Social stratification - Essay Example

In this system, their occupation is vital since it gives the persons benefits such as health care, stability, and fiscal rewards. People in similar social positions are aware of each other and get information regarding their contemporaries from the cars they drive, clothing, the neighbourhood they live in, and the type of job that they do. To come up with a model of social class, one could use occupation, education, and income based terms to divide the various social classes. Using a model following these markers, we have the upper class, upper middle class, lower middle class, working class, and the poor.

Those with institutional leadership, foundation leaders, University heads and International Corporation heads will represent the upper class (Levine, 2010). The capitalist elite are also in this level and include those who own bonds, stocks, lands, as well as other assets. This class derives its wealth from the assets that they own. However, those who have acquired vast sums of money in recent times take longer to be allowed into the old money club. The upper-middle class is represented by those with technical and scientific knowledge like architects, lawyers, engineers, and directors of private and public organizations.

In developed countries, this is the largest class of people, and they are well educated (Levine, 2010). This group is hard to define as they are about more than just the resources, lifestyle, and income that this model is created around. The lower middle class includes those persons who provide support for other professionals, administrative clerics, those who collect data and keep records, as well as paralegals, sales people, bank tellers, and blue-collar workers who work in skilled trades.

These individuals have some college education (Levine, 2010). The working class includes deliverymen, garage workers, and staff at nursing homes, restaurant workers, factory labourers, and craft workers. They have moderate education. Finally, the poor are those who either work full time for wages that fall below a dollar a day, social service workers, as well as the underclass who do not work at all. These have little or no education. Canada, in many ways, is an egalitarian society, with egalitarianism holding that all should be treated equally in all aspects of life such as economically, socially, and politically.

Canadians follow a social mentality as opposed to an individualistic one as pursued in the US (Owen, 2008). While the country’s economy is capitalist in nature, the economic policies are meant to take advantage of the natural resources with a steady and slow stream of growth. Canadian banks, during the 2008 financial crisis, were also the only ones to show some growth, indicating that its prosperity is carefully planned to take into consideration social ramifications instead of wild risk taking and brash economic moves.

The belief in economic equality takes its form in governmental institutions such as CUPE that undertakes to protect Canadian worker’s rights. The immigration policies in Canada also reflect this egalitarianism with the highest immigration rate per capita in the world (Owen, 2008). Finally, Canada has the highest labor demand of the developed nations, especially during the global recession. Canada, in other ways, is also a socially stratified society. It relies heavily on the elites to determine the direction that development takes and to take the major decisions.

Institutional systems in Canada are also organized hierarchically