3 Review(s)

This book is an innovative and comprehensive volume on Social Stratification. One segment of this volume comprises theoretical and conceptual dimensions of social stratification and mobility, and the other segment is a comprehensive analysis of empirical studies of social stratification, including caste, class, ethnicity, power, social inequality, social mobility, etc. The bearing of theoretical frameworks and concepts on empirical realities and of the latter on the former has been examined in the Indian context. The author questions the prevailing notions of caste, class and village; his main concern is to see how caste-class polarity and the country-town divide have ceased to exist and how the nexus between them has emerged in the wake of structural and cultural transformation in contemporary India.The book brings out the challenge to the hold of entrenched castes and classes and the emergence of a new system of theoretical and conceptual paradigms and consequent new patterns of social stratification and mobility. New questions relating to the persisting social order have created new situations and social encounters. This indicates the emergence of a new social milieu, negating conventional notions and definitions. To deal with such a social ambience, Sharma attempts an interdisciplinary approach for a comprehensive and intense study of social stratification and mobility.