“Social stratification is claimed to contribute to the maintenance of social order and stability in society. Critically assess.” (2022)
The claim belongs to the consensus tradition: ranked positions, backed by shared values, are said to hold a complex division of labour together. Conflict theorists read the same hierarchy as a source of tension held down by power. The answer depends on whether stratification is accepted as legitimate.
The claim at its strongest
- Value consensus: Talcott Parsons argued that people are ranked by how far they embody common values. Because rewards express agreed standards, winners and losers alike accept the order, and resentment is contained.
- Coordination: a specialised economy needs planners and executors. Differences of authority and prestige make that coordination workable.
- Role allocation: Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore (1945) held that unequal rewards place and motivate talented people in functionally important positions, so society’s key tasks are performed dependably.
- Stability through belief: the Hindu ideas of dharma and karma long presented each jati‘s place as morally right, giving the caste order remarkable continuity.
Critical assessment
- Order may be coerced, not consensual. Karl Marx saw stratification as exploitation stabilised by ideology and the state; Ralf Dahrendorf (Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959) traced conflict to unequal authority itself.
- Durkheim’s own warning. Émile Durkheim (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893) called a division of labour imposed by inherited inequality forced. It breeds conflict rather than solidarity; cohesion needs equal external conditions of competition.
- Hostility and distrust. Melvin Tumin (1953) argued that rewards the less privileged cannot accept encourage suspicion between strata and so limit integration.
- Acceptance is often pragmatic. Michael Mann (“The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy”, 1970) found that subordinate groups comply out of dependence and a lack of alternatives, not moral agreement. That is a thinner and more fragile order.
- Unequal societies fare worse. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (The Spirit Level, 2009) linked wider income gaps across rich countries to more violence, imprisonment and distrust.
- Stratification generates movements. Gail Omvedt (Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, 1976) traced how non-Brahmin movements challenged hierarchy from below.
Indian evidence
- Caste mobilisation: Maratha, Jat and Patidar agitations for reserved status show ranked groups competing, often violently, over their share of rewards.
- Pressure to count: Bihar’s caste survey (2023) put Extremely Backward Classes at 36.01% and Other Backward Classes at 27.12% of the population. It fuelled demands for shares proportionate to numbers, and in April 2025 the Union Cabinet approved caste enumeration in the forthcoming Census.
- Legitimacy through correction: reservation and democratic representation have helped absorb this conflict, because the Constitution treats caste hierarchy as illegitimate.
Weighing the claim
Stratification stabilises society only under conditions functionalists take for granted: shared belief that rewards are fair, real mobility, and institutions that channel grievance. Where hierarchy is inherited and visibly unjust, the same structure produces conflict. David Lockwood‘s distinction between social integration and system integration (1964) helps here: a stratified system can run smoothly while the groups inside it remain deeply at odds.
Conclusion
The claim holds for legitimated and open inequality, not for stratification as such. India shows the difference: stability has come less from hierarchy than from democratic efforts to loosen it.