CLASS

So far we have discussed the identifiable groups whose membership is defined by the fact of birth. These are Race, Tribe and Caste. We now move to discuss a social category called Class which is open—through achievement, people can enter a new category. Achievement is used here as a neutral word—a person can achieve success or failure. Those who succeed in life rise higher, and those who do not, go lower. Thus, the element of hierarchy is present even in class-based stratification.

Those who talk of ‘equality’ in the class context are underlining the fact of open-ness—suggesting that there are no gatekeepers to restrict entry into the class. Louis Dumont distinguished caste society from class society by designating them as Homo Hier archicus³² and Homo Equalis. But this is an exaggeration; Dumont fails to distinguish between a group (such as caste) and a category (such as class).

Let us briefly note the difference between race, tribe and caste before we proceed to analyse class.

In case of race, the physiological characteristics of its members are so very prominent that they can easily be distinguished from those who do not belong to it. People of the same race may be divided into several different societies—not only tribes or primitive communities, but also big societies. Here again, ascriptive criteria are employed to ascertain membership. People belonging to the same race demonstrate greater similarities in their physiognomy. It is, however, not necessary that people of a given race constitute a single society. As noted earlier, the world population is divided into three major races, Cuacasoid, Mongoloid and the Negroid, but the world consists of several nation-states. There are as many as 192 member-states of the United Nations. This fact alone suggests that race is not coterminus with society or culture.

Smaller societies—such as a tribe#x2014;are constituted by people of a single race. They have a common lifestyle—speaking the same language, practising the same religion (or animistic rituals and magic), and having an endogamous boundary. The community has its gatekeepers to distinguish between members and non-members. The point is that several tribal societies may belong to a common race. Tribes are found amongst all races.

A tribe may become a caste when it joins similar other endogamous groups living in a common area and sharing a common ethos and culture. Such societies are not only multicultural, but also multi-racial. India is a good example of a multi-racial society. Caste membership is defined by birth and the rules of endogamy are followed rather strictly. A caste system is defined as a system of interacting endogamous groups sharing a common habitat. Castes are found not only among the Hindus; as a social structural unit it is found in other social systems as well.

Many of those who have written on Class also refer to endogamy as one of the criteria for its determination. Thus, Johnson writes,

 

A social class … is a more or less endogamous stratum consisting of families of equal social prestige who are, or would be, acceptable to one another for ‘social’ interaction that is culturally regarded as more or less symbolic of equality; as the term ‘stratum’suggests, a social class is one of two or more such groupings, all of which can be ranked relative to one another in a more or less integrated system of prestige stratification (1960: 469–70).

 

Endogamy in the context of class, however, has a different connotation. To quote Johnson again: in the framework of class ‘Men tend to marry women not too different from themselves in family background and education’. Further, ‘the most decisive mark of class equality between families is the fact that they will accept one another’s children in marriage without feeling, on either side, that the match is socially inappropriate’ (ibid.: 471). This conception of endogamy is similar, but not the same as caste endogamy. In the case of caste, it is membership to that group—which is by birth—that is more significant and the emphasis is laid on marrying within the group. In the case of class, the key consideration is the economic status of the family, which is largely judged in terms of the ‘occupation’ of the male members in patrilineal societies. To be sure, even in the caste context marriages are arranged between families of identical social status within the caste; the parents of the girl prefer to get her married into a family of their rank or of a superior rank. Thus, class becomes an additional factor. Students of caste have reported the existence of classes within the caste.³³

In the case of class too, birth does play a role, in the sense that the class of the parent becomes the launching pad for social ascendancy for the child. A new born belongs to the class of his parents, and thus his initial status remains ascriptive. But the child in his later career can either rise up or fall through his deeds—the status thus obtained is achieved status. In caste, the status at birth remains unchanged; not so in the case of class. The twin concepts of class and caste are thus not polar opposites as it is generally made out to be.

But the similarity ends here. The major difference is that while caste is a group, class is not. It is a category. Unlike a group, a class is a construct either concocted by a social analyst or notionalized by the people. Marx’s classification of societies into bourgeoisie and proletariats is one such example. The division of so-called capitalist societies into upper class, middle class and lower or working class is also an analytical classification. Anthony Giddens—a British sociologist—for example, defined upper class on the basis of ownership of property in the means of production, middle class on the basis of possession of educational and technical qualifications, and the working class on the basis of possession of manual labour power. As is evident, this classification is heavily influenced by Marxian thinking.

