Sudhir KumarAIR 42 · CSE 2017 · 277 wordsTheir whole copy
Opening
Davis and Moore gives a functional perspective on role of inequality as functional pre-requisities by its system of role allocation. According to them, major function of social stratification is to match most able person with functionally most important positions.
They say that role allocation is important -
Body · points
i) All roles must be filled and must be filled by most abled persons. ii) They must be given proper training and their performance must be evaluated.
They believe that society has only 'scarce pool of talent' to fulfill the most functionally important positions, therefore social inequality is must and born out of this functional pre-requisite. People differ in their innate abilities and positions differ in their importance.
How social inequality does role allocation? It does so by attaching high rewards for functionally important positions. This motivates people to compete for these positions. This ensures that most talented
will win through (atleast in theory). As these positions require long training (means loss of income), therefore high rewards required to motivate people for these positions. Also high rewards required to make people do their work diligently and conscientiously (like away from corruption).
He highlights functional importance of a position through it being functionally unique and/or dependency.
However, this functional deterministic model has been criticized by Tumin -
There is no established method of determining functionality; A labourer is no less important than a manager.
Theory of scarce pool of talent is farce without equality of opportunity.
This model looks only at functionality but not at dysfunctionality, e.g. how being poor/low caste can hamper chances of an intelligent student like Professor Anand Kumar to have become a renowned researcher.
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