How is Australian society stratified and how is inequality reproduced?
Explain and evaluate social stratification, class, status and inequality in contemporary Australia
Social stratification, class, status and power in Australia, with Marx, Weber and Davis and Moore, plus intersections of gender, ethnicity and Indigenous disadvantage, evaluated with Australian evidence, for TCE Sociology.
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What this dot point is asking
Stratification runs through every institution you study, so the course returns to it again and again. This dot point asks you to explain how society is layered into unequal groups, to use the main theories of class and status, and to evaluate how inequality is produced and justified in contemporary Australia.
What stratification means
Stratification describes a society divided into ranked strata whose members have unequal access to rewards such as wealth, income, status and power. Unlike a caste system based on birth, modern Australia is usually described as a class system, which is in principle open, allowing social mobility, movement up or down the hierarchy. Whether mobility is genuinely common is a key debate, since wealthy families pass advantages to their children.
Marx and class
For Karl Marx, stratification is rooted in the economy. Society divides into the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who own only their labour and are exploited. Class position determines life chances and generates conflict. Marx predicted growing polarisation and eventual class consciousness among workers. The strength of this model is its focus on economic power; its weakness is that the predicted revolution did not occur and the class structure has become more complex, with a large middle class.
Weber and the multidimensional view
Max Weber accepted that class matters but argued stratification has three dimensions: class (economic position in the market), status (social honour or prestige) and party (organised power). This explains inequalities Marx missed, such as the prestige of a poorly paid profession or the influence of organised groups. Weber's approach is widely used because it captures the complexity of modern inequality.
The functionalist defence
Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore offered a functionalist justification: stratification is necessary and beneficial because it motivates the most talented people to train for the most important jobs by rewarding them more highly. Critics reply that this ignores inherited advantage, that the highest paid roles are not always the most functionally important, and that poverty wastes talent rather than rewarding it.
Intersecting inequalities
Contemporary sociologists stress that class does not act alone. Feminists show how gender stratifies income and unpaid labour; others examine how ethnicity, migration and Indigenous status shape opportunity. The idea of intersectionality captures how these dimensions overlap, so that a person's life chances depend on the combination of their class, gender and ethnicity rather than any single factor.
Stratification connects directly to deviance and to social change: who is criminalised, who benefits from institutions and who drives reform all depend on where people sit in the social hierarchy.