Back to Class and Status: Or Why a Sociological View of Social Inequality Should Be Reasserted

Abstract

Of late, issues of social inequality have assumed a new political centrality
in many western societies. However, in much discussion of these issues,
sociological approaches to the analysis of social inequality have been
disregarded, especially in the work of economists and epidemiologists.
The main features of the sociological approach are the emphasis given
to inequality in a relational rather than a merely attributional sense, and to
the distinction between social class and social status as two qualitatively
different forms of social stratifi cation. Two cases serve to illustrate the
limitations and dangers that result from neglecting the conceptual and
empirical work undertaken by sociologists: the study of intergenerational
social mobility by economists and the study of the consequences of social
inequality for health and related social problems by epidemiologists.