Breaking down the question

The statement embodies the functionalist claim that stratification helps maintain social order and stability. The command critically assess requires you to set out that claim, weigh the evidence and arguments for and against it, and arrive at a reasoned judgement — not merely to describe two schools of thought.

Social stratification is the structured, institutionalised inequality of a society into layers that enjoy unequal shares of rewards, power and prestige. Social order and stability refers to the persistence, integration and smooth functioning of society over time. The proposition, therefore, is that ranked inequality is a source of cohesion rather than conflict.

At 20 marks, the essay should present the functionalist case fully, subject it to the conflict and internal critiques, and adjudicate — probably concluding that stratification can support order but often at the cost of justice, and frequently by generating the very tensions it is said to contain.

How to approach it

  • State the functionalist thesis that stratification is a functional necessity contributing to order.
  • Develop the mechanisms: role allocation, motivation through differential rewards, value consensus and integration.
  • Turn to the internal critique of Melvin Tumin and the conflict critique of Marx and Weberians.
  • Weigh the two sides — distinguishing whether stratification maintains order or merely conserves the interests of the dominant.
  • Deliver a balanced verdict.

Draw throughout on the theories of social stratification notes.

Model answer

The claim that social stratification maintains social order and stability is the central proposition of the functionalist theory of inequality, argued most influentially by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore in 1945. On this view, every society faces the problem of placing and motivating individuals in a division of labour, and stratification is the device by which it solves that problem.

The functionalist case rests on several mechanisms. Some positions in society are functionally more important than others and require scarce talent and prolonged, sacrificial training. To ensure that the ablest people are induced to occupy and diligently perform these roles, society must attach differential rewards — income, prestige and power — to them. Stratification is thus a system of motivation that guarantees the key roles are competently filled, which in turn keeps society working smoothly. Talcott Parsons added that stratification reflects a value consensus: positions are ranked according to how far they embody commonly held values, so the hierarchy expresses shared moral judgements and binds members into an integrated whole. Inequality, on this account, is both inevitable and integrative — a source of order rather than of division.

There is some force in this. Every known complex society is stratified, differential rewards do appear to motivate effort and training, and shared evaluations of worth can foster a sense of legitimate order. Where a hierarchy is widely accepted as fair, it may indeed reduce open conflict and lend stability.

Yet the claim demands serious criticism. The internal critique of Melvin Tumin (1953) dismantled the Davis–Moore thesis on its own terms. Tumin questioned how one could objectively establish which positions are functionally most important, noting that a society can survive the loss of many managers more easily than that of its water carriers or farmers. He argued that stratification is frequently dysfunctional: by restricting opportunity to those already privileged, it wastes the talent of the disadvantaged, entrenches inherited advantage across generations, and breeds resentment and hostility rather than integration. Far from ensuring the best fill the best roles, ascriptive barriers of class, caste, race and gender distort the supposed meritocracy. Stratification, then, can be a source of instability, not order.

The conflict tradition presses the point further. For Karl Marx, stratification into classes reflects the relationship to the means of production and expresses the exploitation of the many by the few. Any order it produces is the coerced or ideologically masked stability of a system that serves the ruling class; beneath the surface lies antagonism that periodically erupts into conflict and, ultimately, transformation. What functionalists read as consensus, Marxists read as false consciousness and the legitimation of inequality. Weberians, while pluralising the bases of stratification into class, status and party, similarly emphasise the struggle over life chances rather than harmonious integration.

Weighing these positions, the crucial ambiguity is between two senses of order. Stratification may indeed contribute to social order in the minimal sense that it allocates roles and secures a persistent, functioning arrangement of society. But this is often the conservation of an existing distribution of advantage rather than a genuinely consensual and just cohesion. Stability secured by the acceptance — willing or resigned — of inequality is fragile: it depends on the disadvantaged not perceiving the arrangement as unfair, and history shows that when they do, stratification becomes a wellspring of movements, protest and upheaval. The persistence of caste hierarchies alongside anti-caste struggle, or of class inequality alongside labour and revolutionary movements, illustrates that stratification simultaneously orders and destabilises.

The reasoned assessment, therefore, is qualified. Stratification can contribute to order and stability, especially where it is buttressed by value consensus and offers real mobility. But the functionalist claim overstates the case: it mistakes the conservation of privilege for functional harmony, understates the dysfunctions Tumin exposed, and ignores the conflict that entrenched inequality generates. Stratification is as much a source of tension as a guarantor of stability, and whether it maintains order depends on how far it is perceived as legitimate and how open it is to mobility.

Examiner's perspective

The command critically assess means the examiner is looking for a defended judgement, not a two-paragraph balance sheet. Weak scripts describe Davis–Moore and then Marx without adjudicating; strong scripts argue a position while doing justice to both sides.

The most rewarded answers pair the Davis–Moore thesis accurately with Tumin's internal critique and the Marxist charge of legitimation, and they sharpen the analysis by distinguishing order as functional integration from order as the conservation of privilege. Concrete illustration — caste, class, movements of the disadvantaged — earns credit, as does a confident concluding verdict that concedes the grain of truth in the claim before qualifying it. Precise attribution and disciplined use of terms such as value consensus, dysfunction and legitimation secure the higher band.