A-Level Sociology: stratification and inequality

Stratification is the topic where a candidate can know every term and still write a weak answer, because the terms are all pairs and the marks are in telling each pair apart under pressure. So the questions here are situations in which the pair actually matters.

A factory owner and a surgeon are paid the same. Whether they are in the same class depends entirely on which account you are using, and Marx's answer turns on something the salary does not mention. A retired headteacher owns a flat and a pension and is asked to chair everything in her town; a man who owns three car washes and a row of rented flats is asked to chair nothing. An account built on property alone ranks him higher, and saying what Weber adds to that is the whole of the second question.

A household has food, heat and no arrears, and no money for a school trip, a birthday present or the bus fare to an interview twenty miles away. A minister says it is not poor because nobody is hungry. Absolute and relative measures give different answers here, and the bus fare is why the difference is not academic. The wrong answer most students reach for — that relative poverty is a matter of feeling rather than of what a household can do — is left standing as an option.

Over forty years professional jobs grow from a small share of all work to a large one, a great many people end up higher than their parents, and a child of professional parents is still exactly as much more likely to get there as a child of manual workers. A great deal of movement and no more fairness at all: absolute mobility against relative mobility, put as something that happened rather than as two definitions.

Three questions are about reading a number honestly. Two households on the same monthly income with very different assets show what an income-only measure misses. An aggregate ethnic pay gap is claimed by one newspaper as proof of discrimination and by another as proof of its absence once age, region and qualification are held constant — and both are overclaiming, the second in the subtler way, since unequal access to those qualifications is part of what was being asked about. And a firm moving production to a lower-wage country does not have one effect on inequality but different effects in two places.

The rest: the functionalist argument for unequal rewards stated as an argument someone makes rather than as a fact, the objection that two people of equal ability had unequal access to the training, the dependency argument set against a simple shortage of work so that each position predicts a different outcome from the same policy, and a competition with identical rules and very unequal results, where the question is what to look at next.

Every person, household and firm described is invented. No study, date, percentage or statistic is attributed to anyone, and contested claims are presented as the positions of those who hold them. Nothing is reproduced from any exam board specification, past paper or mark scheme.

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• Define class by the relationship to the means of production, and say why income alone does not settle it
• Say what Weber's status dimension adds to an account built on property
• State the functionalist argument for unequal rewards, and the objection that access to training is unequal
• Tell absolute from relative poverty in a case, and say why the difference matters for policy
• Separate absolute from relative mobility, and refuse to read a mobility rate as evidence of fairness
• Say what an aggregate pay gap establishes and what it does not, including what a control removes
• Set the dependency argument against a shortage of work, and name what each predicts

Twelve invented cases and the distinction each one turns on: a factory owner and a surgeon on the same salary, a headteacher with standing and no property, a household with heating and no bus fare, forty years of upward movement with unchanged odds, two households on one income with different assets, two newspapers overclaiming from one pay gap, and two councillors whose disagreement about an estate produces two different predictions. Fourteen flashcards carry the vocabulary — means of production, status and party, life chances, absolute and relative poverty, wealth against income, absolute against relative mobility, occupational segregation, the glass ceiling, cultural capital, meritocracy, the dependency argument.