots stretch back to the American settlers of the 18th century. and whose wealth was accumulated back in the 19th century. Among the 60,000 richest families, 400 families of the super-rich stand out, constituting a kind of property elite of the upper class. In order to get into it, the minimum amount of wealth must exceed 275 million dollars. The entire wealthy class in the United States does not exceed 5-6% of the population, which is more than 15 million people.

400 elected

Since 1982, Forbes, the magazine for businessmen, has published a list of the 400 richest people in America. In 1989, the total value of their assets less liabilities (assets minus debts) was equal to the total value of goods and. services created by Switzerland and Jordan, namely 268 billion dollars. The entrance "fee" to the elite club is $275 million, and the average wealth of its members is $670 million. Of these, 64 men, including D. Trump, T. Turner and X. Perrault, and two women had a fortune of $ 1 billion. and higher. 40% of the chosen inherited wealth, 6% built it on a relatively modest family foundation, 54% were self-made people.

Few of America's great wealthy date their beginnings to before the Civil War. However, this "old" money is the basis of wealthy families of aristocrats such as the Rockefellers and Du Ponts. On the contrary, the accumulation of the "new rich" began in the 1940s. 20th century

They increase only because, compared with others, they have little time for their wealth to “scatter” - thanks to inheritance - over several generations of relatives. The main channel of savings is the ownership of funds mass media, movable and immovable property, financial speculation.

87% of the super-rich are men, 13% are women who inherited the fortune as the daughters or widows of multimillionaires. All the rich are white, mostly Protestants of Anglo-Saxon roots. The vast majority live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Washington. Only 1/5 graduated from elite universities, most have 4 years of college behind them. Many graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics and law. ten do not have higher education. 21 people are immigrants.

Abbreviated by source at:HessIN.,MarksonE.,Stein P. sociology. — N.Y., 1991.-R.192.

Poor

If inequality characterizes society as a whole, then poverty concerns only part of the population. Depending on how high the level economic development countries, poverty covers a large or small part of the population. As we have seen, in 1992 in the USA 14% of the population were classified as poor, while in Russia it was 80%. Sociologists call the scale of poverty the proportion of a country's population (usually expressed as a percentage) living near the official line, or threshold, of poverty. The terms “poverty rate”, “poverty line” and “poverty ratio” are also used to indicate the scale of poverty.

The poverty threshold is the amount of money (usually expressed, for example, in dollars or rubles) officially set as the minimum income due to which an individual or family is able to purchase food, clothing and housing. It is also called the "poverty level". In Russia, he received an additional name - living wage. The subsistence minimum is a set of goods and services (expressed in the prices of real purchases), which allows a person to satisfy the minimum allowable, from a scientific point of view, needs. For the poor, 50 to 70% of their income is spent on food, as a result they do not have enough money for medicines, utilities, apartment repairs, and the purchase of good furniture and clothes. They are often unable to pay for the education of their children in a paid school or university.

Poverty lines change in historical time. Previously, humanity lived much worse and the number of poor people was higher. In ancient Greece, 90% of the population by the standards of that time lived in poverty. In Renaissance England, about 60% of the population was considered poor. In the 19th century the scale of poverty has been reduced to 50%. In the 30s. 20th century only a third of the British were poor, and after 50 years - only 15%. According to the apt remark of J. Galbraith, in the past poverty was the lot of the majority, and today it is the lot of the minority.

Traditionally, sociologists have distinguished between absolute and relative poverty. Under absolute poverty is understood as such a state in which an individual is not able to satisfy even the basic needs for food, housing, clothing, warmth, or is able to satisfy only the minimum needs that ensure biological survival on his income. The numerical criterion is the poverty threshold (living wage).

Under relative poverty is understood as the impossibility of maintaining a decent standard of living, or some standard of living accepted in a given society. Relative poverty refers to how poor you are compared to other people.

• unemployed;
• low-paid workers;
• recent immigrants;
• people who moved from the village to the city;
• national minorities (especially blacks);
• vagabonds and homeless people;
• people unable to work due to old age, disability or illness;
• incomplete families headed by a woman.

The New Poor in Russia

Society has split into two unequal parts: outsiders and outcasts (60%) and wealthy (20%). Another 20% fell into the group with income from 100 to 1000 dollars, i.e. with a 10-fold difference at the poles. Moreover, some of its "inhabitants" clearly gravitate towards the upper pole, while others - towards the lower one. Between them is a gap, a “black hole”. Thus, we still do not have a middle class - the basis for the stability of society.

Why did almost half of the population fall below the poverty line? We are constantly told that how we work is how we live... So there is nothing, as they say, to blame the mirror... Yes, our labor productivity is lower than, say, the Americans. But, according to academician D. Lvov, our salary is ugly low even in relation to our low labor productivity. With us, a person receives only 20% of what he earns (and even then with huge delays). It turns out that in terms of 1 dollar of salary, our average worker produces 3 times more products than an American. Scientists believe that as long as the salary does not depend on labor productivity, it is not necessary to count on the fact that people will work better. What incentive to work, for example, can a nurse have if she can only buy a monthly pass with her salary?

It is believed that additional earnings help to survive. But, as studies show, those who have money, highly qualified specialists, people in a high official position, have more opportunities to earn extra money.

Thus, additional earnings do not smooth out, but increase income gaps - by 25 times or more.

But people do not even see their meager salary for months. And this is another reason for mass impoverishment.

From a letter to the editor: “This year my children, aged 13 and 19, had nothing to go to school and college: we have no money for clothes and textbooks. There is no money even for bread. We eat crackers, which we dried 3 years ago. There are potatoes, vegetables from his garden. A mother who falls from hunger shares her pension with us. But we are not idlers, my husband does not drink, does not smoke. But he is a miner, and they don't get paid for several months. I was a teacher at kindergarten but has recently been closed. It is impossible for a husband to leave the mine, since there is nowhere else to get a job and there are 2 years before retirement. Go to trade, as our leaders urge? But we already have the whole city trading. And no one buys anything, because no one has money - everything is for the miner!” (L. Lisyutina, Venev, Tula region). Here is a typical example of a "new poor" family. These are those who, by their education, qualifications, and social status, have never been among the low-income before.

Moreover, it must be said that the burden of inflation hits the poor the hardest. At this time, prices for essential goods and services rise. And all the expenses of the poor come down to them. For 1990-1996 for the poor, the cost of living has increased by 5-6 thousand times, and for the rich - by 4.9 thousand times.

Poverty is dangerous because it seems to reproduce itself. Poor material security leads to poor health, dequalification, deprofessionalization. And in the end - to degradation. Poverty is sinking.

The heroes of Gorky's play "At the Bottom" came into our lives. 14 million of our fellow citizens are “inhabitants of the bottom”: 4 million are homeless, 3 million are beggars, 4 million are homeless children, 3 million are street, station prostitutes.

In half of the cases, they fall into outcasts due to a tendency to vice, weakness of character. The rest are victims of social policy.

3/4 of Russians are not sure that they will be able to escape poverty.

The funnel that pulls to the bottom sucks in more and more people. The most dangerous zone is the bottom. There are now 4.5 million people.

Increasingly, life pushes desperate people to the last step, which saves them from all problems.

In recent years, Russia has taken one of the first places in the world in terms of the number of suicides. In 1995, out of 100,000 people, 41 committed suicide.

According to the materials of the Institute of Socio-Economic Problems of the Population of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The concept of social stratification. Conflictological and functionalist theory of stratification

social stratification- this is a set of social strata located in a vertical order (from lat. - layer and - I do).

The author of the term is an American scientist, a former resident of Russia, Pitirim Sorokin. He borrowed the concept of "stratification" from geology. In this science, this term refers to the horizontal occurrence of various layers of geological rocks.

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889-1968) was born in the Vologda region, in the family of a Russian, a jeweler and a koma peasant woman. He graduated from St. Petersburg University, a master of law. He was an activist of the Right Social Revolutionary Party. together with a group of scientists and politicians, he was expelled from Russia by Lenin. In 1923 he worked in the USA at the University of Minnesota, and in 1930 he founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, invited Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons to work. It was in the 30-60s years - the peak of the scientific work of the scientist. The four-volume monograph "Social and Cultural Dynamics" (1937-1941) brings him worldwide fame.

If the social structure arises from the social division of labor, then social stratification, i.e. the hierarchy of social groups - about the social distribution of the results of labor (social benefits).

Social relations in any society are characterized as unequal. Social inequality are the conditions under which people have unequal access to social goods such as money, power and prestige. Differences between people, due to their physiological and mental characteristics, are called natural. Natural differences can become the basis for the emergence of unequal relationships between individuals. The strong coerce the weak, who triumph over the simpletons. Inequality resulting from natural differences is the first form of inequality. but main feature society is social inequality, inextricably linked with social differences.

Theories of social inequality are divided into two principal areas: Functionalist and conflictological(Marxist).

Functionalists, in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, derive social inequality from the division of labor: mechanical (natural, stateevik) and organic (arises as a result of training and professional specialization).

For the normal functioning of society, an optimal combination of all types of activities is necessary, but some of them, from the point of view of society, are more important than others, therefore, there should always be special mechanisms in society to encourage those people who perform important functions, for example, due to uneven in remuneration, provision of certain privileges, etc..

Conflictologistsemphasize the dominant role in the system of social reproduction of differential (those that divide society into layers) relations of property and power. The nature of the formation of elites and the nature of the distribution of social capital depend on who gets control over significant social resources, as well as on what conditions.

