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A person may have status of a daughter, wife, mother, student, worker, church member and a citizen. The term "status set" was coined by Robert K. Merton in 1957. He made a clear distinction between a "role set" and a "status set". [1] Merton stated that status set is the set of statuses in a society while role set is the set of roles in a society
Achieved status is distinguished from ascribed status by virtue of being earned through the set of accomplished tasks and/or goals. Many positions are a mixture of achievement and ascription. For instance, a person who has achieved the status of being a physician is more likely to have the ascribed status of being born into a wealthy family.
Weberian life chances can be seen as an expansion on some of Karl Marx's ideas. Both Weber and Marx agreed that economic factors were important in determining one's future, but Weber's concepts of life chances are more complex; inspired by, but different from Marx's views on social stratification and social class.
Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings, or purposes. Examples of social structure include family, religion, law, economy, and class. It contrasts with "social system", which refers to the parent structure in which these various structures are embedded.
It is the formal structure of role and status that can form in a small, stable group. [1] An individual may belong to multiple social systems at once; [2] examples of social systems include nuclear family units, communities, cities, nations, college campuses, religions, corporations, and industries.
In capitalist society movement between classes is a possibility. Hence the use of the term "The American Dream" to show the ability of people to ascend to a higher class through hard work and ingenuity. "Class composition is forever changing, to the point where there may be a completely new set of families". [15]
Robert K. Merton describes "role set" as the "complement of social relationships in which persons are involved because they occupy a particular social status." [2] For instance, the role of a doctor has a role set comprising colleagues, nurses, patients, hospital administrators, etc. The term "role set" was coined by Merton in 1957.
A social class (or, simply, class), as in class society, is a set of subjectively defined concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, [5] the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.