What type of systems are ideologies or beliefs that support social stratification found in?

2 Forms of Stratification

It is useful to begin with the purely descriptive task of classifying the various types of stratification systems that have appeared in past and present societies. The first panel of Table 2 pertains to the ‘primitive’ tribal systems that dominated human society from the very beginning of human evolution until the Neolithic revolution of some 10,000 years ago. Although tribal societies have of course assumed various forms, the total size of the distributable surplus was in all cases quite limited; and this cap on the surplus placed corresponding limits on the overall level of economic inequality. Indeed, some observers have treated tribal societies as examples of ‘primitive communism,’ since the means of production (e.g., tools) were owned collectively and other types of property were typically distributed evenly among tribal members. Moreover, insofar as positions of power emerged (e.g., shamans), these were never inherited but instead were secured by demonstrating superior skills in the relevant tasks. While meritocratic criteria are often seen as prototypically modern, they were in fact present in incipient form at quite early stages of societal development, no doubt because the surplus was too small to permit the luxury of less adaptive forms of allocation.

With the emergence of agrarian forms of production, the economic surplus became large enough to support more complex and less meritocratic systems of stratification. The ‘Asiatic mode,’ which some commentators regard as a precursor of advanced agrarianism, is characterized by a poorly developed proprietary class and a powerful state elite that extracted surplus agricultural production through rents and taxes (see line B2 in Table 2). This mode provides the conventional example of how a ‘dictatorship of officialdom’ can flourish in the absence of institutionalized private property. Whereas political assets were thus dominant in the Asiatic mode, the ruling class under Western feudalism was, by contrast, very much a propertied one. The distinctive feature of feudalism was that the nobility not only owned large estates or manors but also held legal title to the labor power of its serfs (see line B3). If a serf fled to the city, this was considered a form of theft: The serf was stealing that portion of his or her labor power owned by the lord. With this interpretation, the statuses of serf and slave differ only in degree, and slavery thereby constitutes a limiting case in which workers lose all control over their own labor power (see line B4; also see Slavery as Social Institution).

The historical record makes it clear that agrarian stratification systems were not always based on strictly hereditary forms of social closure. To be sure, the era of classical feudalism (i.e., post-twelfth century) was characterized by a rigid stratification of classes, but there was far greater permeability during the period prior to the institutionalization of the manorial system and the associated transformation of the nobility into a legal class. The most extreme example of agrarian closure can of course be found in caste societies (see line B5). The Indian caste system, for example, is based on (a) a hierarchy of status groupings (i.e., castes) that are ranked by ethnic purity, wealth, and access to goods or services; (b) a corresponding set of ‘closure rules’ that restrict all forms of intercaste marriage or mobility and thereby make caste membership both hereditary and permanent; (c) a high degree of physical and occupational segregation enforced by elaborate rules and rituals governing intercaste contact; and (d) a justifying ideology (i.e., Hinduism) that induces the population to regard such extreme forms of inequality as legitimate and appropriate. What makes this system so distinctive, then, is not merely its well-developed closure rules but also the fundamentally honorific (and noneconomic) character of the underlying social hierarchy.

The defining feature of the industrial era (see panel C) has been the emergence of egalitarian ideologies and the consequent ‘delegitimation’ of the extreme forms of stratification found in caste, feudal, and slave systems. This can be seen, for example, in the European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that pitted the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment against the privileges of rank and the political power of the nobility. In the end, these struggles eliminated the last residue of feudal privilege, but they also made new types of inequality and stratification possible. Under the class system that ultimately emerged (see line C6), the estates of the feudal era were replaced by purely economic groups (i.e., ‘classes’), and closure rules based on heredity were likewise supplanted by (formally) meritocratic processes. The resulting classes were neither legal entities nor closed status groupings, and the associated class-based inequalities could therefore be represented and justified as the natural outcome of competition among individuals with differing abilities, motivation, or moral character (i.e., ‘classical liberalism’). As indicated in line C6, the class structure of early industrialism had a clear economic base, so much so that Marx ([1894] 1972) defined classes in terms of their relationship to the means of economic production. The precise contours of the industrial class structure are nonetheless a matter of continuing debate (see below); for example, a simple Marxian model focuses on the cleavage between capitalists and workers, while more elaborate Marxian and neo-Marxian models identify additional intervening or ‘contradictory’ classes (e.g., Wright 1997), and yet other (non-Marxian) approaches represent the class structure as a continuous gradation of income, prestige, or socioeconomic status.

