Max weber distinguished three different sources of stratification in society
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Sociologists have a distinctive approach to studying governmental power and authority that differs from the perspective of political scientists. For the most part, political scientists focus on studying how power is distributed in different types of political systems.
Sociologists, however, tend to be more interested in the influences of governmental power on society and in how social conflicts arise from the distribution of power.
Sociologists also examine how the use of power affects local, state, national, and global agendas, which in turn affect people differently based on status, class, and socioeconomic standing. For centuries, philosophers, politicians, and social scientists have explored and commented on the nature of power.
Pittacus c. Indeed, the concept of power can have decidedly negative connotations, and the term itself is difficult to define. Power affects more than personal relationships; it shapes larger dynamics like social groups, professional organizations, and governments.
A dominant nation, for instance, will often use its clout to influence or support other governments or to seize control of other nation states. Efforts by the U. Endeavors to gain power and influence do not necessarily lead to violence, exploitation, or abuse. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. Both men organized nonviolent protests to combat corruption and injustice and succeeded in inspiring major reform.
They relied on a variety of nonviolent protest strategies such as rallies, sit-ins, marches, petitions, and boycotts.
Modern technology has made such forms of nonviolent reform easier to implement. Today, protesters can use cell phones and the Internet to disseminate information and plans to masses of protesters in a rapid and efficient manner. In the Arab Spring uprisings, for example, Twitter feeds and other social media helped protesters coordinate their movements, share ideas, and bolster morale, as well as gain global support for their causes.
Social media was also important in getting accurate accounts of the demonstrations out to the world, in contrast to many earlier situations in which government control of the media censored news reports. Notice that in these examples, the users of power were the citizens rather than the governments.
They found they had power because they were able to exercise their will over their own leaders. Thus, government power does not necessarily equate to absolute power. Politics refers to the distribution and exercise of power within a society, and polity refers to the political institution through which power is distributed and exercised.
In any society, decisions must be made regarding the allocation of resources and other matters. Except perhaps in the simplest societies, specific people and often specific organizations make these decisions. Depending on the society, they sometimes make these decisions solely to benefit themselves and other times make these decisions to benefit the society as a whole. Regardless of who benefits, a central point is this: some individuals and groups have more power than others.
Because power is so essential to an understanding of politics, we begin our discussion of politics with a discussion of power.
Most of us have seen a striking example of raw power when we are driving a car and see a police car in our rearview mirror. At that particular moment, the driver of that car has enormous power over us. We make sure we strictly obey the speed limit and all other driving rules. When the officer approaches our car, we ordinarily try to be as polite as possible and pray we do not get a ticket. When you were 16 and your parents told you to be home by midnight or else, your arrival home by this curfew again illustrated the use of power, in this case parental power.
If a child in middle school gives her lunch to a bully who threatens her, that again is an example of the use of power, or, in this case, the misuse of power. These are all vivid examples of power, but the power that social scientists study is both grander and, often, more invisible Wrong, Much of it occurs behind the scenes, and scholars continue to debate who is wielding it and for whose benefit they wield it.
Legitimate authority sometimes just called authority , Weber said, is power whose use is considered just and appropriate by those over whom the power is exercised. In short, if a society approves of the exercise of power in a particular way, then that power is also legitimate authority.
The example of the police car in our rearview mirrors is an example of legitimate authority. He called these three types traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charismatic authority. We turn to these now. As the name implies, traditional authority is power that is rooted in traditional, or long-standing, beliefs and practices of a society. Individuals enjoy traditional authority for at least one of two reasons.
The first is inheritance, as certain individuals are granted traditional authority because they are the children or other relatives of people who already exercise traditional authority.
Traditional authority is common in many preindustrial societies, where tradition and custom are so important, but also in more modern monarchies discussed shortly , where a king, queen, or prince enjoys power because she or he comes from a royal family. Traditional authority is granted to individuals regardless of their qualifications. They do not have to possess any special skills to receive and wield their authority, as their claim to it is based solely on their bloodline or supposed divine designation.
An individual granted traditional authority can be intelligent or stupid, fair or arbitrary, and exciting or boring but receives the authority just the same because of custom and tradition. As not all individuals granted traditional authority are particularly well qualified to use it, societies governed by traditional authority sometimes find that individuals bestowed it are not always up to the job. This form of authority is a hallmark of modern democracies, where power is given to people elected by voters, and the rules for wielding that power are usually set forth in a constitution, a charter, or another written document.
Whereas traditional authority resides in an individual because of inheritance or divine designation, rational-legal authority resides in the office that an individual fills, not in the individual per se. The authority of the president of the United States thus resides in the office of the presidency, not in the individual who happens to be president. When that individual leaves office, authority transfers to the next president. This transfer is usually smooth and stable, and one of the marvels of democracy is that officeholders are replaced in elections without revolutions having to be necessary.
Rational-legal authority helps ensure an orderly transfer of power in a time of crisis. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in , Vice President Lyndon Johnson was immediately sworn in as the next president. When Richard Nixon resigned his office in disgrace in because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal, Vice President Gerald Ford who himself had become vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned because of financial corruption became president.
Because the U. Constitution provided for the transfer of power when the presidency was vacant, and because U. Such charismatic individuals may exercise authority over a whole society or only a specific group within a larger society. Each of these individuals had extraordinary personal qualities that led their followers to admire them and to follow their orders or requests for action. Much of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library of Congress — public domain. Charismatic authority can reside in a person who came to a position of leadership because of traditional or rational-legal authority.
Over the centuries, several kings and queens of England and other European nations were charismatic individuals as well while some were far from charismatic. A few U. Weber emphasized that charismatic authority in its pure form i. The reason for this is simple: once charismatic leaders die, their authority dies as well. After the deaths of all the charismatic leaders named in the preceding paragraph, no one came close to replacing them in the hearts and minds of their followers.
