Resumen

PARRA OLIVARES, Javier E  y  PENA R, Rosa Mercedes. ocial classes in the Olegario Villalobos Parish, Municipality of Maracaibo. Revista de Ciencias Sociales [online]. 2009, vol.15, n.2, pp.245-256. ISSN 1315-9518.

This article reports the results of a study carried out regarding social classes in the Olegario Villalobos parish of the Maracaibo municipality, State of Zulia, in 2006, which is part of a much broader research project titled: Social classification of the Parishes in the Maracaibo Municipality of the State of Zulia. The article also presents the methodological aspects involved in the social classification process that combines Marxist and functionalist concepts, by operationalizing the social class variable in two dimensions: class-category and class-situation. The greatest utility of this work is the contribution of differentiating social classes in small political-territorial spaces, where factors of a more global social order, such as political power and the accumulation of wealth in large-scale productive cycles, are not present. Results show four (4) social classes in the Olegario Villalobos Parish: I “The small proprietors”; Social Class II, “The diploma class”; III, “The modest middle class”; and IV, “The Underemployed Class.”

Palabras clave : Social class; social stratification; class-category; class-situation; Olegario Villalobos parish.