In America, professions are broadly classified into White-collar and Blue-collar jobs. The division of society into upper, middle and lower classes, and the further division of each of the classes into sub-strata, is also made by sociologists. Common men generally refer to the three main classes, but the indicators they use are not well-defined or commonly agreed upon. It is usually considered that developed societies generally have a huge middle class, and that societies tend to encourage upward mobility.

The classes, unlike groups, are fluid in terms of membership; they neither have well-defined boundaries, nor do they have any gatekeepers to allow or deny entry. It is families which are said to belong to a class. In developed societies, where the nuclear family is the norm, it is mainly the status of its head that helps identify the class status of the family. But such families need not be clustered together, nor do they need to have an organized network. It is only the pattern of interaction of the family—the place where it stays, the school where its children are sent, the clubs the family joins, and the overall lifestyle (indicating the affordability)—that becomes symbolic of class equality.

Who belongs to a given social class is arbitrarily determined. An overemphasis is given to occupation. These are ranked in terms of prestige, salary, kind of work, etc. Researchers have developed indicators to classify families in their sample populations. Some others have used the technique of asking respondents about the ranking of families or individuals to assign them a class status. In sociological research, this class status is also known as ‘socio-economic status’ or SES.

Since class is an analytical category and not a group, in real societies it is not easily identifiable. People use the concept rather vaguely. One finds a tendency among people to generally claim a ‘Middle Class’ status. As a sample of such usage, we take Pavan K. Varma’s popular titled The Great Indian Middle Class.³⁴ Varma writes:

 

In the course of this work I have deliberately avoided the not so uncommon obsession with computing the exact size of the middle class and its precise income and consumption parameters …. My approach has been to take this class as a clearly identifiable but numerically broad-brush identity … [1998: xiii].

 

In an earlier exercise, historian B. B. Misra also used the categories without bothering about estimating their size. He classified the Indian population in a historical perspective into various sub-classes of the general middle class category

 

Table 15.4 Classification of the Indian Population

	Part I
I.	The Merchant, the Artisan, and the Landed Aristocracy
II.	The Authoritarian Basis of Society
	Part II
III.	The Commercial Middle Class
IV.	The Industrial Middle Class
V.	The Landed Middle Class
VI.	The Educated Middle Class: 1. Main Objects of Western Education
VII.	The Educated Middle Class: 2. The Learned Professions

Since these works are not strictly sociological, it is understandable that the authors chose to write generally on the emerging structures of social stratification, focusing more on the bulging middle class.

Who constitutes the middle class and how do we differentiate this class from other classes, upper or lower? This is a serious methodological question. While Class is regarded as a Marxian concept, it has mostly been studied empirically by Western sociologists—described as belonging to the capitalist societies. However, rather than talking about the dual distinction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, these societies are seen to be divided into Upper, Middle and Lower Classes; each of these classes is also further sub-divided into two or three categories. Common people also use these distinctions and consider themselves either as belonging to them, or being different from them.

There are six features that seem to characterize a class in the Western setting:

1. Significance of economic factors in determining the class position of an individual;
2. money is important when it is translated into socially approved behaviour and possessions, and people having it are accepted by people of a superior class as members for intimate participation;
3. the claimant to a class position is accepted as an equal by those who belong to that class;
4. class unequally divides the highly and lowly valued things of society;
5. a class society permits vertical mobility of individuals or families. This is made possible by the use of money, education, occupation, talent, skill, marriage, and philanthropy; and
6. class varies from community to community. This is an important point to remember. Stratification at the level of the country in terms of class is not possible. Each community can be stratified; but the distribution in terms of class in a given community may not be applicable to another community. In an Indian village, for example, a family might belong to a higher class, but outside the village, in a town or a city, it may be ranked lower. Nationally, Ambanis belong to a high upper class, but how many in the same town will then belong to that category?

The cartography of status in such societies is not easy. While people have notions of classes, it is not easy for them to identify their occupants. Researchers have tried to define the boundaries of these classes through some objective measures. They have employed two different strategies: the subjective evaluations made either by the experts or the respondents (called Evaluative Participation or EP), or the objective indexing, (called Index of Status Characteristics or ISC).

Anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner developed these techniques way back in the 1940s to classify people in various classes in the United States. Class, for him, was a synonym of socio-economic status (SES).