Social stratification means the way a society can be organized into socioeconomic ranks on factors such as income, power, wealth, and education. The perspective of social stratification can be evaluated from different theoretical points of view. The theories include functionalism, conflict, and symbolic interactionism. The concepts differ from each other in various ways. Functionalism states that society has systems that exist for fair reasons. The theory focuses on how society operates by revealing that different aspects of life exist for a given specific purpose.
On the other hand, conflict theory is critical of social stratification because it appears to benefit a few but not the entire community. For example, a conflict theorist would argue that it is unfair to pay engineers millions of monies for a short-term contract. At the same time, civil servants earn lower wages when they work permanently. Symbolic interactionism applies real-life interactions of people to base its argument on the general community. It evaluates social stratification from a lower-level perspective, and the analysis focuses on explaining how an individual’s social status may affect their daily life.
Horizontal mobility is evident in some situations, such as doctors changing their career from medical practitioners to teaching in a medical school. Ideally, the occupation has changed, but the social status remains the same. In vertical mobility, a factory worker may enroll in a college, add their business skills, and become a recognized world businessperson. Intergenerational mobility applies when a daughter of an ice-cream seller gains breakthrough after studies to become a successful legal practitioner. On the other hand, intergenerational mobility can be related to a person who is born in a middle-class society, grows to be a nurse, and lives the same lifestyle they were brought up in.