What makes a collection of people a 'class'? Does grouping people into classes help to explain anything?
Christine Langhoff
Essay from the year 2003 in the subject Sociology - Social System, Social Structure, Class, Social Stratification, grade: 2.1 (B), Oxford University (New College), language: English, abstract: Class is a concept much used in both sociology as well as everyday language, but itis surrounded by much confusion about its meaning. There are many differentdefinitions of class and many different views on how people can be grouped intoclasses. In sociology there is an ongoing debate whether or not class is a relevantconcept in contemporary societies and whether it can be used to explain any issues. Iam going to look at the different meanings of “class”. Further I am going toinvestigate whether grouping people into classes helps to explain anything.The use of class to indicate lifestyle, prestige or rank is probably the most commonlyused sense of the term. Here class is bound up with hierarchy, of being higher thanor lower than some other person or group. Rank is often indicated by lifestyles andparticular patterns of consumption. Marx and Weber have provided two of the mostinfluential explanations about what classes are and how they influence society. Marxbelieved that systems of stratification derive from the relationships of social groups tothe means of production. He used the concept class as referring to the main strata inall stratification systems. A class is a social group whose members share the samerelationship to the means of production with the ruling class oppressing the subjectclass. He argued that on the one hand there exists a “class in itself” which is just therelationship of the social group to the means of production, but on the other hand asocial group only fully becomes a class when it becomes a “class for itself”, when itsmembers have class consciousness and class solidarity.
