Explain and evaluate social stratification, class, status and inequality in contemporary Australia

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, developed by Kimberle Crenshaw, 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. An Aboriginal woman in a remote community faces a compounded disadvantage quite different from that of a wealthy urban man, which a single-axis theory of class or gender alone cannot capture.

Social mobility and the myth of the fair go

A central debate is whether the Australian class system is genuinely open. Social mobility is movement up or down the hierarchy, and a truly meritocratic society would show high mobility. In practice, wealthy families convert economic capital into educational and cultural advantage (Bourdieu), so children's outcomes remain strongly linked to their parents' position. The popular belief that Australia is an egalitarian land of the fair go is, sociologically, an ideology that can disguise durable inequality. Measuring mobility, through data on intergenerational income and educational attainment, is how sociologists test the claim, and the evidence shows mobility is more limited than the national self-image suggests.

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.