THE FIELD of social stratification is at this writing without a pub-
lished textbook, although a few months ago a voluminous and well
selected book of readings appeared. Yet our research output in
this field has been immense. For several years the American
Sociological Society's Census of Research has recorded major
research activity on stratification. The special issue of the Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology pertaining to stratification, in 1953,
contained a bibliography of 333 items to which we could add at
least another hundred titles without exhausting the available
materials.

It seems that the time is now ripe for someone to attempt a
reasonably brief integration of many of these scattered theoretical
and empirical works, to present to advanced students a reasonably
inclusive and consistent concept of the field of stratification, a
basic vocabulary, some of the main ideas and issues and a repre-
sentative cross section of the empirical materials and critical
analyses of them. This we have tried to do. The book is in no sense
encyclopedic; it is concerned with stratification in the United
States only, and even for this society does not treat all of the
possible theoretical problems. We have tried, in Chapters 2 and
3, to make our orientation explicit. We do not presume to have
written a "standard" advanced textbook in the field, for the field
is yet too fluid for anyone to know what is standard and what is
tangential.

The plan of the book deserves a brief comment. Part I is a
semantic, theoretical, and methodological orientation to stratifica-
tion literature. A number of theoretical positions are taken and
are, somewhat a priori, rationalized. Part II is a series of chapters,

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