Whatever the relative merits of these models might be, the ideology underlying the socialist revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was of course explicitly Marxist (see line C7). The intellectual heritage of these revolutions and their legitimating ideologies can again be traced to the Enlightenment, but the rhetoric of equality that emerged in this period was now directed against the economic power of the capitalist class rather than the status and honorific privileges of the nobility. The evidence from Eastern Europe and elsewhere suggests that these egalitarian ideals were only partially realized. In the immediate postrevolutionary period, factories and farms were indeed collectivized or socialized, and various fiscal and economic reforms were instituted for the express purpose of reducing income inequality and wage differentials among manual and nonmanual workers. Although these egalitarian policies were subsequently weakened through the reform efforts of Stalin and others, inequality on the scale of pre-revolutionary society was never re-established among rank-and-file workers (see Lenski 2001). There nonetheless remained substantial inequalities in power and authority; most notably, the socialization of production did not have the intended effect of empowering workers, as the capitalist class was replaced by a ‘new class’ of party officials and managers who continued to control the means of production and to allocate the resulting social surplus. This class has been variously identified with intellectuals or intelligentsia, bureaucrats or managers, and party officials or appointees (see Gouldner 1979). Regardless of the formulation adopted, the presumption is that the working class ultimately lost out in contemporary socialist revolutions, just as it did in the so-called bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (e.g., see Postsocialist Societies).

Whereas the means of production were socialized in the revolutions of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, the capitalist class remained intact throughout the process of industrialization in the West, even as ownership and control separated and a distinct managerial class emerged (see Dahrendorf 1959). The capitalist class may nonetheless be weakened by the structural changes of postindustrialism, with the most important of these being the rise of a service economy and the consequent emergence of technical expertise, educational degrees, and training certificates as new forms of property (see line C8). By this formulation, a dominant class of cultural elites may be emerging in the West, much as the transition to state socialism (allegedly) generated a new class of intellectuals in the East. This is not to suggest that all theorists of advanced industrialism posit a grand divide between the cultural elite and an undifferentiated working mass. In fact, some commentators (e.g., Dahrendorf 1959) have argued that skill-based cleavages are crystallizing throughout the occupational structure, with the result being a finely differentiated class system made up of discrete occupations (Grusky and Sørensen 1998) or a continuous gradation of socioeconomic status (e.g., Hauser and Warren 1997).

4.1 Dimensions of Stratification

Power is key to stratification, but class and status are closely linked to it; the three vary together. Stratification systems differ in significant ways, the analysis of which is facilitated by comparison along three axes of inequality. One defines the nature of the ranking, contrasting status strata, (‘honor and privilege’) at one pole, and class strata (the ‘economic order’), at the other. A second axis describes the locus of characteristics which determine an individual's status, contrasting those regarded as intrinsic to individuals (ascribed), with those regarded as extrinsic (acquired or achieved). A third addresses the composition of strata: whether they comprise named, organized, acting groups, or analytically discernible but unorganized categories. Variations along these axes, together with the cultural explanations that rationalize each system, constitute the significant differences among them.

1.2 Bases of Social Inequality

The particular social groups that are educationally ‘advantaged’ and ‘disadvantaged’ vary by places and times, depending on the stratification system in place in the larger society. Generally, those groups that are advantaged in society at large are advantaged with respect to educational opportunities and educational outcomes. In most societies in the modern world, social class position confers tremendous educational advantage or disadvantage. Children from advantaged social classes have better educational opportunities, have higher levels of ‘achievement’ as officially measured and recognized by the school, and receive on average ‘better’ educational credentials. In capitalist societies, upper-class and upper-middle-class children reap these educational class advantages. In socialist societies, children of party elites reaped educational class advantages, official policy notwithstanding (see Shavit and Blossfeld 1993). Class is arguably the most important source of educational advantage or disadvantage, and the source that has been most consistent in recent decades.

