ABSTRACT
Social stratification is a classic subject of sociology and social history, probably attracting the attention of most researchers and instigating the most intense debates in these disciplines. The term stratification refers to the fact that similarities and differences in the position of individuals in society, that is, social inequalities, are not distributed randomly but follow specific patterns: thus we can distinguish between relatively homogeneous groups, whose members share important characteristics. Nevertheless, there has been a long-running scholarly debate over how many dimensions of inequality can and should be taken into account by stratification research, and precisely which these should be.
