ABSTRACT
One of the basic truths about the social organization of society and sport is that things are not equal. People generally realize this fact fairly early in life. We learn that some people make more money and are wealthier than others, some people are respected a lot more than others, and some people have more authority and power than others. These are things we value in society, and social stratification refers to the persisting patterns of unequal or hierarchical distribution of these valued things to different types or categories of people. The social stratification system is a set of ladders with the steps representing categories of people with differing amounts of the valued resources in a society. More stratified societies have more distance between the top and bottom steps or strata of their stratification ladders. For example, a society in which the difference in average annual incomes between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent is $150,000 is more stratified than one in which this gap is $75,000. Professional sports leagues that have more salary stratification may have the same base starting salaries for players as others but pay their top players much more than the others.