Another common social distinction that has important educational consequences is race and ethnicity. The degree of educational disadvantage associated with being a member of a disadvantaged racial or ethnic group has varied historically. The USA and South Africa, for example, historically had public educational systems that segregated blacks into separate schools and offered them far fewer educational opportunities; in both cases, changes in state policy eliminated the explicit racial barriers to school access although some forms of racial inequality in education persist. There is also significant cross-cultural variation in the racial or ethnic groups that are educationally disadvantaged: For example, Koreans and other Asians perform better than whites in American schools but are educationally disadvantaged in Japan (Brint 1998, p. 216).

The final major basis of social inequality in education is gender. Gender inequality in education—both in terms of access and outcomes—has decreased dramatically in recent decades in most advanced industrial countries. Whereas girls were once commonly barred from certain types or levels of education, gender barriers in access are insignificant in most industrial countries at present but remain in those less developed countries in which women are still largely restricted to the private (family) sphere. Similarly, in most industrial countries schools offer similar if not identical curricular opportunities at present to boys and girls, and girls outperform boys in some important respects (e.g., in the USA girls earn better grades on average than boys and have higher rates of graduation from high school and college). The significance of gender as a basis of social inequality in education has declined significantly, then, in many parts of the world but remained high in societies in which gender remains a significant basis of differentiation in the larger society.

4 Conclusion: To the Millennium and Beyond

The theoretical link between status and role was severed soon after World War II. The structural conception of status is now confined to such as ‘status attainment studies,’ i.e., investigations of individuals' and groups' relative position in stratification systems that are the result of acquired resources such as income, education, occupation. Status in social psychology is conceived as individuals' or groups' relative societal evaluation, thus referring to degrees of honor, esteem, or resources. Status in this form is used as an independent variable, analyzing its effects upon other social processes.

A second fault line, already discussed, occurred between structural and interactive approaches. Despite their controversy, both camps reduced the use of the term status; a situation particularly accented among interactionists who came to use role as both societal position and its cultural norms. The social psychology of status and role is now tantamount to the social psychology of roles. Additionally, recent studies of status and roles have relied upon and elaborated established theory rather than created theory anew.

Baker and Faulkner's (1991) conception of roles as employed by persons to acquire resources and combine into concrete positions is exemplary of the terminological and theoretical uses of contemporary role theory. Their study of Hollywood film producers, directors, and screen writers refers to these as roles and not as social positions or statuses. Their analysis then focuses upon combinational relations among the three roles before and after the rise of the movie blockbuster. It relates films' financial successes to innovative role combinations. In the production of films the stereotypical organization is functional specificity with three different persons playing the three roles. However, Baker and Faulkner find that functional specificity of producer and functional dedifferentiation of director-screen writer was the most effective arrangement for achieving financial successes during the blockbuster era. The authors present quotes from secondary sources to illustrate that role participants were aware of the advantages of this organizational arrangement. Although their study is primarily focused at the structural level the authors assume that organization is the result of persons' volitional activities, and they attribute the structural reorganization to movie industry leaders' personal agency. Neither in theory nor in practice is there a division between structural and interactive determination of roles and organization for the authors. This position permits the authors to conclude that role innovations may be used as organizational resources.

Each of the first three editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology (1954, 1968, 1985) devoted a chapter to role theory. The fourth edition of the Handbook, published in 1998, contains no chapter exclusive to roles. Instead role is introduced throughout the fourth edition in relation to its functions and displays in groups, gender, race, stereotyping, distributive justice and so forth. Although the language is still not unified, role and status are now part of the social science lexicon and are employed conceptually when empirical issues appropriately call for their use.

4.3 Sociocultural Explanations

There are at least two ways of thinking of the broader sociocultural context. One is that behavior at work is merely an extension of male dominance that thrives in the larger society. Overall, there is general agreement in the literature about the characteristics of the sex stratification system and the socialization patterns that maintain it. The exaggeration of these roles can lead to sexual harassment. For example, men can sexually harass women when they are overly exuberant in pursuing sexual self-interest at work, or they feel entitled to treat women as sex-objects, or when they feel superior to women and express their superiority by berating and belittling the female sex.

The second way of thinking of the broader sociocultural context is to study the sociocultural system itself and examine how and why status is assigned. According to this view, sexual harassment is an organizing principle of our system of heterosexuality, rather than the consequence of systematic deviance.