The followers of Karl Marx, for example, consider private ownership of the means of production to be the main source of social inequality, which gives rise to the social stratification of society, its division into antagonistic classes. The exaggeration of the role of this factor prompted K. Marx and his followers to the idea that with the elimination of private ownership of the means of production, it would be possible to get rid of social inequality.

sociodialect - conventional languages ​​and jargon. Jargon is distinguished: estate, professional, age, etc. Conditional languages ​​("Argo") are lexical systems that perform the functions of a separate language, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, for example, "fenya" is the language of the underworld ("grandmothers" - money, "ban" - station, "corner" - suitcase "Clift" - jacket).

Types of social stratification

In sociology, three basic types of stratification are usually distinguished (economic, political, professional), as well as non-basic types of stratification (cultural-speech, age, etc.).

Economic stratification is characterized by indicators of income and wealth. Income - the amount of cash receipts of an individual or family for a certain period of time (month, year). This includes wage, pension, allowances, fees, etc. Income is usually spent on living but can be accumulated and turned into wealth. Income is measured in monetary units that an individual (individual income) or family (family income) receives over a specified period of time.

Political stratification is characterized by the amount of power. Power - the ability to exercise one's will, to determine and control the activities of other people through various means (law, violence, authority, etc.). Thus, the amount of power is measured, first of all, by the number of people who are subject to the power decision.

Professional stratification is measured by the level of education and the prestige of the profession. Education is a set of knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in the process of education (measured by the number of years of study) and the quality of the acquired knowledge, skills and abilities. Education, like income and power, is an objective measure of the stratification of society. However, it is also important to take into account the subjective assessment of the social structure, because the process of stratification is closely linked with the formation of a system of values, on the basis of which a “normative rating scale” is formed. So, each person, based on their beliefs and preferences, evaluates the professions, statuses, etc. existing in society in different ways. At the same time, the assessment is carried out according to many criteria (place of residence, type of leisure, etc.).

Profession prestige- this is a collective (public) assessment of the significance, attractiveness of a certain type of occupation. Prestige is the respect for status that has developed in public opinion. As a rule, it is measured in points (from 1 to 100). Thus, the profession of a doctor or a lawyer in all societies enjoys respect in public opinion, and the profession of a janitor, for example, has the least status respect. In the USA, the most prestigious professions are doctor, lawyer, scientist (university professor), etc. The average level of prestige is manager, engineer, small owner, etc. Low prestige - welder, driver, plumber, farm worker, janitor, etc.

In sociology, four main types of stratification are known - slavery, castes, estates and classes. The first three characterize closed societies, and the last type - open ones. A closed society is a society where social movements from the lower strata to the higher strata are either completely prohibited or significantly limited. An open society is a society where movement from one country to another is not officially restricted in any way.

Slavery - a form in which one person acts as the property of another; slaves constitute a low stratum of society, which is deprived of all rights and freedoms.

Caste - a social stratum, membership in which a person owes solely to his birth. There are practically insurmountable barriers between castes: a person cannot change the caste in which he was born, marriages between representatives of different castes are also allowed. India is a classic example of a caste organization of society. in India, a political struggle against caste has been proclaimed, in this country today there are 4 main castes and 5000 non-basic ones, the caste system is especially stable in the south, in poor regions, as well as in villages. However, industrialization and urbanization are destroying the caste system, as it is difficult to adhere caste distinctions in a city crowded with strangers. Remnants of the caste system also exist in Indonesia, Japan and other countries. The apartheid regime in the Republic of South Africa was marked by a peculiar caste system: in this country, whites, blacks and "colored" (Asians) did not have the right to live together , study, work, relax. Place in society determined axis belonging to a certain racial group. In 994, apartheid was eliminated, but its remnants will exist for generations to come.

estate - a social group that has certain rights and obligations, enshrined in custom or law, is inherited. During feudalism in Europe, for example, there were such privileged classes: the nobility and the clergy; unprivileged - the so-called third estate, which consisted of artisans and merchants, as well as dependent peasants. The transition from one state to another was very difficult, almost impossible, although individual exceptions were extremely rare. Say, a simple Cossack Alexei Rozum, by the will of fate being a favorite Empress Elizabeth, became a Russian nobleman, count, and his brother Cyril became the hetman of Ukraine.

Classes (in a broad sense) - social strata in modern society. This is an open system, because, unlike previous historical types of social stratification, the personal efforts of the individual, and not his social origin, play a decisive role here. Although in order to move from one stratum the other also has to overcome certain social barriers. It is always easier for the son of a millionaire to reach the top of the social hierarchy. Say, among the 700 richest people in the world, according to Forbes magazine, there are 12 Rockefellers and 9 Mallone, although the richest person in the world today is Bill Gates was by no means the son of a millionaire, he did not even graduate from the university.

Social mobility: definition, classification and forms

According to the definition of P. Sorokin, under social mobility refers to any transition of an individual, group or social object, or value created or modified through activity, from one social position to another, as a result of which the social position of the individual or group changes.

P. Sorokin distinguishes two forms social mobility: horizontal and vertical.Horizontal mobility- this is the transition of an individual or a social object from one social position to another, lying on the same level. For example, the transition of an individual from one family to another, from one religious group to another, as well as a change of residence. In all these cases, the individual does not change the social stratum to which he belongs, or social status. But the most important process is vertical mobility, which is a set of interactions that contribute to the transition of an individual or a social object from one social stratum to another. This includes, for example, career advancement (professional vertical mobility), a significant improvement in well-being (economic vertical mobility) or a transition to a higher social stratum, to a different level of power (political vertical mobility).

Society can elevate the status of some individuals and lower the status of others. And this is understandable: some individuals who have talent, energy, youth should force out other individuals who do not possess these qualities from the highest statuses. Depending on this, upward and downward social mobility, or social upsurge and social downfall, are distinguished. The upward currents of professional economic and political mobility exist in two main forms: as an individual rise from the lower to the higher stratum, and as the creation of new groups of individuals. These groups are included in the top layer next to existing ones or instead of them. Similarly, downward mobility exists both in the form of pushing individual individuals from high social statuses to lower ones, and in the form of lowering the social statuses of an entire group. An example of the second form of downward mobility is the decline in the social status of a professional group of engineers that once held very high positions in our society, or the decline in the status of a political party that is losing real power.

Also distinguish individual social mobility And group(group, as a rule, is the result of serious social changes, such as revolutions or economic transformations, foreign interventions or changes in political regimes, etc.). An example of group social mobility can be a drop in the social status of a professional group of teachers who once occupied very high position in our society, or the decline in the status of a political party, due to defeat in elections or as a result of the revolution, lost real power. According to Sorokin's figurative expression, the case of downward individual social mobility resembles the fall of a person from a ship, while the case of group mobility resembles a ship that sank with all the people on board.

In a society that develops stably, without upheavals, not the most group, but individual vertical movements prevail, that is, it is not political, professional, estate or ethnic groups that rise and fall in the social hierarchy, but individual individuals. In modern society, individual mobility is very high .The processes of industrialization, then the reduction in the proportion of unskilled workers, the growing need for office managers, businessmen, encourage people to change their social status. However, even in the most traditional society there were no insurmountable barriers between strata.

Sociologists also distinguish mobility intergenerational and mobility within one generation.

Intergenerational mobility(intergenerational mobility) is determined by comparing the social status of parents and their children at a certain point in the career of both (for example, by the rank of their profession at approximately the same age). Research shows that a significant portion, perhaps even the majority, of the Russian population moves at least slightly up or down the class hierarchy in every generation.

Intragenerational mobility(intragenerational mobility) involves comparing the social status of an individual over a long period of time. Research results show that many Russians have changed occupations during their lives. However, the mobility of the majority was limited. Short distance travel is the rule, long distance travel is the exception.

Spontaneous and organized mobility.

An example of spontaneous mAbundance can serve as a movement to earn money from residents of the near abroad to large cities in Russia.

Organized mobility - the movement of a person or entire groups up, down or horizontally is controlled by the state. These movements can be carried out:

a) with the consent of the people themselves,

b) without their consent.

An example of organized voluntary mobility in Soviet times is the movement of young people from different cities and villages to Komsomol construction sites, the development of virgin lands, etc. An example of organized involuntary mobility is the repatriation (resettlement) of Chechens and Ingush during the war against German Nazism.

It should be distinguished from organized mobility structural mobility. It is caused by changes in the structure of the national economy and occurs against the will and consciousness of individual individuals. For example, the disappearance or reduction of industries or professions leads to the displacement of large masses of people.

Vertical mobility channels

The most complete description of channels vertical mobility given by P. Sorokin. Only he calls them "channels of vertical circulation." He believes that there are no impassable borders between countries. Between them there are various "elevators" along which individuals move up and down.

Of particular interest are social institutions - the army, church, school, family, property, which are used as channels of social circulation.

The army functions as a channel of vertical circulation most during wartime. Large losses among the command staff lead to the filling of vacancies from lower ranks. In wartime, soldiers advance through talent and bravery.

It is known that out of 92 Roman emperors, 36 reached this rank, starting from the lower ranks. Of the 65 Byzantine emperors, 12 advanced through military careers. Napoleon and his entourage, marshals, generals and the kings of Europe appointed by him, came from commoners. Cromwell, Grant, Washington and thousands of other commanders have risen to the highest positions thanks to the army.

