Analysis of Social Stratification occurred in the USA. Focusing on group conflic

Question

Analysis of Social Stratification occurred in the USA. Focusing on group conflict with one another as a result of the inequality in the USA class system. Your source Article should be either of Washington post, Nee York times , Time magazine and others. Analysis of Social Stratification occurred in the USA. Focusing on group conflict with one another as a result of the inequality in the USA class system. Your source Article should be either of Washington post, Nee York times , Time magazine and others. Your source Article should be either of Washington post, Nee York times , Time magazine and others.

Explanation / Answer

This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level. Results indicate that between-class income differences grew by about 60 percent since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable. A formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between-class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality.

The distribution of personal income in the U.S. has become substantially more unequal since the early 1980s, reversing a general trend of declining inequality that dated back to the 1930s. During the 1980s and early 1990s, incomes in the lower half of the distribution stagnated and then declined, while incomes at the top of the distribution increased. During the late 1990s and 2000s, incomes in the lower part of the distribution ceased declining but did not rebound from the losses of previous decades, while top incomes continued their ascent (McCall and Percheski 2010; Morris and Western 1999; Piketty and Saez 2003).

An individual's position within the ownership and authority structure of an economic organization is a central determinant of personal income (Dahrendorf 1959; Marx 1978; Proudhon 2011; Wright 1979, 1985). At a simple level, there are four distinct groups defined by their position within workplace ownership and authority relations: proprietors, who own the means of production and control the activities of others; managers, who do not own the means of production but do control the activities of others; workers, who control neither the means of production nor the activities of others; and independent producers, who own and operate small firms by themselves. These groups are referred to as social classes, and they are thought to possess antagonistic interests and to frequently engage in conflict with one another (Wright 1979; Wright and Perrone 1977). Social classes are linked to the distribution of personal income through supply and demand for different factors of production, economic rents that emerge from market distortions and incentive problems, and the balance of intergroup bargaining power (Marx 1976; Proudhon 2011; Wright 1979, 1985, 1997).

Despite the centrality of social classes in theories of personal income distribution, they have not played an important role in empirical attempts to explain the recent growth in income inequality. Prior studies have instead focused on the effects of disaggregate occupations (Mouw and Kalleberg 2010; Weeden et al. 2007), skill-biased technical change and increasing returns to education (Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003), institutional change and its impact on low-wage workers (Card, Lemieux, and Riddell 2004; DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux 1996), and demographic shifts (Borjas 1994; Easterlin 1980). No definitive explanation for changes in the distribution of personal income has emerged from this extensive volume of research, and prior models of distributional trends leave considerable room for improvement (McCall and Percheski 2010; Morris and Western 1999).

Among the few recent studies related to social class and income inequality are several that investigate changes in the functional, rather than personal, distribution of income and find that the labor share declined relative to the capital share since the early 1980s (Kristal 2010, 2013; Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013; Piketty 2014).1 In addition, several other recent studies provide evidence of an association between social class and rising personal income inequality. For example, research on executive compensation reveals a pattern of strong earnings growth for upper management (Frydman and Jenter 2010; Goldstein 2012); recent work on inequality of capital ownership suggests that it is rising (Piketty 2014); and research on economic elites indicates that earnings from financial investments have become an increasingly important source of income for this group over the past several decades (Nau 2013; Volscho and Kelly 2012).

While these studies suggest an important relationship between social class and changes in the distribution of personal income, they do not link a well-defined social class typology to growth in personal income inequality nor do they provide a precise accounting of how changes in factor shares, capital concentration, or executive compensation contributed to growth in personal income inequality at the population level. These various trends may correspond, but a significant impact for changes in social class inequality on patterns of personal income distribution cannot simply be assumed. Rather, the link between social classes and growing personal income inequality must be subjected to rigorous empirical investigation.

Several other studies have directly linked growth in personal income inequality to class typologies defined in terms of large occupational groups with similar skill requirements, job tasks, and career trajectories (Morgan and Cha 2007; Morgan and Tang 2007; Weeden et al. 2007). But social class divisions based on exclusionary relations of production and occupational class divisions based on the technical division of labor are distinct forms of stratification, and the occupational class typologies used in prior research have only a tangential link to workplace ownership and authority (Kalleberg and Griffin 1980). The few empirical studies of personal income distribution that explicitly model the returns to ownership and authority rely exclusively on cross-sectional data that predate the recent increase in inequality (Halaby and Weakliem 1993; Kalleberg and Griffin 1980; Robinson and Kelley 1979; Wright 1979; Wright and Perrone 1977). As a result, previous research provides little information about the link between social classes and growth in personal income inequality since the early 1980s.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse A
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.