- Natural Superiority Theory Concepts and Perspectives.
Natural superiority theory, also referred to as social Darwinism, was a popular and widely accepted theory of social stratification in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The main advocate of social Darwinism was Herbert Spencer, an English Sociologist, who saw social organization as an environment. It is believed that certain individuals and groups had the requisite skills or attributes to compete and to rise in that environment. Others, not so skilled or less competitive, would fail. The social Darwinists believed that their theory was part of the law of nature. Some other sociologists believed that the social inequality arising out of stratification is biologically based. Such beliefs are often heard in the case of racial stratification where, for example, whites claim biological superiority over the blacks. Even in terms of gender stratification, the underlying principle is that the men are biologically superior to women.
However, the question of relationship between the biologically based inequality and socially created inequality is difficult to answer. Rousseau refers to biologically based inequality as natural or physical, because it is established by the nature, particularly with respect to the age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind. In comparison, socially created inequality consists of different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as that of being richer, more honored, or more powerful. However, biologically based inequalities between men are treated as small and relatively
unimportant where as socially created inequalities provide the major basis for systems of social stratification.
- Functionalist Theory of Social Stratification
Functionalist theory is a theory that is most concerned with how societies maintain order. Generally, the functionalist theorists have tended to stress stability, consensus, and integration in society.
Functionalists assume that the society as similar to that of a human body, comprising several parts which form an integrated whole. Like the human body, the society's institutions must function properly to maintain stability of the entire social system. Further, certain functional prerequisites must be met if the society is to function effectively and in order.
Social stratification therefore becomes a tool to see how far it meets these functional prerequisites.
Talcott Parsons, the leading proponent of functionalist model, differentiated societies as falling on a continuum between ascribed-status-based societies and achievement- based societies. Societies in which individuals were value based on their family position, sex, race, or other traits of birth are viewed as the traditional end of the continuum. On the other end is the modem society, in which a system of rewards is used to aid in fulfilling a complex division of labour. According to Parsons, more difficult positions that demanded considerable responsibility required a system of rewards to motivate individuals to take them. In his view, stratification - which is, by definition, social inequality - was both necessary and
agreeable. Parsons believed that stratification was necessary to provide rewards for people who would take on the additional responsibility tied to difficult positions, and in his view, stratification was desirable because it allowed the social system to function smoothly.
-Marxian Theory of Social Stratification
The Marxist perspectives generally regard modem society as being divided primarily into two classes - the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat - on the basis of property ownership or non-ownership of property. Marx understood classes to be economically determined by the difference between owners of the means of production and non- owning direct producers. Class differences therefore are determined by the mode of production. Marx and Frederich Engels have divided history into five distinct epochs of production: primitive communism, Asiatic, ancient Greece and Rome, feudal society, and capitalism of these, only the ancient, the feudal and the capitalist phases received special treatment by both Marx and Engels. Ancient society was based on slavery, feudal society was based on serfdom, and capitalism on wage labour.
Each of these societies was divided into two major classes: the oppressors and the oppressed or the exploiters and the exploited. In every case the exploiters are made up of those who own the means of production but do not produce. The exploited are those who do not own the means of production but are the direct producers of social goods and services. Because the exploited do not own the means of production, they are forced, in order to live, to work for those who own and control the productive conditions of life. The exploiters live by means of the surplus produced by the exploited. As a result, the social mode of production also reproduces the social relations of production. Thus the relationship between the exploiters and the exploited is constantly renewed and conserved. The Marxists therefore in contrast to the functionalists regard stratification as a divisive rather than an integrative structure and the focus was on social strata rather than social inequality in general.
- The Weberian Theory of Social Stratification.
The work of the german sociologist Max Weber represents one of the important developments in the stratification theory. According to Weber, stratification is based on the three types of social formation, namely class, status and power or party. Property differences generate classes, power differences generate political parties and prestige differences generate status groupings or strata.
Like Marx, Weber sees class in economic terms, classes as a group of individuals who share the same position in the market economy.
johnson mwenjera answered the question on November 30, 2017 at 15:28