The Church as a channel of social circulation has moved a large number of people from the bottom to the top of society. P. Sorokin studied the biographies of 144 Roman Catholic popes and found that 28 came from the lower classes, and 27 from the middle strata. The institution of celibacy (celibacy), introduced in the 11th century. Pope Gregory VII ordered the Catholic clergy not to have children. Thanks to this after death officials vacated positions were filled with new people.

In addition to the upward movement, the church became a channel for the downward movement. Thousands of heretics, pagans, enemies of the church were brought to justice, ruined and destroyed. Among them were many kings, dukes, princes, lords, aristocrats and nobles of the highest ranks.

School. The institutions of education and upbringing, no matter what concrete form they take, have served in all ages as a powerful channel of social circulation. In an open society, the "social lift" moves from the very bottom, goes through all the floors and reaches the very top.

During the era of Confucius, schools were open to all classes. Examinations were held every three years. The best students, regardless of their marital status, were selected and transferred to higher schools, and then to universities, from where they got to high government posts. Thus, the Chinese school constantly uplifted the common people and hindered the advancement of the higher strata if they did not meet the requirements. The great competition for colleges and universities in many countries is explained by the fact that education is the most fast and accessible channel of social circulation.

Property most clearly manifests itself in the form of accumulated wealth and money. They are one of the simplest and most effective ways of social promotion. Family and marriage become channels of vertical circulation in the event that representatives of different social statuses enter the union. In European society, the marriage of a poor, but titled partner with a rich, but not noble, was common. As a result, both moved up the social ladder, getting what each wanted.

(from Lat. stratum - layer + facere - to do) is the differentiation of people in society depending on access to power, profession, income and some other socially significant features. The concept of "stratification" was proposed by a sociologist (1889-1968), who borrowed it from the natural sciences, where it, in particular, denotes the distribution of geological layers.

Rice. 1. The main types of social stratification (differentiation)

The distribution of social groups and people by strata (layers) makes it possible to identify relatively stable elements of the structure of society (Fig. 1) in terms of access to power (politics), professional functions performed and income received (economy). Three main types of stratification are presented in history - castes, estates and classes (Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Main historical types of social stratification

castes(from Portuguese casta - clan, generation, origin) - closed social groups connected by a common origin and legal status. Caste membership is determined solely by birth, and marriages between members of different castes are forbidden. The most famous is the caste system of India (Table 1), originally based on the division of the population into four varnas (in Sanskrit this word means “kind, genus, color”). According to legend, varnas were formed from different parts of the body of the primordial man, who was sacrificed.

Table 1. Caste system in ancient India

	Representatives		Associated body part
Brahmins	Scholars and priests
	Warriors and rulers
	Peasants and merchants
	"Untouchable", dependent persons

Estates - social groups whose rights and obligations, enshrined in law and tradition, are inherited. Below are the main estates characteristic of Europe in the 18th-19th centuries:

• the nobility is a privileged class from among the large landowners and officials who have served themselves. An indicator of nobility is usually a title: prince, duke, count, marquis, viscount, baron, etc.;
• clergy - ministers of worship and the church, with the exception of priests. In Orthodoxy, black clergy (monastic) and white (non-monastic) are distinguished;
• merchant class - the trading class, which included the owners of private enterprises;
• peasantry - the class of farmers engaged in agricultural labor as the main profession;
• philistinism - the urban class, consisting of artisans, small merchants and lower employees.

In some countries, a military estate was distinguished (for example, chivalry). In the Russian Empire, the Cossacks were sometimes referred to as a special estate. Unlike the caste system, marriages between members of different classes are permissible. It is possible (although difficult) to move from one class to another (for example, the purchase of the nobility by a merchant).

Classes(from lat. classis - category) - large groups of people, differing in their attitude to property. The German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), who proposed a historical classification of classes, pointed out that an important criterion for distinguishing classes is the position of their members - oppressed or oppressed:

• in a slave-owning society, such were slaves and slave-owners;
• in feudal society, feudal lords and dependent peasants;
• in capitalist society, the capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and the workers (the proletariat);
• there will be no classes in a communist society.

In modern sociology, one often speaks of classes in the most general sense - as collections of people with similar life chances, mediated by income, prestige and power:

• upper class: divided into upper upper class (rich people from "old families") and lower upper class (recently rich people);
• middle class: divided into upper middle (professionals) and
• lower middle (skilled workers and employees); The lower class is divided into an upper lower class (unskilled workers) and a lower lower class (lumpen and marginals).

The lower lower class are groups of the population that, for various reasons, do not fit into the structure of society. In fact, their representatives are excluded from the social class structure, so they are also called declassed elements.

The declassed elements include lumpen - vagabonds, beggars, beggars, as well as outcasts - those who have lost their social characteristics and have not acquired a new system of norms and values ​​in return, for example, former factory workers who lost their jobs due to the economic crisis, or peasants, driven off the land during industrialization.

Strata - groups of people with similar characteristics in a social space. This is the most universal and broadest concept, which makes it possible to single out any fractional elements in the structure of society according to a set of various socially significant criteria. For example, such strata as elite specialists, professional entrepreneurs, government officials, office workers, skilled workers, unskilled workers, etc. are distinguished. Classes, estates and castes can be considered varieties of strata.

Social stratification reflects presence in society. It shows that strata exist in different conditions and people have different opportunities to meet their needs. Inequality is the source of stratification in society. Thus, inequality reflects differences in the access of representatives of each layer to social benefits, and stratification is a sociological characteristic of the structure of society as a set of layers.

With the help of the concept of social stratification (from lat. stratum- layer, stratification) sociologists try to describe and explain the fact of social inequality, the subordination of large groups of people, the existence of social order.

The generally accepted position is the eternity of inequality in society, the predetermined differences between social subjects, which ultimately takes shape in the hierarchy system adopted in this society, in which all members of society are included and against which they act and evaluate their own and others' behavioral practices.

social stratificationis a set of functionally related statuses and roles (reduced to strata), reflecting vertical projection social system, which in turn indicates the inequality of subjects in the social hierarchy. At the same time, the concept of inequality is devoid of an ethical-chain character (although this is difficult to accept) and is seen as a natural and necessary way of organizing and functioning of society. In this regard, absolute equality is assessed as a detrimental factor for the social system, although several models of universal equality can be mentioned that do not bring the death of the social hierarchy - this is Roman law (“everyone is equal before the law”) and religion (“everyone is equal before God”) However, their implementation in practice is far from perfect.

From the standpoint of the theory of social stratification, society is a hierarchy (pyramid) of strata (social strata), which consist of carriers of the same or similar statuses and roles. The concept of a stratum was transferred to sociology from geology, where it denoted a geological layer of rock when describing a cut of the earth. It was applied in sociology in the 1920s. 20th century P.A. Sorokin, who developed and systematized a number of concepts that formed the basis of the theory of social stratification.

The concept of social stratification as inequality should be distinguished from the concept of social differentiation, which implies all sorts of social differences, not necessarily related to inequality. For example, one can single out groups of philatelists and football fans whose pastimes form these groups, but have nothing to do with social inequality or anything like that. In this regard, the question arises about the foundations of social stratification, about the initial prerequisites for the emergence of a system of inequality in society. Russian researcher G.A. Avanesova proposes to refer to such grounds:

• social connections of people(as a natural basis for the processes of stratification of society), which always involve the formation of hierarchization over time: leaders and subordinates, authorities and outcasts, leaders and followers are singled out;
• value-symbolic basis, which is associated with the comprehension of social norms and prescriptions, endowing social roles with specific evaluative content and meaning;
• norm(motivationoppo-repressive basis) as a boundary within which the ordering of social ties and value ideas takes place;
• bionatural and anthropological qualities: “... Few of the researchers object to the very fact of the continuity of the functional-hierarchical nature of social organization in the natural environment and the animal world.<...>Many anthropologists, using the example of pre-modern and surviving archaic communities, have traced a positive relationship between, firstly, the territory and the natural environment, secondly, the satisfaction of the initial (primary) human needs, and, thirdly, forms of interaction, value-stimulating systems.<...>Such anthropological qualities of people as gender, physical, psychological abilities, as well as signs mastered from the first days of life - family-role ties, ethno-national stereotypes, etc., also acquire a great influence on stratification processes. one .

The emergence of ideas about social stratification is associated with the development of ideas about social structure, when it became clear that “all relations in society are between systems and communities of different types or between social groups and specific people - placed in systems of different ranks. Such stable types of institutional connections, specific behavior of people give society stability. Understanding this necessitated the creation of a new categorical-conceptual apparatus, with the help of which it was possible to scientifically describe and understand the vertical projection of society, inequality. The main concepts of the theory of social stratification include: "social class", "stratum", "social status", "social role", "social mobility".

social class(from lat. classis- group) in a broad sense - a large group of people as part of society. The basis of this group is a certain unifying (common) feature, which entails the similarity of interests and behavioral practices of those who belong to this class.

The inequality of people in the system of organization and functioning of society was already obvious to Plato and Aristotle, who explained and justified this fact. In the VI century. BC e. Roman emperor Servius Tullius divided his subjects into five classes based on wealth in order to streamline the process of army formation.

The theoretical discovery of classes took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. thanks to the works of French historians F. Guizot,

O. Thierry, O. Mignet and others, who, on the basis of bourgeois revolutions, approached the concepts of class interest, class struggle, class as subjects of history. The English political economists A. Smith and D. Ricardo tried to clarify the economic reasons for the emergence and functioning of social classes. This vector of research was continued in Marxism, which made the greatest contribution to the development of class theory.