Critical theory

Critical theorists share similarities with constructivists in that they believe that reality is interpreted by social actors as individuals or within social groupings. However, they diverge philosophically from constructivists because of their identification with historical realism. They believe that, although reality is constructed, a history of repression determined by patriarchal, ethnocentric, agist and other social stratification systems influences the ways in which people choose, and are able, to construct their own realities (Denzin and Lincoln 1998, p. 187). When undertaking ethnographic study and writing ethnographic texts critical theorists use:

the emancipatory aspects within the philosophies of feminism (Duran 1991; Fonow and Cook 1991);

ethnic and racial studies (Collins 1990; hooks (sic) and West 1991; Stanfield 1998);

anti-colonialism (Spivak 1988);

post-modernism (Brown 1995; Van Maanen 1995); and

Marxism (Nelson and Grossberg 1988).

The adherence to emancipatory politics means that their interpretation of their own roles as writers of culture differs from constructivists and others working within interpretivist frameworks of ethnographic study.

Critical theorists write value-laden texts, where notions of impartiality and objectivity are entirely absent. They believe that ethnographic literature should not simply describe and construct theory that reflects a particular social and/or cultural phenomenon. ‘Critical theorists seek to produce transformations in the social order, producing knowledge that is historical and structural, judged by its degree of historical situatedness and its ability to produce praxis or action’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1998, p. 187). Researchers not only have the responsibility of ensuring they are accountable for representing the people being studied fairly and forthrightly. Nor can the ethnographic work merely be a source of‘thick description’, where the text reflects the words, interpretations and actions of the social actors involved. They must also incorporate an emancipatory narrative into the text. Thus, investigators will have an obvious and strong influence on the data analysed as they approach the ethnography from an overt ideological stance.

Four main problems occur within critical theory ethnographies. First, Hammersley (1990, pp. 67-69) believes that the emancipatory model of critical theory suffers ‘from too narrow a conception of the appropriate audience for research’ as well as the range of topics that are judged to be of importance. Only those who fit under the category of ‘oppressed’ are deemed worth studying.

Second, critical theory loses much of its validity as an authentic account or interpretation of a phenomenon because of its ideological approach. Hammersley (1992) asks the poignant question: At what point is the line drawn within the ethnographic text to distinguish between political insight and political prejudice? (p. 15) At what point within critical theory does an ethnographic text become diatribe for a political movement and/or ideal, rather than a scholarly look into the culture of a social grouping?

Third, Fine (1998, p. 152) wonders about the potential for the maintenance of stereotypes within critical theory. By stating that there are particular disadvantaged groups which need to be given a voice through critical theory, those groups which may not be visible to the ethnographer’s eye may remain invisible. Also, the complexities and contradictions that exist in any social grouping may be ignored in order for the researcher to write a ‘good’ emancipatory ethnographic text.

Fourth, many critical theorists write that knowledge about a particular social group can only be realised and articulated by members of the community itself (Spivak 1988; Omolade 1994). Subscribing to this belief means that it is only individuals from within a community, be it a lesbian community or an African-American community, who are able to write for and about that community. The need for validity and rigour of analysis becomes lost, and the possibility of qualified individuals who are removed from a social grouping contributing to ethnographic analysis is no longer possible.

1 Research Questions and Traditions of Study

Classical authors have primarily seen social mobility as a mechanism of class formation or status group formation. The basic assumption is that classes, status groups, or other collectivities with some form of sociocultural or sociopolitical identity can only emerge and potentially provide a basis for collective action on condition that they achieve a sufficient degree of ‘demographic identity’ (Goldthorpe) in their membership, that is, when they include a kernel of members homogeneous in terms of their social origin and stable over time (families across generations or individuals through their working lives). Along these lines, Marx—whose main concern with mobility is otherwise with collective downward mobility of small proprietors and other middle classes into the proletariat—considers individual mobility as a crucial determinant of working class organization in his discussion of the North American class structure. Contrary to Europe, classes in the USA, he argues (much as Sombart does later), ‘have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in a constant flux’ (Marx [1852] 1958, p. 225), with the effect of weakening class formation in the working class. Also stressing the connection to social mobility, Max Weber even defines a social class as an ensemble of those class situations among which high interchange of individuals typically takes place, while different classes are distinguished from each other by a lack of mobility between them. Weber's mobility criterion has been used to empirically establish class boundaries by later researchers.