Because charismatic leaders recognize that their eventual death may well undermine the nation or cause they represent, they often designate a replacement leader, who they hope will also have charismatic qualities. This new leader may be a grown child of the charismatic leader or someone else the leader knows and trusts. The danger, of course, is that any new leaders will lack sufficient charisma to have their authority accepted by the followers of the original charismatic leader.
For this reason, Weber recognized that charismatic authority ultimately becomes more stable when it is evolves into traditional or rational-legal authority. Transformation into rational-legal authority occurs when a society ruled by a charismatic leader develops the rules and bureaucratic structures that we associate with a government.
Weber used the term routinization of charisma to refer to the transformation of charismatic authority in either of these ways. Lanoue, D. From Camelot to the teflon president: Economics and presidential popularaity since Weber, M. Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology G.
Wittich, Eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Original work published Wrong, D. Power: Its forms, bases, and uses. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Skip to content Learning Objectives Define power and the three types of authority. Explain why charismatic authority may be unstable in the long run. Figure He is pictured here with fascist Benito Mussolini of Italy. Photo courtesy of U. National Archives and Records Administration.
Social media also played an important role in rallying grassroots support. Traditional Authority As the name implies, traditional authority is power that is rooted in traditional, or long-standing, beliefs and practices of a society. According to Max Weber, the three types of legitimate authority are traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic. Charismatic authority is relatively unstable because the authority held by a charismatic leader may not easily extend to anyone else after the leader dies.
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SOCIOLOGY 100 • Survey of General Sociology
Edited by Matthew Pauley. Figure 1. Status Symbol. When he died in , Ted Rogers Jr. In his autobiography he credited his success to a willingness to take risks, work hard, bend the rules, be on the constant look-out for opportunities, and be dedicated to building the business. In many respects, he saw himself as a self-made billionaire who started from scratch, seized opportunities, and created a business through his own initiative.
Max webber’s Social Stratification
Smelser, editors Social Change and Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, c Haferkamp is grateful to Angelika Schade for her fruitful comments and her helpful assistance in editing this volume and to Geoff Hunter for translating the first German version of parts of the Introduction; Smelser has profited from the research assistance and critical analyses given by Joppke. Those who organized the conference on which this volume is based—including the editors—decided to use the terms "social change" and "modernity" as the organizing concepts for this project. Because these terms enjoy wide usage in contemporary sociology and are general and inclusive, they seem preferable to more specific terms such as "evolution" "progress," "differentiation," or even "development," many of which evoke more specific mechanisms, processes, and directions of change. Likewise, we have excluded historically specific terms such as "late capitalism" and "industrial society" even though these concepts figure prominently in many of the contributions to this volume. The conference strategy called for a general statement of a metaframework for the study of social change within which a variety of more specific theories could be identified. Change is such an evident feature of social reality that any social-scientific theory, whatever its conceptual starting point, must sooner or later address it. At the same time it is essential to note that the ways social change has been identified have varied greatly in the history of thought. Furthermore, conceptions of change appear to have mirrored the historical.
Power and Authority
When we look around the world and through history, we see different types of stratification systems. These systems vary on their degree of vertical mobility , or the chances of rising up or falling down the stratification ladder. In some so-called closed societies, an individual has virtually no chance of moving up or down. Open societies have more vertical mobility, as some people, and perhaps many people, can move up or even down.
Conflict Theory
Weber developed a different approach to the study of social groups and classes than did Marx. For Marx, there were two primary groups in society and these were classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose contradictory social relationship is the motive force for change in capitalism. Marx considers these classes to be defined and determined by whether they own the means of production bourgeoisie or whether they do not own the means of production and must sell labour power to those who do proletariat. In contrast, for Weber, social groups and classes are in the sphere of power and are connected to the distribution of power. Given that there are various ways that power can be exercised, for Weber it is not possible to reduce the organization of all these groups to a single dimension or factor such as ownership or non-ownership of the means of production. Rather, for Weber there is a pluralism associated with class structure in that people attempt to achieve ends using various means — each of these may create a grouping such as a class, status group, or party.
Max Weber’s Social Action Theory
Social stratification. Based on degree of flexibility. Ideology that we are doing it the way we are supposed to be doing it thus we are taught not to question it. Max Weber: Wealth, Power, Prestige. Weber suggested that bureaucracies were so powerful that even a worker's revolution would not lessen social inequality. Weberian approach: education, occupation, family income.
Ethnicity, Culture, and "The Past"
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I originally created this web site on Weber pronounced "Vay-bur" in for my students in social theory. Most of the paper is fairly standard, it is based on information and insights from standard texts or through other secondary sources. My intention in summarizing this information was simply to present Weber in a fairly coherent and comprehensive manner, using language and structure for the generalists amongst us. I do claim some originality in regard to explaining oligarchy, the rationalization process, and the difference between formal and substantive rationality what I have called "the irrationality factor". Yes, I know, bad title. If I had a chance to do it again it would be HyperIndustrialism.
The following points highlight the top three approaches towards stratification. The approaches are: 1. Marxian Approach to Stratification 2. Weberian Approach to Stratification 3. Functionalist Approach to Stratification. The term social class is used in different ways by different writers.
The pioneering European sociologists, however, also offered a broad conceptualization of the fundamentals of society and its workings. Their views form the basis for today's theoretical perspectives, or paradigms , which provide sociologists with an orienting framework—a philosophical position—for asking certain kinds of questions about society and its people. Sociologists today employ three primary theoretical perspectives: the symbolic interactionist perspective, the functionalist perspective, and the conflict perspective. These perspectives offer sociologists theoretical paradigms for explaining how society influences people, and vice versa.
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