K. Marx proceeded from the fact that the weight of the reasons for the appearance of classes proposed before him (mental and physical differences of people, different levels of income, violence and wars) do not reflect the real state of affairs, since classes are socio-economic formations: the appearance, development and disappearance social classes is determined by the level and specifics of material production. Classes arise as a result of the development of productive forces, the division of labor and the formation of private property relations during the period of the decomposition of the tribal system. These processes led to the separation of agriculture from cattle breeding, later - crafts from agriculture, to the emergence of surplus product and private property, which determined the social differentiation of people in society, which became the basis for the formation of classes.

The materialistic analysis of history allowed K. Marx to argue that it is the economic aspect (relation to the means of production) that determines the role of classes in the social organization of labor and the system of political power, and affects their social position and way of life. The class struggle, in turn, is the driving force behind social development (changes in the social structure of society).

The classical definition of a social class was given by the successor of the Marxist theory V.I. Lenin. He singled out four main features of a class: classes are large groups of people that differ in their place in a historically defined system of social production, their attitude to the means of production, their role in the social organization of labor, the methods of obtaining and the size of the share of social wealth that they possess. The essence of relations between classes lies in the ability of some to appropriate the labor of others, which is possible due to the difference in their place in a certain way of social economy.

Within the framework of Marxist theory, any society exists as a system major And non-core classes. The existence of the former is determined by the dominant mode of production (the specifics of the economic basis), while the presence of the latter is determined by the processes of preservation (or gradual disappearance) of the remnants of old economic relations or the formation of a new (not yet dominant) mode of production. Social groups that are not part of the existing classes (they do not have clear class features) form specific (intermediate, transitional) social strata (layers). An example of such a layer is the intelligentsia - a significant group of people professionally comma mental labor, the production of knowledge, meanings, symbols.

An alternative to the Marxist logic of class analysis (of that period) was the theory of violence by H. Spencer and E. Dühring and the polystructural Weberian approach. The first alternative proceeded from the leading role of war and violence in the formation of social classes: as a result of war and the enslavement of some groups by others, a distinction arises in labor functions, wealth, and prestige. For example, G. Spencer believed that the winners create the ruling class, and the defeated become producers (slaves, serfs, etc.). The system of inequality includes three classes: the highest (domination, leadership), the middle (delivery, purchase and sale of products), the lowest (extraction and production of the product).

Unlike K. Marx, M. Weber did not want to see only economic features in the class, which oversimplify both the nature of the class and the diversity of elements of the social structure of society. Along with the category "class", he used the categories "stratum" and "party", in relation to which he singled out three stratification projections of society (three orders): economic, social, political. Differences in property form classes, differences in prestige form strata (status groups), differences in power form political parties.

M. Weber represented a class as a group of people with similar chances in life, determined by their power (influence), which makes it possible to receive specific benefits and have an income. Being in a class is not fatal, irresistible (unlike the beliefs of K. Marx), since the market is the determining factor in the class situation, i.e. types of human opportunities to enjoy goods and earn income under certain conditions. Thus, a class is people who are in the same class situation, having general position in the field of economics, which can be changed depending on the situation. The transition from one class to another is not difficult, since the class-forming features are blurred and it is not always possible to draw clear boundaries between classes.

There are three classes: class of owners(property owners of various shapes and sizes), profit class(subjects related to banking, trade and services) and social class(proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, officials, persons, commas in the education system). These three classes are essentially groups of classes, since each of them consists of several classes (subclasses), belonging to which is determined not by the relation to the means of production, but by arbitrary criteria (mainly the level of consumption and forms of ownership of property). For example, the class of owners looks like this: owners of slaves, owners of land, owners of mines, owners of equipment and instruments, owners of steamships, owners of jewelry and art treasures, financial creditors. The class (subclass) of propertyless owners (owners with a minus sign) includes slaves, declassed people, debtors, and the “poor”.

In modern sociology, the theory of classes has broken up into many directions and schools that are trying to comprehend the modern processes of transformation of the class structure of the traditional capitalist society, determined by the new quality of social realities (post-industrialism, information society, globalization). The main topics of class studies include the analysis of transformations in the system of ownership - management - control (M. Zeitlin, G. Karchedi, H. Bravsrman, P. Bourds), the study of the processes of change in the working class and the restructuring of classes (S. Malle, A. Gorz , P. Saunders, P. Townsend, A. Touraine), micro-level analysis of the class structure (E. Wright), exploitation theory (J. Roemer), research in the field of modern class struggle (M. Foucault, T. Marshall, R. Darsndorf ).

Strata (status group) - a set of people who have a certain amount of socially attributed prestige (honor) shared by all. The assessment (positive or negative) of this prestige is status. Status, honor, according to M. Weber, is not connected with the class situation of the subject and may even be in opposition to economic indicators. The fundamental difference between classes and strata is that the former arise in the process of development of production and commodity relations, and the strata are formed as the principles of consumption are established in all spheres of public life.

Strata(from lat. stratum- layer), or social stratum - a set of subjects with the same or similar statuses (a set of status features). Sometimes these concepts (stratum and layer) are distinguished: a stratum is a social group that has a certain status in the social hierarchy; social stratum - an intermediate (or transitional) social group that does not have all the characteristics of a class.

The concept of a stratum in modern form arose after the Marxist-Leninist theory of class as a more flexible and precise tool for the analysis of modern systems of stratification. A hierarchical set of strata forms a vertical section of the social system and reflects the inequality of its members. Historically, status groups in different societies were formed and consolidated in different forms: castes, estates, clans, etc.

As an ideal model for describing social inequality, a pyramid of three levels is most often proposed: upper - upper class (elite), middle - middle class (main class), lower - lower class ( social bottom).

The stratification pyramid functions according to its universal laws, which allow us to give it some invariant characteristics: there are always fewer positions at the top than at the bottom; the amount of social goods circulating (consumed) at the top is always greater than at the bottom; promotion to the top positions is always associated with overcoming social filters (property qualification, educational, age, etc.) - the higher the position, the tougher the effect of these filters. Each of these levels may consist of a whole set of strata that reflect the real status diversity of social groups in a given society. For example, within the framework of the analysis of the structure of the middle class, it is possible (under appropriate conditions) to distinguish the upper stratum of the middle class, the main class, the lower stratum of the middle class, the boundary layer, etc. - it all depends on the source material of the study and the criteria for identifying strata. The latter concerns the main methodological question of the theory of stratification: on what basis does a scientist single out a stratum, distinguish them from each other? The answer was formed during the development of the concept of status.

social status, or rank, - the position of the subject in society, position in the social hierarchy. Status, status is formed on the basis of both objective signs (for example, industrial and professional) and subjective (for example, cultural and psychological assessments). With regard to status, a person is treated as a status set, i.e. carrier of many statuses at the same time (they are acquired and manifested in different situations). It is customary to distinguish between the following statuses:

• basic (key) And minor, which differ in the situation of manifestation;
• attributed, which does not depend on the individual (conditioned biologically (race, gender) or socially (class title, inheritance)), and achieved(depends on the personal merits of the subject);
• social(objective position in the social hierarchy) and private(position in a small group based on personal qualities).

The status is a consequence of the action of status (stratification) features. It is according to them that sociologists distribute people according to the "floors" of the social ladder, they are the basis for distinguishing social strata. These signs are concrete-historical, depending on the time and place of action, although in the theory of stratification there were attempts to find universal, invariant status signs. K. Marx, for example, singled out the main and only sign of social stratification - economic. It is based on the relationship to the means of production. The German sociologist R. Dahrendorf believed that a status sign is political authority, which reflects the complicity of power. Hence the division into managers (owners and non-owners) and managed (lower and higher). The French sociologist A. Touraine believed that in modern society (information, post-industrial) the main class sign is access to the information because the forms of domination today are based on knowledge and education: the new ruling class (technocrats) is determined by the level of education and the availability of knowledge.

However, most researchers believe that there is no single universal stratification feature, that it is complex in nature and must correspond to the polystructural realities of the social system. P.A. Sorokin (the author of the classical theory of stratification) argued that in order to describe the social inequality of subjects, it is necessary to use a combination of economic, professional and political grounds. The American researcher L. Warner named income, prestige of the profession, education, ethnicity as stratification features, on the basis of which in the US society of the 1930s-1940s. he identified six social strata. His colleague B. Barber defined the following features: prestige, profession, power, power, income, education, degree of religiosity (ritual purity); position of relatives, ethnicity.

When analyzing social inequality in modern societies, the following elements of stratification are most often evaluated:

• economic well-being(property, form and amount of income), according to which it is possible to distinguish the rich, wealthy, moderately well-off and poor;
• education, in accordance with the level of which citizens can be divided into groups of people with higher education, secondary education, etc.;
• profession(place in the system of division of labor, sphere of implementation of labor behavior, type, nature and qualification of labor). Depending on the nature of the activity, it is customary to distinguish between knowledge workers, workers employed in agriculture, industry, etc.;
• power(the amount of power, access to the distribution of scarce and significant resources), in relation to which one can single out ordinary workers, middle managers, top managers in business, top government managers, etc.;
• authority, prestige(the significance and influence of certain subjects in the view of others), according to which leaders, the elite, "stars", etc. can be distinguished.

