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Social Stratification and Informalization in Global Perspective

In the industrialized West, processes of differentiation and integration contain a long-term trend towards decreasing differences in power, status and wealth between the social classes, sexes and generations. Toward the end of the last century, this trend became dominant. Succeeding waves of democratization and the redistribution of economic surpluses according to welfare state principles, resulted in the depletion or disappearance of the groups at either end of the social ladder of Western countries, with a sharp increase of the jostling in the middle. Inequalities, together with the social and psychological distance between people, have diminished without losing importance. These processes of democratization and social equalization have run in tandem with collective emotional changes and informalization: more and more people have pressured each other towards more differentiated and flexible patterns of self-regulation and mutually expected self-restraints, allowing for an increase of socially permitted behavioural and emotional alternatives. In informalization processes, more and more of the dominant modes of social conduct, symbolizing institutionalized power relationships, have come to be both ignored and attacked. Behavioural extremes, expressing large differences in power and respect, came to provoke moral indignation and were banned - a diminishing of contrasts, a trend towards convergence or homogenization -, while for the rest the codes of social conduct have become more lenient, more differentiated and varied - a trend towards divergence or heterogenization.