Assess the sociological explanations of relationship between occupation and social class.

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Assess the sociological explanations of the relationship between occupation and social class.

The term "Social Class" is widely used in sociology to differentiate the population on grounds of economic considerations, such as inequality in terms of wealth or income. An occupation is an individual's established choice of employment which provides most of the time a steady source of income.

According to Karl Marx, the transition from feudalism to industrialization has produced a highly unequal capitalist society consisting of only two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the property, capital owning class. They own the means of production and monopolize the profits and values of industrial production. The proletariat are the landless wage workers, the mass of working people who labour for the bourgeoisie as the mode of production. Their rewards are mainly to be exploited by the bourgeoisie and be made poorer, not richer, by the social and technical advances of industrial development.

This process is called pauperization.

The bourgeoisie derive their class position from what Bilton et al. (1997) calls productive wealth. Productive wealth is wealth which generates additional income, such as capital invested in property or stocks and shares. However, Marx argues that it is not the bourgeoisie's high income which allows them to become capitalists, rather it is the fact that they own the means of production. This therefore also makes them the sole owners of the products and their surplus, that is, the difference between the value of the labour and the value of the product of that labour.

For example, Westergaard (1997), using statistics from government resources claimed that the power of the top class, which is only 1% of the population, has grown steadily from 1979 to the late 1990s. Denationalization of public enterprises (like British Airways and...