When analyzing the social stratification of a given society, it is necessary to remember the specific historical context, which is reflected in the system of status (stratification) features, which can be rank (basic) and nominal (additional or concomitant). Ranked- these are the signs that "work" in a given situation, are real indicators of correlation with a particular stratum. Rated- those signs that “do not work” or show their effect in a latent form (for example, for the systems of stratification of modern democratic societies, gender, race, religion, nationality, place of residence will be nominal, but when transferred to the analysis of medieval society, they turn into rank ).

social role - status-related system of actions (functions, behaviors) subject. This concept was introduced by R. Linton in 1936. He defined the social role as the dynamic aspect of status.

The social role is formed as an objective and subjective expectation on the part of others of proper behavior from the bearer of this status. The concept and content of the role is formed in the individual in the process of socialization. Through the performance of roles, social interaction of individuals is carried out, a system of role ligaments is created.

According to T. Parsons, any social role is described by the following characteristics: emotional side (some roles require emotional restraint, others - looseness), a way to get a role (some roles are prescribed, others are won), scale (roles are strictly limited or blurred), degree of formalization roles (action according to strictly established rules or arbitrarily), motivation (orientation to personal benefit, the common good, the interests of the group), a structure that includes a description of the type of behavior, rules of conduct, evaluation of the role, a system of sanctions for breaking the rules.

When performing social roles, which fit the system of social relations and interactions of a given society, situations such as role conflict and distancing from the role may arise. Role conflict(relative to one subject) arises in a situation of mismatch of roles in the presence of several statuses at the same time (for example, the situation of Taras Bulba, when he killed his son Ondry: in the person of Bulba, the statuses of father and military opponent simultaneously converged). Role distancing is a deliberate violation of the strategy of prescribed role behavior. This situation falls under the definition of deviation. Mass distancing from a role can serve as a sign of social tension, a demand to change the existing rules of the status-role system.

social mobility - movement of the subject in social space or change by the subject of his place in the social structure. It is the most important characteristic of a stratified system, which makes it possible to describe its dynamics and changes. P.A. Sorokin argued that social mobility is present in any hierarchical society and it is necessary in the same way as blood vessels are for an animal organism.

Speaking of social mobility, it is necessary to distinguish between its varieties. So, in modern sociology there are:

• vertical(ascending and descending) and horizontal mobility. Vertical mobility is associated with a change in status to a higher (upward mobility) or lower (downward mobility), horizontal - with movements within the stratum without changing the status and rank signs. An example of horizontal mobility is geographic mobility, which is a simple movement from one place to another while maintaining the same social status (but if a change of status is added to the change of place, then geographic mobility becomes migration);
• individual mobility(moving up, down, horizontally of an individual independently of others) and group mobility(a situation of increasing or decreasing the social significance (value) of an entire group - a class, estate, caste). According to P.A. Sorokin, the reasons for group mobility can be social revolutions, invasions and foreign interventions, wars, coups and change of political regimes, replacement of the old constitution with a new one, creation of an empire, peasant uprisings, internecine struggle of aristocratic families;
• intergenerational And intragenerational mobility. Intergenerational mobility suggests that the new generation reaches a higher or lower social level than the previous one, while intragenerational mobility describes a situation in which the same individual changes social positions several times throughout his life (the phenomenon of a social career).

Moving in the social hierarchy is carried out with the help of "social lifts", which are legalized ways and means of changing the current social status. Some researchers identify six standard "elevators" (ways to increase status):

• 1) economic activity with which a poor, enterprising person can become a millionaire;
• 2) an area of ​​politics where one can make a political career with all the favorable consequences that follow from this;
• 3) service in the army, where an ordinary soldier can rise to the rank of general;
• 4) serving God as a way to achieve a high position in the church hierarchy;
• 5) scientific activity which allows, although not immediately, thanks to great efforts to achieve a high position;
• 6) a successful marriage, with the help of which you can instantly improve your social status and financial situation.

The presence and nature of social mobility make it possible to characterize societies as closed And open. The first are social systems in which mobility is difficult, and some of its types are prohibited (caste and class societies). The latter approve and encourage social mobility, create conditions for the subject to move up the social ladder. However, it should be remembered that the division into closed and open societies is a rather ideological construction that appeared during the Cold War to describe the advantages of the West over the USSR and does not always stand up to criticism.

The concept of marginalism, which was introduced in the 1920s, is closely related to the concept of social mobility. 20th century American sociologist R. Park to designate the socio-psychological consequences of the inability of immigrants to adapt to a new environment.

Marginality(from lat. margo- on the edge) the state of a social subject (individual or group), which is characterized by borderlines with respect to socially significant structures, social groups or strata. Marginality as social phenomenon includes the following features:

The main factors of marginalization, researchers include poverty, closely related unemployment, urbanization processes (when the rural population is forced to change their way of life), high rates of modernization of traditional spheres of public and individual life.

Social stratification - an attributive sign of society - arises to a small extent already in primitive society (the stratification of the tribal community is not bright). Further development society brings to life various historical systems (types) of stratification, among which the following are most often distinguished:

• slavery, where the main historically relevant stratification feature was the subject's personal freedom/unfreedom;
• castes- the main features are religious purity and the origin of the individual (a classic example is Indian society);
• estates- the stratification sign here is the origin (feudal Europe, in which the estates initially, according to the law and (or) traditions, have unequal rights);
• classes- with this system of stratification, a number of stratification signs of economic, political, cultural content (income, education, power, profession, prestige) are distinguished, there are no formal social boundaries, equality of opportunity is legalized, the right of everyone to change their position is declared.

The first three historical systems of stratification are typical for closed societies, the last - for open ones.

The fact of social stratification, i.e. the existence of real social inequality among members of society has always given rise to the problem of its assessment and explanation. In modern social theory, four methodological approaches to the assessment of social inequality have been formed: functionalist, evolutionary, conflictological and symbolic.

Functionalists insist on the inevitability, naturalness and necessity of stratification (inequality), which is determined by the variety of needs of social subjects, the multiplicity of their roles and functions. Stratification, in their opinion, ensures the optimal functioning of society, and through the system of mobility ensures a fair distribution of benefits and resources.

Evolutionists note the dual nature of stratification - it cannot be unambiguously assessed as a positive and necessary phenomenon: the system of inequality is not always associated with justice, is not always useful and necessary, since it arises not only due to the natural needs of society, but also as a result of provoked conflicts over about the distribution of scarce resources; the existing system of stratification is capable of not only ensuring the development of society, but also hindering it.

Representatives of conflictological logic see the source of the formation of a system of inequality in intergroup conflicts and do not consider it fair (it serves the interests of the elite).

Symbolists do not focus on its "functionality - dysfunctionality" or "fairness - injustice", but on its content. From their point of view, the system of inequality evolves from overt, physical justification for the better position of the elite to forms of covert, symbolic elite violence and the distribution of social benefits; modern system social inequality is a system of symbolic distinction between the top and bottom of the social pyramid.

As for social stratification modern society, then all sociologists talk about its complexity and the ambiguity of the criteria for distinguishing strata and classes, but the point of view that is associated with the exploitation of economic indicators subject (income, type of labor, profession, consumption structure, etc.). For example, Russian researchers I.I. Sanzharevsky, V.A. Titarenko and others, according to their place in the system of social production, distinguish production (material production), commercial (exchange), state-distribution (distribution and redistribution) and service (ensuring the normal functioning of production, exchange and distribution) classes, declassed elements.

On the example of Great Britain, E. Giddens proposes to single out (according to the level of economic well-being) the upper class, the middle class: the old middle class (small businesses and farmers), the upper middle class (managers and specialists high level) and the lower middle class (small clerks, salespeople, teachers, nurses); working class: the upper working class (skilled workers - the "labor aristocracy") and the lower working class (low-skilled workers); lower class.

In modern Belarus, there are five levels of stratification (depending on income and consumption patterns): 1) the bottom layer (employees without a specialty, low-skilled workers, pensioners, disabled people, housewives, unemployed);

2) the base layer (specialists of mass professions, pensioners, workers of medium qualification); 3) the middle layer (highly qualified specialists, highly skilled workers, medium-sized entrepreneurs); 4) the top layer (specialists in demand, successful entrepreneurs, the most skilled workers); 5) elite (highly paid employees, entrepreneurs). In the Republic of Belarus, the middle class makes up about 30%, the basic and lower class - about 70%.

• Sociological Encyclopedia / ed. rsd. A.N. Danilova. Minsk, 2003.S. 349-352.
• Sociological Encyclopedia / ed. ed. A.N. Danilova. pp. 351-352.
• There. S. 348.

1. INTRODUCTION

Social stratification is a central theme in sociology. It explains social stratification into the poor, the wealthy and the rich.

Considering the subject of sociology, we found a close connection between the three fundamental concepts of sociology - social structure, social composition and social stratification. We expressed the structure in terms of a set of statuses and likened it to empty cells of a honeycomb. It is located, as it were, in a horizontal plane, but is created by the social division of labor. In a primitive society there are few statuses and a low level of division of labor, in a modern society there are many statuses and a high level of organization of the division of labor.

But no matter how many statuses there are, in the social structure they are equal and functionally related to each other. But now we have filled the empty cells with people, each status has turned into a large social group. The totality of statuses gave us a new concept - the social composition of the population. And here the groups are equal to each other, they are also located horizontally. Indeed, in terms of social composition, all Russians, women, engineers, non-party people and housewives are equal.

However, we know that in real life the inequality of people plays a huge role. Inequality is the criterion by which we can place some groups above or below others. Social composition turns into social stratification - a set of vertically arranged social strata, in particular, the poor, the wealthy, the rich. If we resort to a physical analogy, then the social composition is a disorderly collection of iron filings. But then they put a magnet, and they all lined up in a clear order. Stratification is a certain way "oriented" composition of the population.