In its later development, research on social mobility has largely turned to the study of social opportunity, aiming to determine the relative fluidity or rigidity of the stratification system concerning access to positions of varying advantage (see Equality of Opportunity). Research has in particular concentrated on identifying the degree to which individuals' prospects in life are determined by the social conditions of their family of origin and on specifying the individual, institutional, and societal factors responsible for it. The more strongly the positions persons hold are conditioned by their social provenance, the more rigid and closed is a stratification system; the greater the mobility between social origin and a persons' own position, the more open or fluid that system is.

Issues related to social mobility are often the object of normative and political discourse and are then often interpreted ideologically, for instance as ways of legitimizing social inequalities. In this vein, variants of liberal political philosophy from John Stuart Mill onwards regard unequal conditions as legitimate when they result from (fair) competition or when unequal chances of access to privileged positions are due to unequal achievements. In its extreme form, the functionalist theory of stratification (see Social Stratification) holds unequal rewards to be deserved, as they are assumed to be distributed according to the contributions made to the efficient functioning (and ultimately survival) of society and are thought to be necessary to attract the most able and hard-working individuals to the most important positions (see Goldthorpe 1996 for a forceful critique of meritocratic and functionalist assumptions). Though at times influenced by normative preferences, research in the field is analytical and empirical. Its results may, however, serve to examine to what degree and for what reasons social reality conforms to or falls short of particular normative or political goals.

The investigation of social mobility is mainly pursued by way of observation and comparison of national populations. Comparative designs are essential to determine the extent to which fluidity or rigidity of the stratification system is related to other characteristics of societies such as their degree of modernity, their economic and political order (e.g. capitalist market economies vs. state command economies), particular institutions or policies. Research has especially focused on the evolution of social mobility in line with the development of industrial society. While in his early work Sorokin (1927) expected ‘trendless fluctuation’ rather than a development in a specific direction, later researchers have assumed a historical increase in mobility with the transition from preindustrial to industrial society, either as a precondition for the take-off of industrial development or as its consequence (Lipset and Zetterberg 1959). Others assume a steady increase in mobility as industrialism advances, and an increasing uniformity and convergence of social structures and social mobility in industrial societies, due to standardizing tendencies inherent in advanced technologies and other elements of industrialism. Finally, exceptionally high rates of mobility have been postulated for specific societies, particularly those not burdened by the legacy of the European feudal past or its class-based stratification system, such as the USA, Australia, or Japan. To test such hypotheses, numerous datasets in many different societies have been created, primarily through large-scale population surveys, but also (notably in studies on earlier periods) by using suitable information from official records. As members of social elites tend to be represented in extremely small numbers only in population surveys, mobility into elite positions is generally not covered (see Elites: Sociological Aspects).

For the purposes of structured summary, much of the sociological literature can be represented as a debate between two different paradigms and research traditions. To study mobility, both essentially rely on work positions, that is, the (occupational) jobs individuals hold to earn a living. The status attainment approach, on the one side, sees the principle property of these jobs in terms of their respective location in a finely graduated continuum of rewards related to the position and conveyed to their incumbents. The continuum of rewards is generally conceived in terms of social prestige or socioeconomic status and measured by corresponding scales (see Social Stratification).

The class mobility approach, on the other side, conceives the (structure of) positions among which mobility can occur as discrete classes which differ from each other by properties of a qualitatively different nature rather than only along a vertical dimension. In earlier studies, categories consisted of rather broad groupings of occupations defined in an ad hoc manner (sometimes as broadly as agricultural/manual/nonmanual). Newer class schemas are grounded in theoretically comprehensive conceptions of the class structure. In their now widely accepted class schema, Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) draw on the character of employment relations as core criteria to identify different classes, distinguishing first between classes whose incumbents buy the labor of others (employer), sell their own labor (employee) or do neither (self-employed); among employees, further distinctions are made between different classes of (manual) workers, routine nonmanual employees, and of professionals, administrators, and managers in the so-called service class or salariat, the criterion being the extent to which employment relations are regulated according to a labor contract or a service relationship. Related to the differing conception of the main properties of the positions among which mobility is seen to occur, the two traditions also differ in their theoretical understanding of the mobility process, the methods used, and the main conclusions arrived at.

