Rank Is Not Enough: Why We Need a Sociocultural Perspective to Understand Social Class

In the target article, Kraus, Tan, and Tannenbaum identify a key feature of the psychological experience of social class—perception of one’s rank vis-à-vis others. This rank-based perspective, which reveals the systematic influence of rank on psychological functioning, makes an important contribution to current and future theories of social class. Drawing out the significance of rank brings social class research into the mainstream and puts it into ongoing conversation with social psychological literature on power, status, and intergroup relations (i.e., stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination). In addition, the rank-based perspective enables Kraus and colleagues to synthesize what would otherwise be a disparate set of findings and also suggests potential paradigms for future research. Although rank is a critical piece of the social class puzzle, the experience of social class extends far beyond rank and involves ongoing participation in a particular sociocultural context—a socially and historically constructed environment that contains a set of culture-specific ideas, practices, and institutions. Thus, we argue that to develop a complete understanding of the causes and consequences of social class, it is necessary to conceptualize social class contexts as sociocultural contexts—that is, to take a sociocultural perspective. This theoretical perspective makes two key claims. First, social class contexts (e.g., poverty, workingclass, middle-class, or upper-class) are sociocultural contexts that expose people to particular material and social conditions over time. In addition to differences in rank or perceptions of rank vis-à-vis others, these contexts include different absolute levels of material resources (e.g., financial assets), as well as divergent sets of ideas (e.g., stereotypes, cultural narratives, social representations), practices (e.g., socialization styles), and institutions (e.g., workplaces, schools). The second claim of the sociocultural perspective is that people’s social class contexts are important because they shape the self and corresponding patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. For example, these sociocultural contexts shape how people answer fundamental questions such as “Who am I?” and “How should someone like me act?” People from different social class contexts will answer these questions in different ways. By conceptualizing social class as a context that affords particular understandings of self and behavior, our sociocultural perspective provides a more thorough, experience-near, and psychologically nuanced understanding of what social class means and how it functions in a given society (e.g., in the United States). Specifically, it begins to provide more complete answers to a number of increasingly urgent questions: (a) How does social class differ from other rank-related social categories (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender), (b) How is social class produced and maintained over time, (c) How does social class shape important life outcomes, and (d) How can practitioners develop interventions that will help to reduce social class disparities in important life outcomes (e.g., in the domains of health and education)? In the sections that follow, we outline why taking a sociocultural perspective is necessary in order to answer each of these questions.