What "orients" large social groups? It turns out that there is an unequal assessment by society of the meaning and role of each status or group. A plumber or a janitor is valued below a lawyer and a minister. Consequently, high statuses and people occupying them are better rewarded, they have more power, the prestige of their occupation is higher, and the level of education should also be higher. Here we got four main dimensions of stratification - income, power, education, prestige. And that's it, there are no others. Why? But because they exhaust the range of social benefits that people strive for. More precisely, not the goods themselves (there may just be many of them), but access channels to them. A home abroad, a luxury car, a yacht, a vacation in the Canary Islands, etc. - social goods that are always in short supply (i.e. highly respected and inaccessible to the majority) and are acquired through access to money and power, which in turn are achieved through high education and personal qualities.

In this way, social structure arises from the social division of labor, and social stratification arises from the social distribution of the results of labor, i.e. social benefits.

And it's always uneven. So there is an arrangement of social strata according to the criterion of unequal access to power, wealth, education and prestige.

2. MEASURING STRATIFICATION

Imagine a social space in which vertical and horizontal distances are not equal. P. Sorokin, the man who was the first in the world to give a complete theoretical explanation of the phenomenon, and who confirmed his theory with the help of a huge empirical material stretching throughout human history, thought this way or something like this.

Points in space are social statuses. The distance between the turner and the miller is one, it is horizontal, and the distance between the worker and the master is different, it is vertical. The master is the boss, the worker is the subordinate. They have different social ranks. Although the case can be presented in such a way that the master and worker will be located at an equal distance from each other. This will happen if we consider both of them not as a boss and a subordinate, but only as workers performing different labor functions. But then we will move from the vertical to the horizontal plane.

Curious fact

Among the Alans, the deformation of the skull served as a sure indicator of the social differentiation of society: among the leaders of the tribes, the elders of the clans and the priesthood, it was elongated.

The inequality of distances between statuses is the main property of stratification. She has four measuring rulers, or axes coordinates. All of them arranged vertically and next to each other:

income,

power,

education,

prestige.

Income is measured in rubles or dollars that an individual receives (individual income) or family (family income) over a specified period of time, say one month or one year.

On the coordinate axis, we plot equal intervals, for example, up to $5,000, from $5,001 to $10,000, from $10,001 to $15,000, and so on. up to $75,000 and above.

Education is measured by the number of years of study at a public or private school or university.

Let's say Primary School means 4 years, incomplete secondary - 9 years, complete secondary - 11, college - 4 years, university - 5 years, graduate school - 3 years, doctoral studies - 3 years. Thus, a professor has more than 20 years of formal education behind him, while a plumber may not have eight.

power is measured by the number of people affected by the decision you make (power- possibility

Rice. Four dimensions of social stratification. People occupying the same positions in all dimensions constitute one stratum (the figure shows an example of one of the strata).

impose their will or decisions on other people, regardless of their desire).

The decisions of the President of Russia apply to 150 million people (whether they are implemented is another question, although it also concerns the issue of power), and the decisions of the brigadier - to 7-10 people. Three scales of stratification - income, education and power - have completely objective units of measurement: dollars, years, people. Prestige is outside this range, as it is a subjective indicator.

Prestige - respect for status, prevailing in public opinion.

Since 1947, the US National Public Opinion Research Center has periodically polled ordinary Americans, selected from a national sample, in order to determine the social prestige of various professions. Respondents are asked to rate each of 90 professions (occupations) on a 5-point scale: excellent (best),

Note: the scale has from 100 (the highest score) to 1 (the lowest score) points. The second column "points" shows the average score received by this type of occupation in the sample.

good, average, slightly worse than average, the worst occupation. List II included almost all occupations from the supreme judge, minister and doctor to plumber and janitor. Having calculated the average for each occupation, the sociologists obtained a public assessment of the prestige of each type of work in points. Arranging them in a hierarchical order from the most respected to the most unprestigious, they received a rating, or a scale of professional prestige. Unfortunately, periodic representative surveys of the population about professional prestige have never been conducted in our country. Therefore, we will have to use American data (see table).

Comparison of data for different years (1949, 1964, 1972, 1982) shows the stability of the prestige scale. The same types of occupations enjoyed the greatest, average and least prestige in these years. Lawyer, doctor, teacher, scientist, banker, pilot, engineer received invariably high marks. Their position on the scale changed slightly: the doctor in 1964 was in second place, and in 1982 - in first place, the minister, respectively, occupied 10th and 11th places.

If the upper part of the scale is occupied by representatives of creative, intellectual labor, then the lower part is occupied by representatives of predominantly physical unskilled: a driver, a welder, a carpenter, a plumber, a janitor. They have the least status respect. People occupying the same positions on the four dimensions of stratification constitute one stratum.

For each status or individual, you can find a place on any scale.

A classic example is the comparison between a police officer and a college professor. On the scales of education and prestige, the professor ranks higher than the policeman, and on the scales of income and power, the policeman ranks higher than the professor. Indeed, the professor has less power, the income is somewhat lower than that of a policeman, but the professor has more prestige and years of study. Noting both with points on each scale and connecting them lines, we get a stratification profile.

Each scale can be considered separately and denoted by an independent concept.

In sociology, there are three basic types of stratification:

economic (income),

political (power)

professional (prestige)

and many non-basic, for example, cultural and speech and age.

Rice. Stratified profile of a college professor and police officer.

3. BELONGING TO A STRATE

Affiliation measured by subjective and objective indicators:

subjective indicator - feeling of belonging to this group, identification with it;

objective indicators - income, power, education, prestige.

So, a large fortune, high education, great power and high professional prestige are the necessary conditions for you to be classified as the highest stratum of society.

A stratum is a social stratum of people who have similar objective indicators on four scales of stratification.

concept stratification (stratum- layer, facio- do) came to sociology from geology, where it denotes the location of layers various breeds vertically. If we make a cut of the earth's crust at a certain distance, it will be found that under the layer of chernozem there is a layer of clay, then sand, etc. Each layer consists of homogeneous elements. So is the stratum - it includes people with the same income, education, power and prestige. There is no stratum that includes highly educated people in power and powerless poor people in low-prestige jobs. The rich are in the same stratum with the rich, and the average with the average.

In a civilized country, a big mafioso cannot belong to the highest stratum. Although he has a very high income, perhaps a high education and strong power, his occupation does not enjoy high prestige among citizens. It is condemned. Subjectively, he may consider himself a member of the upper class and even fit the objective criteria. However, he lacks the main thing - the recognition of "significant others."

Under "significant others" are two large social groups: members of the upper class and the general population. The highest stratum will never recognize him as "their" because he compromises the entire group as a whole. The population will never recognize mafia activity as a socially approved occupation, as it contradicts the mores, traditions and ideals of this society.

Let's conclude: belonging to a stratum has two components - subjective (psychological identification with a certain layer) and objective (social entry into a certain layer).

Social entry has undergone a certain historical evolution. In primitive society, inequality was insignificant, so stratification was almost absent there. With the emergence of slavery, it suddenly intensified. slavery- a form of the most rigid fixing of people in unprivileged strata. castes- lifelong assignment of an individual to his (but not necessarily unprivileged) stratum. In medieval Europe, lifelong ownership is weakening. Estates imply legal attachment to the stratum. Rich merchants bought noble titles and thus moved to a higher class. Estates were replaced by classes - open to all strata, not implying any legitimate (legal) way of securing one stratum.

4. HISTORICAL TYPES OF STRATIFICATION

Known in sociology four main types of stratification - slavery, castes, estates and classes. The first three characterize closed societies and the last type is open.

Closed is a society where social movements from lower to higher strata are either completely prohibited, either significantly limited.

open called a society where movement from one stratum to another is not officially restricted in any way.

Slavery- an economic, social and legal form of enslavement of people, bordering on complete lack of rights and an extreme degree of inequality.

Slavery has historically evolved. There are two forms of it.

At patriarchal slavery (primitive form) a slave had all the rights of a younger member of the family: he lived in the same house with the owners, participated in public life, married free people, inherited the owner's property. It was forbidden to kill him.

At classic bondage (mature form) the slave was finally enslaved: he lived in a separate room, did not participate in anything, did not inherit anything, did not marry and had no family. He was allowed to be killed. He did not own property, but he himself was considered the property of the owner ("talking tool").

Antique slavery in ancient Greece and plantation slavery in the United States before 1865 is closer to the second form, and servitude to the Geese of the 10th-12th centuries is closer to the first. The sources of slavery differ: the ancient was replenished mainly through conquests, and servitude was debt, or bonded slavery. The third source is criminals. In medieval China and in the Soviet GULAG (non-legal slavery), criminals were in the position of slaves.

At a mature stage slavery turns into slavery. When people talk about slavery as a historical type of stratification, they mean its highest stage. Slavery - the only form of social relations in history when one person acts as the property of another, and when the lower stratum is deprived of all rights and freedoms. There is no such thing in castes and estates, not to mention classes.

caste system not as ancient as the slave system, and less common. If almost all countries went through slavery, of course, to varying degrees, then castes were found only in India and partly in Africa. India is a classic example of a caste society. It arose on the ruins of the slaveholding in the first centuries of the new era.

Castoycalled a social group (stratum), membership in which a person owes solely to his birth.

