The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality

Citation

Gilbert, D. L. (2021). The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (11th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Chapter Summary

The eleventh edition is a compact text of eleven chapters (about 290–304 pages in publisher and library listings), followed by a glossary of key terms. Dennis Gilbert, of Hamilton College, organises the whole book around three issues he draws from Marx and Weber: the economic basis of class, its social basis, and its political implications. Running through every chapter is the theme announced in the title: the shift, beginning in the mid-1970s, from what the book calls the Age of Shared Prosperity (1946 to about 1975) to the Age of Growing Inequality. According to SAGE, this edition adds recent statistics on wages, income, wealth and poverty, research on class and Donald Trump's political base, new material on women in the class structure, long-range mobility trends for men and women, and a discussion of Robert Putnam's research on inequality and children's futures.

Chapter 1: Social Class in America

The opening chapter is a conceptual summary of the whole book. It starts from Weber's idea of life chances, then gives a careful account of Marx (classes defined by relation to the means of production, ideology, class consciousness) and Weber (class, status and power), and derives from them the three issues and ten variables used throughout: occupation, wealth, income and poverty; prestige, association, socialization and mobility; power and class consciousness. It defines classes as groupings of households and introduces the Gilbert–Kahl model of six classes and one subclass, based on the source rather than the level of income. The chapter closes with evidence of the "great U-turn" in inequality after 1975. The author advises serious readers to reread it.

Chapter 2: Position and Prestige

How Americans perceive rank. The chapter draws on the documentary People Like Us, community studies of prestige classes and occupational prestige surveys, and concludes that people agree more about rank order than about where class lines fall, agree most about the top, and perceive class differently depending on their own position. This is why the book bases its model on economic distinctions rather than prestige.

Chapters 3–4: Social Class, Occupation, and Social Change; Wealth and Income

The economic core of the book: how changes in the occupational structure have reshaped the class system, and the distribution of wealth and income, with current data on the trends that define the Age of Growing Inequality.

Chapter 5: Socialization, Association, Lifestyles, and Values

The social dimension of class: how class shapes upbringing, whom people associate with and marry, how they live, and what they value.

Chapters 6–7: Social Mobility: The Societal Context; Family, Education, and Career

Two chapters on mobility. The first looks at mobility at the level of society, including the long-range trends for men and women added in this edition; the second at how family background and education shape individual careers.

Chapters 8–9: Elites, the Capitalist Class, and Political Power; Class Consciousness and Class Conflict

The political dimension: the power of elites and the capitalist class, and the conditions under which class consciousness and conflict develop, a question Chapter 1 traces back to Marx and promises to take up in Chapter 9. SAGE's description of this edition's updated research on class in politics (Donald Trump's social base and the growing role of the very rich in financing campaigns) belongs with this material.

Chapter 10: Poverty and Public Policy

The bottom of the class structure: the working poor and underclass of the model and the policies that affect them, including the shrinking of traditional welfare and the expansion of food stamps, which Chapter 1 previews.

Chapter 11: The American Class Structure and Growing Inequality

The final chapter returns to the Gilbert–Kahl model in more detail and synthesises the book's lessons about the power of class and the forces behind growing inequality.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Framework

• Life chances: Weber's term for the opportunities, from health to education, shaped by class position.
• Class and status: Weber's distinction between ranking by economic position and ranking by social honour or prestige.
• Social class (Gilbert's definition): groupings of households of roughly equal rank, differentiated by occupation, income, wealth and prestige; usually placed by the occupation of the largest earner.
• Gilbert–Kahl model: six classes and one subclass: the capitalist class; the upper-middle class, with a "working rich" subclass at its top; the middle and working classes; and the working poor and underclass, grouped into privileged, majority and lower strata.
• Age of Shared Prosperity and Age of Growing Inequality: the two periods of postwar history, divided at about 1975.

Chapters 3–7: Economic and social dimensions

• Occupational structure: the mix of jobs in the economy, whose changes reshape the class system.
• Wealth and income distribution: the shares of total wealth and income held by different groups.
• Socialization and association: class differences in upbringing and in social networks.
• Social mobility: movement up or down the class structure, at the level of society and of individual careers.

Chapters 8–11: Power and poverty

• Capitalist class and elites: the small class living mainly on returns from assets and its political influence.
• Class consciousness: a sense of shared identity and grievance that may or may not develop from shared position.
• Working poor and underclass: those in low-wage, insecure jobs and those with unstable work and dependence on public support.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• One explicit model throughout. The Gilbert–Kahl model is introduced in Chapter 1 and revisited in Chapter 11, so readers have a single map of the class structure against which to place each chapter's evidence. The author is frank that the model is a synthesis that cannot be the one "true" model.
• Strong theoretical opening. Chapter 1's account of Marx and Weber is clear and balanced, and the book translates their concerns into concrete variables rather than leaving theory and data apart.
• A clear organising question. The contrast between the Age of Shared Prosperity and the Age of Growing Inequality gives every chapter a purpose; SAGE notes that the author repeatedly asks why inequality has grown and weighs competing explanations.
• Readable and data-driven. Instructor comments quoted by SAGE praise its easy, lucid writing and good statistics; bold key terms and an end-of-book glossary support revision.

Limitations

• United States only. The book analyses one country's class structure; students elsewhere will need other sources for their own societies.
• An economic model by design. The model excludes prestige distinctions on the grounds that they derive from economic differences. Readers interested in cultural or relational accounts of class will want to compare it with other approaches.
• Household as the unit. The author acknowledges that classifying households by the occupation of the main earner is harder to justify as women's economic roles change, though he keeps the approach and discusses women's position in later chapters.
• Dated statistics. Much of the book's value lies in current data; figures from an edition published in 2021 should be updated from official sources.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the course's systematic textbook on class in the United States. Mike Savage and colleagues' Social Class in the 21st Century is a shorter, accessible account of class in Britain built on economic, cultural and social capital; reading it beside Gilbert shows how a capitals-based model differs from his source-of-income model. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods is an ethnography of how class shapes family life, which fits naturally with Chapters 5 and 7 on socialization and family, education and career.

Erik Olin Wright's Understanding Class is a theoretical work that sets Marxist, Weberian and stratification approaches side by side; it is the natural next step after Gilbert's Chapter 1, which covers the same founding debate in introductory form. The edited readers in the course, Jackson, Dahir, Daviss and Grusky's Social Stratification and Manza and Sauder's Inequality and Society, collect original studies and are best used alongside Gilbert, by pairing a chapter here with the corresponding primary readings.

How to Use This Book

An introductory sociology course helps but is not required; readers need only be comfortable with tables and charts. The book suits undergraduates in sociology, political science and public policy, and anyone who wants an organised, evidence-based account of class and inequality in the United States.

A practical plan:

• Read Chapter 1 twice, as the author recommends. It defines the terms, the model and the two periods that the rest of the book uses.
• Read Chapter 2 for why the book prefers an economic model, then the economic core (Chapters 3–4).
• Choose by course emphasis: Chapters 5–7 for culture, family and mobility; Chapters 8–9 for politics and power; Chapter 10 for poverty and policy.
• Finish with Chapter 11, checking how each chapter's evidence fits the model.

Keep a one-page sketch of the Gilbert–Kahl model and add to it as you read, noting the typical occupations, income sources and trends for each class. Use the key-term lists and glossary for revision. Because the book is built on statistics, practise by updating one table or chart from current official sources (for example, the Census Bureau's income and poverty reports) and asking whether the trend the book describes has continued.