Social Hierarchy

Overview

In delineating the relationship between education and social hierarchy, scholars examine how these hierarchies are manifest within schools via institutionalized mechanisms and peer relations, as well as how these structures and relations legitimize or naturalize social hierarchies extant in society at large. Although these examinations have focused disproportionately on the manifestation and reproduction of social class hierarchies, researchers have increasingly examined the articulation of and perpetuation of racial and gender hierarchies—including how these hierarchies intersect with social class hierarchies. This entry delineates the evolution in researchers' thinking regarding how social hierarchies are manifest in and perpetuated via schools' organization, norms, and practices and the attendant implications for students' educational experiences and academic and social outcomes along the divisions of class, race, and gender. The evolution of researchers' considerations requires educators and social scientists to illuminate the stability and reproductive nature of social hierarchies, theorizations of this stability and reproduction, and school-level institutional and everyday micro-processes that sustain systems of stratification and inequality.

The Stability of Social Hierarchies

Paul Willis, in the subtitle of his seminal book Learning to Labor, asked, “How do working-class kids get working-class jobs?” Willis's question communicated, in short, the entrenchment of social class hierarchies and the extent to which children are likely to replicate the social class statuses of their parents. When Willis published his text in [Page 1986]1977, it was already well established that social class stratification characterized industrialized societies and social class origins predicted social class outcomes. Different research and theoretical traditions offered competing interpretations of the logic and purpose of social stratification.

Functionalism provided one school of thought that was dominant in the mid-20th century but fell out of favor by the 1970s. According to this theoretical tradition, the technological change and demands that characterized rapidly industrializing nations mandated a differentiated and stratified labor force. The purpose of education was to establish systems of socialization and selection that would allow for the efficient and meritocratic allocation of individuals into their rightful places in this occupational hierarchy such that the most able and deserving would assume occupational roles that required the greatest technical and professional expertise. According to this school of thought, social inequality is a necessary and inevitable feature of modern society, and the selection of individuals based on their class origins rather than on their merit and qualifications would compromise technological and social advancement.

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