Sociology: TestAS practice testlets

Every society distributes resources such as income, wealth, education, power and prestige unequally. Social stratification describes how people are arranged in layers according to their access to these resources. Sociologists have used different concepts to describe these layers. Marx defined classes by their relation to the means of production. Weber added that status, based on prestige and lifestyle, and power, organised in parties, could vary independently of class. Modern studies often use occupational classes, grouping people by the type of work they do and the security and autonomy it brings.

Pierre Bourdieu argued that people possess different kinds of capital. Economic capital is money and property. Cultural capital includes education, knowledge and cultural competence, such as familiarity with literature and art, and it is partly passed on in families. Social capital consists of networks of relationships that can be used for one's own purposes. According to Bourdieu, the education system often rewards the cultural capital of the middle and upper classes, and thereby helps to reproduce inequality while appearing to reward only merit.

Social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups between positions. Intergenerational mobility compares the position of children with that of their parents; intragenerational mobility follows changes within a person's own working life. Mobility can be upward or downward. Sociologists also distinguish between absolute mobility, the share of people who end up in a different class from their parents, which is strongly influenced by changes in the structure of the economy, such as the growth of service and professional jobs, and relative mobility, which compares the chances of people from different origins of reaching a given position. A society can show a lot of absolute upward mobility while relative chances remain unequal.

Studies of educational attainment in Germany have repeatedly found that the chances of attending university depend strongly on the education of one's parents.

Social inequality is also visible in health, housing and political participation. People with higher incomes and more education tend to live longer, live in better housing and vote more often, which means that their interests are more strongly represented in politics.

The table shows the class positions of 1,000 adults (fictional data) according to the class of their parents.

Social institutions are relatively stable patterns of rules and practices that regulate important areas of social life, such as family, education, religion, the economy and politics. They give orientation and predictability but also constrain individuals, and they change over time.

The family is a clear example of institutional change. In Germany and many other Western societies, the model of the married couple with children, in which the husband earned the income and the wife ran the household, dominated in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, forms of family life have become more diverse: people marry later and less often, divorce has become more common, many children grow up with a single parent or in blended families, same-sex couples can marry, and most mothers are in paid employment. Sociologists speak of a pluralisation of family forms. Nevertheless, the family remains central for the care of children and for emotional support.

Education is expected to give all children equal chances and to allocate positions according to merit. Research shows, however, that educational success depends strongly on social background. In Germany, where children in most Länder are sorted into different types of secondary school at around the age of ten, early selection has been criticised for reinforcing these differences, since parents with more education and resources are better able to support their children at this point. Sociologists distinguish primary effects of social origin, differences in performance, from secondary effects, different decisions made by families with the same performance, for example about whether to aim for the Gymnasium.

Formal organisations, such as firms, hospitals, universities and public authorities, pursue specific goals, have a clear membership and structure their work through rules, positions and hierarchies. Max Weber saw bureaucracy as the most efficient form of organisation, but critics have pointed to rigidity and to informal structures, the unofficial relationships and norms that develop alongside the formal chart. Erving Goffman described total institutions, such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals and boarding schools, in which all aspects of life take place in one place under one authority, separated from the outside world.