The Changing Images of Japan’s Social Stratification: The Other Side of the ‘Quiet Transformation’

Hiroshi KANBAYASHIProfessor

Social Science Japan Journal, 2019, vol. 22, issue 1, 45-63

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to investigate longitudinal changes in the association between people’s images of social stratification (ISS) and their social status in Japan. ISS are defined as people’s perceptions of how social stratification is distributed. Existing studies on ISS have discussed how ISS are influenced by people’s reference groups and the socioeconomic situation of their society. Meanwhile, the latest study on the ‘quiet transformation of status identification’ suggested that Japanese people came to have a more realistic view of their own social status and social structure from the 1980s to the 2010s, and that this change was the key mechanism of the transformation. Combining these arguments, I expect to find that the influence of reference groups on ISS weakened from the 1980s to the 2010s. Analyzing representative national survey datasets from 1985 and 2015, I indeed find that the influence of status identification (a proxy of reference groups) on ISS decreased in 2015. This suggests that the mechanism of the ‘quiet transformation’ could be applied in explaining how ISS change over time.

Keywords: images of social stratification; status identification; inequality; reference group (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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