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Unit-3: Theories of Social Stratification-I

Tumin rejects the view that unequal rewards motivate talented individuals to fill the important Notes
positions. He argued that in reality they act as barriers to the motivation and recruitment of talent.
Closed stratification systems operate in exactly the opposite way to Davis and Moore’s theory.
Tumin further argued that Davis and Moore have failed to consider the possibility that those who
occupy highly rewarded position will erect barriers to recruitment. Tumin claims that the American
Medical Association is restricting the entry of more people into the profession. It artificially creates
the shortage of doctors and ensures high rewards for medical services. Tumin claimed that
stratification is a divisive rather than an integrating force because differential reward encourage
hostility, suspicion and distrust among the various segments of a society.

Social discrimination is present in every society and that act as a barrier. Thus the ascribed
status of untouchables prevent even the most talented from becoming Brahmins.

T.B. Bottomore in his study ‘elites and societies’ shows that even in developed countries such as
Britain and France where the stratification system is more open an overwhelming majority of the
civil servants are children of civil servants. There is also another fact that the access to improve
knowledge and skill matters a lot to fulfil the position with efficient people.
Tumin concluded that stratification, by its very nature, can never adequately perform the functions
which Davis and Moore assign to it. He maintains that, ‘It is only when there is a genuinely equal
access to recruitment and training for all potentially talented persons that differential rewards can
conceivably be justified as functional. And stratification systems are apparently inherently
antagonistic to the development of such full equality of opportunity.’
The Davis-Moore Theory of Stratification : The Life Course of a Socially
Constructed Classic
In 1945 Davis and Moore, following an earlier formulation by Davis, proposed a functional theory
of stratification that was intended to account for what they contended was the “universal necessity”
for social inequality in any social order. Beginning with an article by Tumin in 1953, the Davis-
Moore theory elicited regular analysis, commentary, criticism, and debate through the 1970s.
Although professional work on the theory has largely ceased since the late 1980s, the Davis-
Moore theory remains perhaps the single most widely cited paper in American introductory
sociology and stratification textbooks and constitutes “required reading” in hundreds, if not
thousands, of undergraduate and graduate courses throughout the United States. The present
paper traces the history of the debate and attempts to explain the theory’s longevity and vitality
in the face of what has amounted to largely negative assessments by other sociologists over the
preceding fifty years.
In 1945, two young Harvard-trained sociologists, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, published a
short, seven-page article on social and economic inequality in the younger of the discipline’s two
most prestigious journals, the American Sociological Review. Titled “Some Principles of Stratification,”
the article elicited no published commentary for a number of years. However, beginning in 1953
with the publication of Melvin Tumin’s article entitled “Some Principles of Stratification : A
Critical Analysis,” the Davis and Moore article began to receive regular public treatment and
attention within the discipline. No doubt Davis and Moore’s willingness (and, one may say,
eagerness) to join issue with Tumin contributed to the original article’s increasing notoriety. Over
time, “Some Principles of Stratification” became one of the most frequently cited—and negatively
evaluated—papers within American sociology. Yet, although widely discredited on both logical
and empirical grounds, the article remains a mainstay of conventional sociology and is even
considered a “classic.” How did this happen ?

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