“Elucidate the basic premises of Davis’ structural-functional theory of social stratification. How far is it relevant in understanding contemporary Indian society?” (2016)
Kingsley Davis, writing with Wilbert E. Moore in “Some Principles of Stratification” (American Sociological Review, 1945), gave the classic functionalist answer to why inequality is found everywhere. In India, where achievement-based class and birth-based caste coexist, the theory works as a partial lens.
Basic premises
- Universality implies necessity: no known society is unstratified, so inequality must meet a requirement of every social system.
- Positions differ in functional importance: some are more vital to survival, judged by how unique they are and how many other positions depend on them.
- Talent and training are scarce: few people can acquire the needed skills, and training involves sacrifice.
- Differential rewards as inducement: positions must offer greater sustenance and comfort, humour and diversion, and self-respect and ego expansion.
- Prestige follows reward: unequal access to rewards produces unequal prestige and esteem between strata.
- Stratification is an unconsciously evolved device, ensuring that important positions are conscientiously filled by the most qualified.
- Rank depends on context: priests rank high where sacred values dominate, and technical experts where secular goals do.
Where the theory helps in India
- Achievement-based occupational hierarchy: since liberalisation, doctors, engineers, managers and software professionals command high incomes and prestige. Families invest heavily in coaching for entrance examinations, as the logic of scarce skills predicts.
- Meritocratic selection: open examinations for the civil services, IITs and medical colleges institutionalise the idea that important positions go to the qualified.
- Shifting functional emphasis: the decline of priestly prestige against professional prestige fits the premise that rank follows a society’s dominant values.
- Traditional interdependence: William H. Wiser (The Hindu Jajmani System, 1936) described caste occupations as reciprocal services, echoing the functionalist picture.
Where it fails
- Ascription: caste assigns status by birth, not talent. Thomas O. Beidelman (1959) read the jajmani system as exploitation of low castes by landowning castes, and Joan Mencher (1974) showed how it looked from the bottom.
- Importance does not match reward: sanitation work is vital to public health, yet it is the most stigmatised and worst paid. The Union government told Parliament in December 2023 that over 400 people died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between 2018 and 2023, in work historically imposed on Dalit castes.
- Caste as hidden capital: Satish Deshpande (“Caste and Castelessness”, 2013) argued that upper castes have turned inherited caste advantage into educational and professional capital, so apparent merit carries birth privilege.
- Unequal starting points: Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell (2007) found employers less likely to respond to Dalit and Muslim applicants than to equally qualified upper-caste applicants.
- Power and extreme concentration: according to estimates by Thomas Piketty and colleagues (2024), the top 1% held 40.1% of wealth in 2022-23. That reflects inheritance and political economy more than scarce talent.
- Constitutional rejection: reservations, and the 2024 ruling allowing sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, treat inherited hierarchy as an injustice, not a functional arrangement.
Conclusion
Davis’s theory is relevant to the expanding class and occupational sphere of contemporary India, where incentives and credentials matter. It explains little of caste, the persistence of stigma, or rising wealth concentration. In India it is best combined with conflict and closure theories.