Socioeconomic Status

The sociologist Max Weber (1958) conceptualized inequality along three related tracks—class, status, and party. Each was understood as a basis for power and influence. Whereas class focused on economic resources and partly referred to political clout, status was understood as honor and prestige. For Weber, status groups were hierarchically arrayed on the basis of distinctive lifestyles, consumption patterns, and modes of conduct or action.

In North America, the sociologist Talcott Parsons (1970) has been most influential in delineating the theoretical underpinnings of socioeconomic status. First, Parsons understood the idea of status as a position in the social structure, as part of the social differentiation in society (different occupations, different family positions). Although Parsons associated status with position (a status is occupied, such as accountant, and a role is performed, as in financial auditing), the concept carries with it a hierarchical referent as in Weber's notion of honor and prestige.

A status is evaluated, and this social evaluation is central to Parsons's contribution to the idea of socioeconomic status. Social status was, for him, the core notion of social stratification, or rank. This differential evaluation in terms of honor and prestige lay at the heart of inequality. In social relations with others, status distinctions affect how people interrelate. For Parsons, income and wealth were important, but secondary to social status or honor.

Second, Parsons understood family units as the key component of stratification. Families were assumed to be units of solidarity sharing similar interests. He also assumed that families had a single breadwinner. That is, the concept of the head of a family was central to his understanding of the family unit.

Although there is a tendency to interpret this idea of a single breadwinner as sexist, various reasons at the time gave some plausibility to the assumption. First, the inequities of domestic labor meant that most families had one principal wage earner, and this was typically the male head of the household. Second, many families had made investments in a single earner, either via decisions about geographic mobility or support for education (in both cases, women's careers typically were de-emphasized). Third, Parsons and others assumed that family members had a shared interest not only in their own well-being, but also in the well-being of their children. These ideas were the basis of the thinking that the family was the key unit of stratification and that the male head of the household was the principal determinant of the family's social status.

Finally, Parsons and his followers (Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, in particular) developed the functional theory of stratification. The core premise of this theory was that society had to differentially evaluate positions so that members of society would be motivated both to pursue the training necessary for the most important positions and, once in those positions, to perform them as well as possible. Encouraging the most qualified and competent people in a society to perform the most important jobs required that jobs be differentially ranked. Differences in socioeconomic status were one way to understand this necessary hierarchy.