Class and Status: The Conceptual Distinction and its Empirical Relevance

Weber’s distinction between class and status (Weber [1922] 1968:926–40) is commonplace in materials in introductory courses and texts dealing with social stratification. Surprisingly, however, contemporary research makes little use of the distinction. Moreover, the concepts of class and status are often applied in ways that, at least from a Weberian standpoint, appear unclear if not confusing. In the United States, much of the refinement of Weber’s approach appears to already have been lost by the 1950s and 1960s as leading authors, in effect, reinterpreted class in terms of status. Thus, one finds definitions of social classes on such lines as “strata of society composed of individuals who accept each other as status equals” (Lipset and Bendix 1959:275) or “aggregate[s] of persons, within a society, possessing approximately the same status” (Shils [1962] 1975:249). Subsequently, the essentially one-dimensional view of stratification implicit in such definitions was confirmed through the widespread acceptance of the notion of “socioeconomic” status, which, while little explicated, allowed stratification to be treated—in a way highly convenient to quantitative researchers—in terms of a single continuous measure such as the Duncan Socio-Economic Index (Duncan 1961). In Europe, and especially in Britain, the idea of class and status as two qualitatively different forms of social stratification retained currency through the 1970s, following its effective deployment in Lockwood’s influential The Blackcoated Worker (1958) and also in various community studies. Interest in status, however, then rather rapidly declined. In part, this can be seen as a response to actual social change—that is, to the rather evident decay over the postwar decades of many features of the traditional status order. The revival of academic Marxism and a consequent preoccupation, on the part of Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists alike, with issues of class was also important. More recently, the theoretical efforts of Bourdieu (see Class and Status: The Conceptual Distinction and its Empirical Relevance