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Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zadimensions or hierarchical systems of stratification to indicate the economic,social, and legal-political facets of society. This scheme produces three mainstratification structures: class, status, and power. Each of these threehierarchical systems is manifested in a specific group context namely classes,status groups, and political parties.Weber defined class primarily in terms of economic considerations (anindividual’s position in the market in relation to the resources in society,especially property); status was seen as an expression of social honour andprestige; and power was associated with a person’s political bargainingposition. It is, therefore, clear that Weber viewed social stratification as amultidimensional phenomenon that involved more than Marx’s classdichotomy. He also indicated that a person need not necessarily be placed atthe same level in each of these three hierarchical systems. A person whoachieved a high class and political (power) position could, for example, have alow ranking as far as social prestige is concerned.Because concepts provide access to empirical experience, different socialscientists adhering to different theories of the same construct will often studydifferent phenomena. This is the problem that Kuhn indicated with hisincommensurability thesis. According to him, the fact that scientists operatefrom different conceptual frameworks makes communication between themimpossible and excludes any comparison between theories. As far as we areconcerned, this point of view is too radical for two reasons (Kuhn also,incidentally, toned this down at a later stage): On the one hand, this wouldapply only to highly theoretical concepts — a good deal of overlap is to befound between more concrete concepts. On the other hand, it is certainly thecase that even the more abstract theories include certain lower level terms(compare our discussion of Marx’s theory in chapter 3) which would imply adegree of overlap in meaning between theories.VariablesWe shall conclude this section with a brief discussion of the concept variable.A common practice amongst social scientists is to refer to the characteristics ofthe research object that is being investigated as variables. (Strictly speaking,this is an abbreviated form of characteristics that are variable). Examples ofvariables that are commonly used in investigations include: gender, income,socio-economic class, productivity, unemployment, education, mobility,anxiety, religious affiliation, political preferences, intelligence, andachievement.There are a variety of classification principles in terms of which different typesof variables may be distinguished. We shall only discuss two in this section.129