1 Bureaucracy vs. Traditional Organizations

Weber's analysis of bureaucracy begins by comparing the structure of bureaucracies with traditional organizations. This comparison is made along four dimensions: differentiation, integration, constraints, and incentives.

Compared to traditional organizations, bureaucracies are highly differentiated. There is horizontal division of labor: jobs are specialized and responsibilities are strictly delimited. There is vertical division of labor as well: there are higher and lower offices, the latter subordinate to the former, all of which are ultimately accountable to the head of the organization. Perhaps most importantly, there is a clear differentiation of official duties from personal interests and obligations, what Weber calls separation of home from office. Traditional organizations, by contrast, are undifferentiated. They do not delimit responsibilities, do not separate higher from lower offices, and do not distinguish personal from official capacities-instead, the organization mirrors the stratification system of the larger community (Dibble 1965).

Compared to traditional organizations, bureaucracies have numerous integrating mechanisms, among them written rules and regulations, procedures for selection and advancement of officials, and a specialized administrative staff charged with maintaining these rules and procedures. Written rules, formal procedures, and specialized administrative staffs are largely absent from traditional organizations—actions taken by traditional organizations need not be consistent.

Compared to traditional organizations, bureaucracies constrain the conduct of officials while offering powerful incentives for compliance. There are several types of constraints: actions must be justified in terms of the larger purposes of the organization; actions must be guided by the norm of impersonality, that is, detachment and objectivity is required in all decisions; and advancement is contingent on contributing to the purposes of the organization. Traditional organizations have no distinctive purposes apart from the purposes of the people participating in them; norms of impersonality and objectivity are practically nonexistent because the organization and the community are indistinct; and there is no possibility of advancement within the organization because, again, stratification within the organization is determined by the stratification of the community.

The incentives offered by bureaucracies include the prospect of a lifetime career, salaries paid in cash rather than in kind, and (in Europe if not the USA) a modicum of prestige attached to the status of the official. Careers, salaries, and prestige based on position within the organization do not exist under traditional administration. The elements of differentiation, integration, constraints, and incentives render bureaucracies more powerful than traditional organizations yet more responsive to central authority. The power of bureaucracies results from their capacity for coordinated action. Traditional organizations are incapable of coordinating large-scale action, except temporarily when the interests of elites coincide. The responsiveness of bureaucracies to central authority arises from top-down control of ultimate decision premises, the policies and objectives of the organization, which is impossible in traditional organizations where authority is fragmented. Paradoxically, the same elements that make bureaucracies powerful yet responsive to central authority render individual bureaucrats nearly powerless. Limited responsibilities, subordination to higher authority, and numerous rules and regulations, as well as the norm of impersonality deprive bureaucrats of latitude in decision-making. The powerlessness of individual bureaucrats, moreover, is exacerbated by their dependence on the organization for their income and social standing. Weber claims that the capacity for coordinated action, responsiveness to central authority, and dependence of individual bureaucrats on the organization promote administrative efficiency. ‘Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration…’ (Weber 1946, p. 214). The context in which Weber was writing is critical. Weber was not comparing modern businesses with bureaucracies. Rather, he was comparing bureaucracies capable of coordinated large-scale action with traditional organizations that were not.

3 Viewing the School as a Subsystem in Society

Many social scientists have used the social system model to analyze the role of various institutions in society. Education is seen as one of society's primary institutions, along with religion, the economy, and the judicial system. The aim of a social system approach to the study of schools in society is to ascertain how schooling enables society to achieve its goals.

2 Virtuoso and Mass Religion

The sociology of social stratification is concerned with the distribution of scarce resources and with the formation of social hierarchies by the processes of social closure and exclusion. The most common illustration of social stratification would be the unequal distribution of economic resources, resulting in a simple formation of economic classes. However, stratification also involves cultural distinctions such as education, lifestyle, and cultural consumption. Weber made an original contribution to the sociology of religion by treating charisma (a ‘gift of grace’) as a religious value that is also characterized by scarcity. Because these religious values are unequally and unevenly distributed in human societies, there is religious stratification. In The Social Psychology of the World Religions, Weber (1991, p. 287) asserted ‘that men are differently qualified in a religious way stands at the beginning of the history of religion…the sacred values that have been most cherished, the ecstatic and visionary capacities of shamans, sorcerers, ascetics, and pneumatics of all sorts, could not be attained by everyone. The possession of such faculties as “charisma,” which, to be sure, might be awakened in some but not in all. It follows from this that all intensive religiosity has a tendency towards status stratification, in accordance with differences in the charismatic qualifications.’

