A relative junior to Marx was another German sociologist, Max Weber, regarded as one of the founders of modern sociology. He closely examined Marx’s work and presented a counter theory. He questioned the Marxist assumption that it is the economy that lays the foundations for the superstructures of society. His work on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and even his incursions into some of the Eastern religions, including Hinduism, refute this Marxian assumption. For him, it is religion that influences people’s behaviour relative to economy, and to other aspects of societal interaction.
Although Weber also views class in economic terms, he goes a step further and suggests that stratification in a society occurs at three different planes, of which class is just one. The other two are power and status.
Vis-à-vis economic classes, Weber differentiates between people with ‘substantial property’ and the ‘property-less’ groups. The latter are sub-divided into three different categories: the white-collar workers, the petty bourgeoisie and the manual working class. Weber also argued that there are factors other than ownership that work to create different classes among the so-called property-less groups. Important among them is the market value of different skills.
Weber is also critical of the assumption of polarization between classes. He argues that with the growth of capitalism, the middle class expands, and that the management of big enterprises—factories and companies—require a rational bureaucratic organization; the same is true even in the realm of religion, where churches develop their own bureaucracies.
Distinguishing between class and other sources of ranking, Weber has argued that political power need not necessarily be derived from economic power. Similarly, status—a position of social esteem—may be gained through birth or through achievement in areas other than the economic. For Weber, a status group consists of those individuals who are given identical social honour. Similarly, power is derived through winning an election, or through the mobilization of people. It is possible that a person in power may also rise in social status and move into an economically upper class. However, for analytical purposes Weber wanted these three categories to be kept separate. The interplay of these three categories in the formation of social groups is indeed a complex process, and varies from society to society and from one time period to another. Weber regards social stratification as a more complex and highly diversified phenomenon compared to Marx’s simplistic dichotomy.3
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