Introduction

Abstract

Social systems are comprised of the interactions of human beings that produce and reproduce such structural features as stratification, i.e., patterns of inequality. Social scientists, especially sociologists, have been interested not only in the actual stratification of members of social systems — by differential wealth, power, and prestige, for instance — but also in the images or perspectives on the system that are acquired by people in different locations in that system, e.g., class consciousness. Although the writings of Karl Marx are often cited in this respect, under various rubrics the problem has been abstracted from the Marxian framework to become an aspect of the broader field of theory and research dealing with topics in social stratification. Our focus, however, is not only on class-identification in this sense but a broader one since class identification presupposes some sort of image of the structure of stratification in a society. Even more generally, stratification is an ubiquitous feature of social systems at a variety of scales — from small groups to organizations to societies and even global structures — and hence, the theoretical treatment of the problem can be undertaken in all generality by framing it in terms of an arbitrary or general social system and then proceeding by abstract analysis to derive results that can be instantiated at quite different levels.