Religious gifts (charisma) are in demand because they bring healing and salvation, but they are inevitably in short supply. The resulting hierarchy of spiritual gifts creates a stratification system that differentiates between the virtuoso and the mass, where the latter are, in Weber's terminology, religiously ‘unmusical.’ This hierarchy of intense religious values stands in contrast to and frequently in opposition to the formal hierarchy of the ecclesiastical organizations of Christianity that attempted to regulate and to control the flow of charisma.

This model of virtuoso–mass religion is connected with the specific forms of salvational drive in the world religions, namely with their soteriologies. Religious systems of soteriology may be directed either toward inner-worldly asceticism or toward other-worldly mysticism. Now all religions that place a special emphasis on rebirth and spiritual renewal will create a special category of religious aristocracy, because charisma cannot be institutionalized in terms of an egalitarian distribution. This virtuoso pattern emerged as a general characteristic of religious communities, for example, among the Protestant sects, the perushim in Judaism, the Sufi dervishes of Islam, and the Buddhist monks (see Weber 1965, pp. 151–65). The existence of distinctive forms of internal religious stratification has often evolved in sharp contrast to the official doctrines of egalitarianism and universalism in, for example, Christianity and Islam.

There is demand from popular religion to enjoy the benefits of virtuoso religion such as healing, and thus there develops a distinctive pattern of exchange between the virtuosi and the mass. In return for acts of charity and direct economic support from their followers, the virtuosi offer healing, guidance, and other charismatic gifts. The layman who is completely immersed in the everyday world needs the blessing of charisma, but in return the virtuosi depend on lay tributes merely to exist. This mutual dependency and reciprocity create the conditions whereby virtuoso religion can always be diluted or manipulated to some extent by the laity who demand tangible evidence of charismatic gifts in the form of magical displays. In fact, with the possible exceptions of Judaism and Protestantism, all religions and religious ethics have had to (re)introduce cults of saints, heroes, or functional gods in order to accommodate themselves to the needs of the masses (Weber 1965, p. 103). In Asia the religious teachers or gurus function as living saviors, while in Catholicism the veneration of the saints was the real basis of popular religion. In Hasidic Judaism, despite its popular appeal to the ordinary people through, for example, its use of dance as an expression of religious joy, there was also a clear division between the spiritual elite and their disciples. In these examples, Weber recognized a paradoxical tension between the spiritual quest for perfection in the virtuosi, the pragmatic needs of the laity for healing and material sustenance, and the mutual reciprocity between elite and mass. Weber's sociology of charismatic roles was an application of philosophical critique of Christian morals by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who had condemned Christianity as a system of slave morality and as a product of psychological weakness. Slave morals are created out of resentment by a subservient social class, and hence the Christian doctrine of love was analyzed critically as a subconscious doctrine of a resentful social group. Guilt and bad conscience played a pivotal role in Christian ethics. Against this moral system, Nietzsche argued in favor of a revaluation of values from a position of psychological strength. Nietzsche's genealogy of (Christian) morals in terms of a study of the stratification of values between slave and master moralities was translated directly into Weber's social psychology of the world religions (see Stauth and Turner 1988). In Weber's treatment of the psychology of religion, he argued that certain social carriers were crucial in the development of the cultural systems of the various religions. In particular, he claimed, for example, that Islam had been carried by warriors, Buddhism by mendicant monks, Confucianism by court officials and the literati, and Christianity by artisans and craftsmen. These occupational groups were particularly important historically in providing the world religions with a specific soteriology. Thus, the world view of Christianity was shaped by the practical rationalism of artisans and craftsmen, and in the long run this rationalism proved decisive in the connection between the Protestant capitalists and economic rationalism. This thesis has been challenged and various historians have attempted to find similar connections between Jewish culture and the rise of capitalism (see Sombart 1951) or between Islam and capitalism (see Turner 1998). The core of the Weber thesis has survived these criticisms insofar as it attempts to identify important cultural connections between religious discipline, class position, and economic rationalism.