Sticky struggles are a metaphor that offers a new way of approaching social stratification. Three novelties give a taste of the arguments to come.

First, in place of ladders of positions or discrete classes or other concepts, I will derive rank as an inevitable counterpart of social networks. Networks, in turn, are sticky. Once formed, ties are glue that bind people into repetitive relations. This starting assumption is a commonplace, even beyond dispute. The novelty is a formal argument that stickiness must ramify to population- wide regularity: an emergent dimension of social rank. This poses a challenge, or offers new puzzle resolutions, to central dilemmas of the nature of social structure or social order.

A second novelty follows from the emergence of rank as a counterpart of sticky networks. Nearly all received opinion holds that stratification is multidimensional. But convergence to a principal dimension follows logically from the network account. Hence, one dimension is first among equals. This theory claim has testable implications. Reanalysis of several mobility data sets yields strong support.

A third novelty is a challenge to a generation or more of empirical research. Intergenerational fluidity will be shown to be less, perhaps much less, than reported heretofore. This is a corollary of the empirical superiority of the principal dimension when pitted against previous proposals for schemes of social rank.

The central metaphor, sticky struggles, emphasizes that stratification is not plural but myriad, not several but many, almost beyond counting. In place of a tidy few “dimensions,” stratification is many, many locales of activity. But complexity is not intractable. Quite the opposite. The emergent ranking of a principal dimension yields order out of complexity. Sticky struggles address head- on one of the central conundrums of stratification.

Stratification has a powerful impact, but stratification can be fuzzy, even elusive, not readily reduced to specific propositions about concrete circumstances. That may be, in part, because stratification is not a thing, a form, a principle, or anything else pure or simple. Stratification is more nearly a tangle.

Stratification is also a metaphor, likening social ranks to the layering observed in rock formations laid down by repeating cycles of sedimentation. The metaphor of strata may be unpacked into individuals somehow bound into stable social ranks. The metaphor of sticky struggles substitutes a new vision. The binding force of stable inequalities is entanglements in social networks.