Revision summary
Functionalists claim unequal reward sorts talent and keeps order. Davis-Moore, Parsons, and a reading of Durkheim support that claim. Tumin, Marx, Weber, and Dahrendorf show circularity, exploitation, and normal conflict. Caste, Mandal, gender, and world-system hierarchy illustrate order for some and injury for others. Coordination of roles is not a moral proof of a given ranking.
Model answer
Introduction
Functional theory claims that ranking people is how a society places talent, rewards duty, and keeps order. Conflict theory answers that stratification is organised advantage, and that the order it keeps is the order of the dominant. The claim is half a description of integration and half an ideology of inequality.
Body
The order-and-stability claim
- Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore argued that unequal rewards attach to functionally important roles so that the able are motivated to train.
- Talcott Parsons treated stratification as a ranking of valued roles that supports pattern maintenance in the social system.
- Emile Durkheim’s hierarchical organisation of functions in organic solidarity can be read as a moral ranking that prevents anomic disorder.
- Caste apologists have used a similar idiom: each varna keeps the whole stable.
Critical assessment
- Melvin Tumin: barriers of birth waste talent; the theory is circular when importance is inferred from pay.
- Karl Marx: class is exploitation. Stability is often the stability of surplus extraction, broken by struggle, not a harmony of roles.
- Max Weber: class, status, and party can conflict. Status honour may freeze order while the market moves, or the reverse.
- Ralf Dahrendorf: authority conflict is normal in associations. Stratification organises dispute as well as quiet.
- Indian caste as “order” included exclusion, violence, and blocked mobility. Mandal showed that re-ranking through the state is itself a conflict over stability.
- Gender: Ann Oakley and Sylvia Walby show that household ranking keeps a kind of order by unpaid care. NFHS sex ratios and work gaps measure the cost.
- Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein: global stratification can stabilise a core by destabilising a periphery.
What remains usable
- Some coordination of roles is real. Hospitals and railways need graded skills.
- The leap from “needs coordination” to “therefore this hierarchy is just and must persist” is the ideological step.
- Order can be produced by consent, as Antonio Gramsci argued, or by coercion. Stratification does both.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD ST[Stratification] --> F[Functional placement Davis Moore Parsons] ST --> C[Conflict class status gender] F --> ORD[Apparent order] C --> BRK[Struggle and exclusion] ORD --> Q[Whose stability]
Conclusion
Stratification can coordinate roles and so look like stability. Davis-Moore and Parsons named that function too cleanly. Marx, Tumin, Weber, and Indian caste and gender files show that the same ranking manufactures conflict and waste. Assess who is stabilised, and at whose cost.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Critically examine the relevance of Durkheim's views on religion in contemporary society.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2022 · Q5(a)). View answer →
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Does criticism mean a society can have no ranks?
No. It means a given rank order is not self-justifying as the only possible stability.
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Is caste a functional stratification system?
It coordinated occupations for some historical periods. It also enforced ritual exclusion. Function talk cannot wash that.
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