He cannot move from his caste to another during his lifetime. To do this, he needs to be born again. The caste position is fixed by the Hindu religion (now it is clear why castes are not widespread). According to its canons, people live more than one life. Each person falls into the appropriate caste, depending on what his behavior was in a previous life. If bad, then after the next birth he should fall into a lower caste, and vice versa.

In India 4 main castes: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), Shudras (workers and peasants) and about 5 thousand minor castes and podcasts. The untouchables are especially worthy - they are not included in any caste and occupy the lowest position. In the course of industrialization, castes are replaced by classes. The Indian city is becoming more and more class-based, while the village, in which 7/10 of the population lives, remains caste-based.

Estates precede classes and characterize the feudal societies that existed in Europe from the 4th to the 14th centuries.

estate- a social group that has fixed custom or legal law and inherited rights and obligations.

The estate system, which includes several strata, is characterized by a hierarchy, expressed in the inequality of position and privileges. Europe was a classic example of a class organization, where at the turn of the 14th-15th centuries society was divided into upper classes(nobility and clergy) and unprivileged third estate(artisans, merchants, peasants). In the X-XIII centuries there were three main estates: the clergy, the nobility and the peasantry. In Russia, from the second half of the 18th century, a class division into nobility, clergy, merchants, peasantry and philistinism (middle urban strata) was established. Estates were based on landed property.

The rights and obligations of each estate were determined by legal law and consecrated by religious doctrine. Membership in the estate was determined inheritance. Social barriers between classes were quite rigid, therefore social mobility existed not so much between as within the estates. Each estate included many layers, ranks, levels, professions, ranks. So, only nobles could engage in public service. The aristocracy was considered a military estate (chivalry).

The higher in the social hierarchy an estate stood, the higher was its status. In contrast to castes, inter-class marriages were quite allowed. Sometimes individual mobility was allowed. A simple person could become a knight by purchasing a special permit from the ruler. As a relic, this practice has survived in modern England.

5. Social stratification and prospects for civil society in Russia

Russia in its history has experienced more than one wave of restructuring of the social space, when the old social structure collapsed, the world of values ​​changed, guidelines, patterns and norms of behavior were formed, entire layers perished, new communities were born. On the threshold of the XXI century. Russia is once again going through a complex and controversial process of renewal.

In order to understand the changes taking place, it is first necessary to consider the foundations on which the social structure of Soviet society was built before the reforms of the second half of the 1980s.

The nature of the social structure of Soviet Russia can be revealed by analyzing Russian society as a combination of various stratification systems.

In the stratification of Soviet society, permeated with administrative and political control, the etacratic system played a key role. The place of social groups in the party-state hierarchy predetermined the volume of distributive rights, the level of decision-making and the scope of opportunities in all areas. The stability of the political system was ensured by the stability of the position of the ruling elite (“nomenklatura”), in which the key positions were occupied by the political and military elites, and the economic and cultural elite occupied a subordinate place.

A etacratic society is characterized by a fusion of power and property; the predominance of state property; state-monopoly mode of production; dominance of centralized distribution; militarization of the economy; class-layer stratification of a hierarchical type, in which the positions of individuals and social groups are determined by their place in the structure of state power, which extends to the vast majority of material, labor, and information resources; social mobility in the form of organized from above selection of the most obedient and loyal people to the system.

A distinctive characteristic of the social structure of a Soviet-type society was that it was not class-based, although in terms of the parameters of professional structure and economic differentiation it remained outwardly similar to the stratification of Western societies. As a result of the elimination of the basis of class division - private ownership of the means of production - the classes gradually destructured.

The monopoly of state property, in principle, cannot give a class society, since all citizens are employees of the state, differing only in the amount of powers delegated to them. Distinctive features of social groups in the USSR were special functions, formalized as a legal inequality of these groups. Such inequality led to the isolation of these groups, the destruction of "social lifts" that serve for upward social mobility. Accordingly, the life and consumption of elite groups acquired an increasingly significant character, reminiscent of a phenomenon called “prestigious consumption”. All these signs form a picture of a class society.

Class stratification is inherent in a society in which economic relations are rudimentary and do not play a differentiating role, and the main mechanism of social regulation is the state, which divides people into legally unequal estates.

From the first years of Soviet power, for example, the peasantry was formed into a special estate: its political rights were limited until 1936. The inequality of the rights of workers and peasants manifested itself for many years (attachment to collective farms through the system of a passportless regime, privileges for workers in obtaining education and promotion, propiska system, etc.). In fact, employees of the party and state apparatus have become a special class with a whole range of special rights and privileges. The social status of the mass and heterogeneous class of prisoners was fixed in the legal and administrative order.

In the 60-70s. in conditions of chronic shortages and limited purchasing power of money, the process of leveling wages is intensifying, while the consumer market is split into closed “special sectors” and the role of privileges is growing. The material and social situation of groups involved in distribution processes in the sphere of trade, supply, and transport has improved. The social influence of these groups increased as the shortage of goods and services worsened. During this period, shadow socio-economic ties and associations arise and develop. A more open type of social relations is being formed: in the economy, the bureaucracy acquires the ability to achieve the most favorable results for itself; the spirit of entrepreneurship also covers the lower social strata - numerous groups of private traders, manufacturers of "left" products, builders - "shabashniks" are being formed. Thus, there is a doubling of the social structure, when fundamentally different social groups coexist in a bizarre way within its framework.

Important social changes that took place in the Soviet Union in 1965 - 1985 are associated with the development of the scientific and technological revolution, urbanization and, accordingly, an increase in the general level of education.

From the early 60s to the mid 80s. More than 35 million people migrated to the city. However, urbanization in our country had a clearly deformed character: mass movements of rural migrants to the city were not accompanied by a corresponding deployment of social infrastructure. A huge mass of superfluous people, social outsiders, has appeared. Having lost contact with the rural subculture and unable to join the urban one, the migrants created a typically marginal subculture.

The figure of a migrant from the countryside to the city is a classic model of the marginal: no longer a peasant, not yet a worker; the norms of the rural subculture have been undermined, the urban subculture has not yet been assimilated. The main sign of marginalization is the rupture of social, economic, and spiritual ties.

The economic reasons for marginalization were the extensive development of the Soviet economy, the dominance of outdated technologies and primitive forms of labor, the discrepancy between the education system and the real needs of production, etc. This is closely related to the social causes of marginalization - the hypertrophy of the accumulation fund to the detriment of the consumption fund, which gave rise to an extremely low standard of living and a shortage of goods. Among the political and legal reasons for the marginalization of society, the main one is that during the Soviet period in the country there was a destruction of any kind of social ties “horizontally”. The state strove for global dominance over all spheres of public life, deforming civil society, minimizing the autonomy and independence of individuals and social groups.

In the 60-80s. an increase in the general level of education, the development of an urban subculture gave rise to a more complex and differentiated social structure. In the early 80s. specialists who received higher or secondary specialized education already accounted for 40% of the urban population.

By the beginning of the 90s. in terms of their educational level and professional positions, the Soviet middle stratum was not inferior to the Western “new middle class”. In this regard, the English political scientist R. Sakwa noted: “The communist regime gave rise to a kind of paradox: millions of people were bourgeois in their culture and aspirations, but were included in the socio-economic system that denied these aspirations.”

Under the influence of socio-economic and political reforms in the second half of the 80s. big changes have taken place in Russia. Compared to Soviet times, the structure of Russian society has undergone significant changes, although it retains many of its former features. The transformation of the institutions of Russian society has seriously affected its social structure: property and power relations have changed and continue to change, new social groups are emerging, the level and quality of life of each social group is changing, and the mechanism of social stratification is being rebuilt.

As an initial model of multidimensional stratification of modern Russia, we will take four main parameters: power, prestige of professions, income level and level of education.

Power is the most important dimension of social stratification. Power is necessary for the sustainable existence of any socio-political system; the most important public interests intersect in it. The system of power bodies of post-Soviet Russia has been substantially restructured - some of them have been liquidated, others have only been organized, some have changed their functions, their personal composition has been updated. The previously closed upper stratum of society opened up to people from other groups.

The place of the monolith of the nomenklatura pyramid was occupied by numerous elite groupings that are in competition with each other. The elite has lost a significant part of the levers of power inherent in the old ruling class. This led to a gradual transition from political and ideological methods of management to economic ones. Instead of a stable ruling class with strong vertical ties between its floors, many elite groups have been created, between which horizontal ties have intensified.

The sphere of administrative activity, where the role of political power has increased, is the redistribution of accumulated wealth. Direct or indirect involvement in the redistribution of state property is in modern Russia the most important factor determining the social status of management groups.

In the social structure of modern Russia, the features of the former etacratic society, built on power hierarchies, are preserved. However, at the same time, the revival of economic classes on the basis of privatized state property begins. There is a transition from stratification based on the basis of power (appropriation through privileges, distribution in accordance with the place of the individual in the party-state hierarchy) to stratification of the proprietary type (appropriation by profit and market-valued labor). Next to the power hierarchies, an “entrepreneurial structure” appears, which includes the following main groups: 1) large and medium-sized entrepreneurs; 2) small entrepreneurs (owners and managers of firms with minimal use of hired labor); 3) independent workers; 4) employees.

There is a tendency for the formation of new social groups claiming high places in the hierarchy of social prestige.

