Social stratification
society's categorization of its people into hierarchical groups based on socioeconomic factors
Social stratification refers to a society's hierarchical categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors such as wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power (social and political). It is a hierarchy within groups that ascribe them to different levels of privileges. As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit. The concept of social stratification (as well as the concept of social mobility) was introduced by a Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in his book "Social Mobility" published in 1927.
In modern Western societies, social stratification is defined in terms of three social classes: an upper class, a middle class, and a working class; in turn, each class can be subdivided into an upper-stratum, a middle-stratum, and a lower stratum. Moreover, a social stratum can be formed upon the bases of kinship, clan, tribe, or caste, or all four.
The categorization of people by social stratum occurs most clearly in complex state-based, polycentric, or feudal societies, the latter being based upon socio-economic relations among classes of nobility and classes of peasants. Whether social stratification first appeared in hunter-gatherer, tribal, and band societies or whether it began with agriculture and large-scale means of social exchange remains a matter of debate in the social sciences. The structures of social stratification arise from inequalities of status among persons; therefore, the degree of social inequality determines a person's social stratum. Generally, the greater the social complexity of a society, the more social stratification exists, by way of social differentiation.
The public source identifies “Social stratification” as society's categorization of its people into hierarchical groups based on socioeconomic factors. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Social, stratification and society's.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q841628. The Library of Congress control number is sh99000315. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “Social stratification” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.