Page 47 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes occupation is strictly restricted. Tumin, their famous intellectual opponent has criticised
their theory on several grounds. There is no objective way of measuring the functional
importance of position which was treated by Davis and Moore as the basis of distribution of
rewards. Tumin argues that Davis and Moore have ignored the influences of power on the
unequal distribution of rewards.
• Tumin also questions the view that the training required for important position would be
regarded as a sacrifice and therefore in need of compensation. He sees no reason for continuing
this compensation for the rest of an individual’s working life.
• Tumin rejects the view that unequal rewards motivate talented individuals to fill the important
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. 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.
• Functionalists view, society as a system that is a set of interconnected parts which together
form a whole. The basic unit of analysis is society and its various parts are understood
primarily in terms of their relationship to the whole. They took society as an organism they
tried to explain how a society is able to survive. The underlying assumption here is that all
societies want stability, order and peace. They presume that there are certain basic needs of
every society which they called functional prerequisites these needs have to be met for the
stability of society. Thus functionalist theory explains how stratification contribute for the
maintenance of stability and order in society.
• Kingsley Davis (1908-1997), a student of Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons, received his
Ph. D. from Harvard’s Department of Sociology in 1936. Parsons, at the time, was gathering
around him the faculty and students who would assist him in developing functional theory,
including Davis and Moore. In the late 1930s Davis held a position at Pennsylvania State
College (now Pennsylvania State University), followed by positions at Princeton University
during the 1940s; Columbia University during the 1950s; and the University of California at
Berkeley from the late 1950s until his retirement in the 1980s. Davis’ primary academic
interest eventually centered on demography.
• In 1953 Melvin Tumin published the first public commentary on the Davis-Moore article.
Tumin carefully critiqued their thesis and later engaged in a series of published exchanges
with Davis and Moore regarding the theory.
• The visibility, and perhaps the tenor, of the debate with Tumin, as well as its location within
the pages of the ASR, engendered wide attention and led to more published responses to the
original article. Indeed, the Davis and Moore article is now recognized as “one of the most
widely cited and debated pieces to ever appear in a sociology journal,” a rather remarkable
feat for an argument consisting of fewer than 5,000 words. No fewer than thirty substantive
articles and commentaries have appeared addressing the Davis-Moore article in professional
journals in the United States over the years, many written by prominent members of the
profession.
• While primarily an American thesis advanced and debated by American, academic
sociologists, papers, books, and course syllabi addressing the article and ensuing controversy
have been written by foreign authors and appeared in languages other than English, a
further indicator of the reach, if not influence, of the article. Given the immediate postwar

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