The prestige of professions is the second important dimension of social stratification. We can talk about a number of fundamentally new trends in the professional structure associated with the emergence of new prestigious social roles. The set of professions is becoming more complex, their comparative attractiveness is changing in favor of those that provide more substantial and faster material rewards. As a result, assessments of social prestige are changing. different types activities where physically or ethically "dirty" work is still considered attractive in terms of monetary reward.

The newly emerged and therefore "deficient" in terms of personnel, the financial sector, business, and commerce are filled with a large number of semi- and non-professionals. Entire professional strata are lowered to the "bottom" of social rating scales - their special training turned out to be unclaimed and the income from it is negligible.

The role of the intelligentsia in society has changed. As a result of the reduction state support science, education, culture and art, there was a drop in the prestige and social status of knowledge workers.

In modern conditions in Russia, there has been a tendency to form a number of social strata belonging to the middle class - these are entrepreneurs, managers, certain categories of the intelligentsia, and highly skilled workers. But this trend is contradictory, since the common interests of various social strata, potentially forming the middle class, are not supported by the processes of their convergence on such important criteria as the prestige of the profession and the level of income.

income level various groups is the third essential parameter of social stratification. Economic status is the most important indicator of social stratification, because the level of income affects such aspects of social status as the type of consumption and lifestyle, the opportunity to do business, advance in the service, give children a good education, etc.

In 1997, the income received by the top 10% of Russians was almost 27 times higher than the income of the bottom 10%. The 20% of the wealthiest strata accounted for 47.5% of total cash income, while the 20% of the poorest received only 5.4%. 4% of Russians are super-wealthy - their income is approximately 300 times higher than the income of the bulk of the population.

The most acute problem in the social sphere today is the problem of mass poverty - the beggarly existence of almost 1/3 of the country's population is being conserved. Of particular concern is the change in the composition of the poor: today they include not only the traditionally low-income (disabled, pensioners, large families), the ranks of the poor have been joined by the unemployed and employed, whose wages (and this is a quarter of all employed in enterprises) are below the subsistence level. Almost 64% of the population has incomes below the average (average income is considered to be 8-10 times the minimum wage per person) (see: Zaslavskaya T.I. The social structure of modern and certain society // Social sciences and modernity. 1997 No. 2. S. 17).

One of the manifestations of the declining standard of living of a significant part of the population was the growing need for secondary employment. However, it is not possible to determine the real scale of secondary employment and additional earnings (bringing even higher income than the main job). The criteria used today in Russia give only a conditional characterization of the income structure of the population, the data obtained are often limited and incomplete. Nevertheless, social stratification on an economic basis testifies to the ongoing process of restructuring of Russian society with great intensity. It was artificially limited in Soviet times and is being developed openly

The deepening of the processes of social differentiation of income groups is beginning to have a noticeable impact on the education system.

The level of education is another important criterion for stratification; education is one of the main channels of vertical mobility. During the Soviet period, higher education was accessible to many segments of the population, and secondary education was compulsory. However, such an education system was ineffective; higher education trained specialists without taking into account the real needs of society.

In modern Russia, the breadth of educational offerings is becoming a new differentiating factor.

In the new high-status groups, receiving a scarce and high-quality education is considered not only prestigious, but also functionally important.

Newly emerging professions require more qualifications and better training, and are better paid. As a consequence, education is becoming more and more an important factor at the entrance to the professional hierarchy. The result is increased social mobility. It depends less and less on the social characteristics of the family and is more determined by the personal qualities and education of the individual.

An analysis of the changes taking place in the system of social stratification according to four main parameters speaks of the depth and inconsistency of the transformation process experienced by Russia and allows us to conclude that today it continues to retain the old pyramidal form (characteristic of a pre-industrial society), although the content characteristics of its constituent layers have changed significantly.

In the social structure of modern Russia, six layers can be distinguished: 1) the upper one - the economic, political and power elite; 2) upper middle - medium and large entrepreneurs; 3) medium - small entrepreneurs, managers of the production sector, the highest intelligentsia, the working elite, military personnel; 4) basic - the mass intelligentsia, the main part of the working class, peasants, trade and service workers; 5) lower - unskilled workers, long-term unemployed, single pensioners; 6) "social bottom" - the homeless, released from places of detention, etc.

At the same time, a number of significant clarifications should be made related to the processes of changing the stratification system in the process of reforms:

Majority social formations has a mutually transitional character, has fuzzy, vague boundaries;

There is no internal unity of the newly emerging social groups;

There is a total marginalization of almost all social groups;

The new Russian state does not ensure the security of citizens and does not alleviate their economic situation. In turn, these dysfunctions of the state deform the social structure of society, give it a criminal character;

The criminal nature of class formation gives rise to a growing property polarization of society;

The current level of income cannot stimulate the labor and business activity of the bulk of the economically active population;

Russia retains a stratum of the population that can be called a potential resource for the middle class. Today, about 15% of those employed in the national economy can be attributed to this layer, but its maturation to a "critical mass" will require a lot of time. So far, in Russia, the socio-economic priorities characteristic of the "classical" middle class can only be observed in the upper strata of the social hierarchy.

A significant transformation of the structure of Russian society, which requires the transformation of the institutions of property and power, is a long process. Meanwhile, the stratification of society will continue to lose rigidity and unambiguity, taking the form of a blurred system in which layer and class structures are intertwined.

Undoubtedly, the formation of a civil society should become the guarantor of the renewal of Russia.

The problem of civil society in our country is of particular theoretical and practical interest. In terms of the nature of the dominant role of the state, Russia was initially closer to the eastern type of societies, but in our country this role was even more pronounced. According to A. Gramsci, "in Russia, the state represents everything, and civil society is primitive and vague."

In contrast to the West, a different type of social system has developed in Russia, based on the efficiency of power, and not the efficiency of property. One should also take into account the fact that for a long time in Russia there were practically no public organizations and such values ​​as the inviolability of the individual and private property, legal thinking, which constitute the context of civil society in the West, remained undeveloped, the social initiative belonged not to associations of individuals, but to the bureaucracy.

From the second half of the XIX century. the problem of civil society began to be developed in Russian social and scientific thought (B.N. Chicherin, E.N. Trubetskoy, S.L., Frank, etc.). The formation of civil society in Russia begins during the reign of Alexander I. It was at this time that separate spheres of civil life arose that were not related to military and court officials - salons, clubs, etc. As a result of the reforms of Alexander II, zemstvos, various unions of entrepreneurs, charity institutions, and cultural societies arose. However, the process of formation of civil society was interrupted by the revolution of 1917. Totalitarianism blocked the very possibility of the emergence and development of civil society.

The era of totalitarianism led to a grandiose leveling of all members of society before the all-powerful state, washing out any groups pursuing private interests. The totalitarian state significantly narrowed the autonomy of sociality and civil society, securing control over all spheres of public life.

The peculiarity of the current situation in Russia is that the elements of civil society will have to be created largely anew. Let us single out the most fundamental directions of the formation of civil society in modern Russia:

Formation and development of new economic relations, including pluralism of forms of ownership and the market, as well as the open social structure of society caused by them;

The emergence of a system of real interests adequate to this structure, uniting individuals, social groups and strata into a single community;

The emergence of various forms of labor associations, social and cultural associations, socio-political movements that make up the main institutions of civil society;

Renewal of relationships between social groups and communities (national, professional, regional, gender and age, etc.);

Creation of economic, social and spiritual prerequisites for the creative self-realization of the individual;

Formation and deployment of mechanisms of social self-regulation and self-government at all levels of the social organism.

The ideas of civil society found themselves in post-communist Russia in that peculiar context that distinguishes our country both from Western states (with their strongest mechanisms of rational legal relations) and from Eastern countries (with their specifics of traditional primary groups). Unlike Western countries, the modern Russian state does not deal with a structured society, but, on the one hand, with rapidly emerging elite groups, and on the other, with an amorphous, atomized society dominated by individual consumer interests. Today, civil society in Russia is not developed, many of its elements have been forced out or "blocked", although over the years of reform there have been significant changes in the direction of its formation.

Modern Russian society is quasi-civil, its structures and institutions have many formal features of civil society formations. There are up to 50 thousand voluntary associations in the country - consumer associations, trade unions, environmental groups, political clubs, etc. However, many of them, having survived at the turn of the 80-90s. a short period of rapid growth, in recent years they have become bureaucratic, weakened, and lost their activity. An ordinary Russian underestimates group self-organization, and the most common social type has become an individual, closed in his aspirations for himself and his family. In overcoming such a state, due to the process of transformation, is the specificity of the current stage of development.

1. Social stratification - a system of social inequality, consisting of a set of interconnected and hierarchically organized social strata (strata). The stratification system is formed on the basis of such characteristics as the prestige of professions, the amount of power, income level and education level.

2. The theory of stratification makes it possible to model the political pyramid of society, identify and take into account the interests of individual social groups, determine the level of their political activity, the degree of influence on political decision-making.

3. The main purpose of civil society is to reach consensus among various social groups and interests. Civil society is a set of social formations united specifically by economic, ethnic, cultural, etc. interests realized outside the sphere of state activity.

4. The formation of civil society in Russia is associated with significant changes in the social structure. The new social hierarchy differs in many ways from the one that existed in the Soviet era and is characterized by extreme instability. The mechanisms of stratification are being rebuilt, social mobility is increasing, and many marginal groups with an indefinite status are emerging. Objective possibilities for the formation of a middle class are beginning to take shape. For a significant transformation of the structure of Russian society, it is necessary to transform the institutions of property and power, accompanied by a blurring of the boundaries between groups, a change in group interests and social interactions.

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