Wilbert Ellis Moore is remembered above all for seven pages written with Kingsley Davis in 1945. Some Principles of Stratification asked not whether inequality is just but what it does, and answered that every society faces the problem of getting its members into the right positions and making them work hard once there. The solution societies hit upon, on this account, is differential reward — an arrangement of unequal returns attached not to persons but to positions, and calibrated by their functional importance and by the scarcity of personnel able to fill them.

Moore was, however, far more than one paper. He was among the first American sociologists to treat industrialisation and economic development as sociological problems rather than economic ones, he wrote a standard short treatise on social change, and he opened up the study of time as a social resource. Read together, his work is an attempt to make functionalism handle movement — labour markets, development, careers, schedules — rather than only equilibrium.

Life and intellectual formation

Moore was born in Illinois in 1914 and took his doctorate at Harvard in 1940, at the moment when Talcott Parsons was assembling the structural functionalist programme there and when the young Kingsley Davis was a fellow student. That Harvard training left two permanent marks: a habit of asking what a social arrangement contributes to the working of the whole, and a taste for constructing general propositions rather than reporting cases.

He spent the core of his career at Princeton, working on labour and development, before moving to the Russell Sage Foundation and later to the University of Denver; he was president of the American Sociological Association in 1966. His output was unusually wide for a theorist — industrial relations, the professions, economic development, comparative sociology, social change — and it was almost always pitched as an attempt to specify mechanisms rather than to celebrate order.

The functional theory of stratification

The 1945 argument begins from a functional prerequisite: a society must distribute its members among social positions and motivate them both to seek those positions and to perform the duties attached to them. If all positions were equally pleasant, equally important and equally easy to fill, placement would raise no difficulty. They are not, so societies must possess inducements.

Moore and Davis identified the rewards built into positions as falling into three kinds — things that sustain life and comfort, things that provide humour and diversion, and things that serve self-respect and self-expansion. Rights to unequal amounts of these rewards, distributed unequally across positions, are what we call a system of stratification. Stratification, in this reading, is not a plan anyone designed; it is an unconsciously evolved device by which societies ensure that important work is done by competent people.

Two variables fix how much reward a position must carry. The first is functional importance: how far the society depends on that position, whether because it is uniquely necessary or because other positions depend upon it. The second is the scarcity of personnel, which is a matter partly of native talent and partly of the training required — where training is long, costly and burdensome, sacrifices must be compensated, typically through the future prospect of higher income and prestige. High reward therefore attaches to positions that are both important and hard to fill; positions that are important but easily filled, or difficult but marginal, do not command it.

The theory has real explanatory reach. It accounts for the pattern of medical and technical remuneration, for the prestige of religious and governmental office where sacred and political functions are pivotal, and for the way occupational hierarchies shift as a society's dependence shifts — priests declining and engineers rising as production becomes technically complex.

Industrialisation, labour and development

Moore's empirical preoccupation was the social side of economic change. In Industrialization and Labor (1951) he argued that building an industrial economy is not primarily a matter of capital and machinery but of creating a labour force — recruiting workers out of agrarian and kin-based settings, and securing their commitment to the discipline of wage employment, timekeeping, supervision and impersonal authority. He treated the resulting frictions, including absenteeism, high turnover and industrial conflict, as predictable features of transition rather than as failures of character, and he insisted that the sequence and pace of industrialisation depended on pre-existing social structure.

That interest continued in his work on industrial relations, where he read the factory as a system of authority requiring legitimation. The developmental strand also disciplined his functionalism: societies in his hands are always in the middle of rearrangement, and their institutions are only ever provisionally in fit with one another.

Social change and social time

Social Change (1963) made the case that change is the normal condition of societies rather than a disturbance of a resting state. Moore distinguished change in a structure from change of a structure, treated direction, rate and reversibility as separate questions, and rejected both unilinear evolutionism and cyclical theories in favour of specifying the sources of change and the resistances they meet.

Man, Time, and Society, published the same year, is his most original single book. Moore argued that time is a scarce social resource which organisations must allocate as deliberately as money or labour, and he analysed the requirements this generates: synchronisation, so that activities coincide; sequence, so that they occur in a workable order; and rate, so that they occur at a sustainable frequency. The schedule, on this view, is a social institution, and much of the felt pressure of modern work follows from the fact that industrial societies coordinate by clock rather than by task.

Criticisms and Moore's reply

The 1945 paper drew one of the most famous rejoinders in sociology. Melvin Tumin (1953) argued that functional importance cannot be measured independently of the rewards it is meant to explain, that stratification restricts rather than enlarges the discovery of talent by narrowing access to training, that the sacrifices of training are largely borne by parents and repaid many times over, and that motivation could be secured by intrinsic satisfaction or duty without unequal material reward. Marxist and Weberian critics added that the theory ignores inherited property, market power and the capacity of advantaged groups to close positions against competition — and that a theory which explains inequality by its usefulness inevitably functions as its ideological justification.

Moore's response was to narrow the claim rather than abandon it. In But Some Are More Equal than Others (1963) he restated the theory as being about positions rather than persons and about the necessity of some differentiation of rewards rather than the legitimacy of any existing distribution. He conceded that comparative measurement of functional importance remained undeveloped, that actual inequalities in societies like the United States exceeded anything functional requirements could justify, and that the transmission of advantage across generations was a genuine dysfunction — since it wastes talent the theory itself claims societies need. The exchange narrowed the disagreement without closing it, and the pair of papers remains the standard teaching case of functionalist and conflict reasoning applied to the same fact.

Legacy

Davis and Moore set the terms in which stratification was argued for two generations, and the debate they generated produced the vocabulary — functional importance, scarcity of personnel, positional rather than personal reward — that later work on meritocracy and equality of opportunity still uses. Moore's insistence that development is a social process, not merely an economic one, prefigured the sociology of work in industrialising countries.

For the UPSC answer

Never present Davis and Moore as a defence of existing inequality; present it as a functional explanation of why some unequal reward exists, resting on the two variables of functional importance and scarcity of personnel. State the mechanism in full — placement and motivation, the three kinds of reward, the compensation of training sacrifice — because precision here separates a good script from a vague one. Then bring Tumin's five objections in sequence and finish with Moore's own concession that inherited advantage wastes the pool of talent, which lets you show the theory being revised from inside rather than merely refuted. Add an Indian illustration to make the critique concrete: where caste and class restrict access to training, high rewards indicate closure and not scarcity of ability. Close by noting that the debate is really about whether reward follows function or function is defined by those already rewarded.

References & further reading

  1. Davis, K., & Moore, W. E. (1945). Some Principles of Stratification. American Sociological Review, 10(2), 242–249.
  2. Moore, W. E. (1951). Industrialization and Labor: Social Aspects of Economic Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  3. Moore, W. E. (1963). Social Change. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
  4. Moore, W. E. (1963). Man, Time, and Society. New York: Wiley.
  5. Moore, W. E. (1963). But Some Are More Equal than Others. American Sociological Review, 28(1), 13–18.
  6. Tumin, M. M. (1953). Some Principles of Stratification: A Critical Analysis. American Sociological Review, 18(4), 387–394.