Stratification, Institutions & Social Change — UPSC Sociology Optional Paper I

Weightage: Units 5 to 10 of Paper I. In sheer length this is the larger part of the paper, and Unit 5 on stratification is the block most directly reusable in Paper II, where caste, class and agrarian structure are all stratification questions in Indian dress.

1. Stratification: concepts before theories

Social stratification is the arrangement of a society into a hierarchy of layers whose members have unequal access to valued resources — and the definition already contains the examinable point, which is that stratification is structured inequality. A society in which some people happen to have more than others is unequal; a society in which the inequality is patterned, persists across generations, and is supported by institutions and beliefs is stratified.

Four concepts must be separated cleanly, because questions routinely turn on the distinctions.

Inequality is the unequal distribution of a resource. Hierarchy adds ranking, so positions are ordered rather than merely different. Exclusion adds a barrier: certain groups are denied access to institutions, spaces or opportunities on the basis of group membership rather than of individual capacity — and the sociological interest lies in the fact that exclusion can persist through informal mechanisms after formal barriers are removed. Deprivation is the condition of lacking what is necessary; relative deprivation, following Merton, is dissatisfaction measured against a reference group rather than against an absolute standard, which is why objective improvement can coexist with rising discontent.

Poverty likewise splits. Absolute poverty is the inability to secure subsistence, defined by a fixed threshold. Relative poverty is a shortfall against the prevailing standard of one's own society, and is a measure of inequality rather than of destitution. Multidimensional poverty treats deprivation as compound — nutrition, schooling, sanitation, fuel, assets — on the argument that income is a poor proxy for what income is meant to secure. The choice among these is not technical: each answers a different question, and the political consequences of choosing differ.

Equality requires its own distinctions. Formal or legal equality is equal standing before the law. Equality of opportunity requires that positions be open to all on relevant criteria, which is compatible with very unequal outcomes. Equality of outcome requires that the distribution itself be equalised. The Indian constitutional scheme is an instructive case because it deliberately adopts substantive rather than merely formal equality — permitting differential treatment where it is required to make equality effective, which is why reservation is not a departure from the equality provision but an application of it.

2. The three theories of stratification

Every stratification question can be answered by setting these three against each other, and the strongest answers do so rather than presenting them in sequence.

The structural-functionalist theory

Davis and Moore's argument is that stratification is universal, necessary and functional. Its logic: societies contain positions of unequal functional importance; some require scarce talent and lengthy training; unequal rewards are the mechanism by which the most capable are motivated to undertake that training and to fill the most demanding positions. Stratification is therefore an unconsciously evolved device by which a society ensures its most important positions are conscientiously filled.

Tumin's critique is the standard one and must be given in specifics rather than summarised. Functional importance cannot be measured independently of the rewards it supposedly explains, which makes the argument circular. The account ignores the power of incumbents to restrict entry to their own positions and thereby to protect the scarcity that justifies their reward. It ignores the barriers that prevent talent from reaching training at all, so that the pool from which the "most capable" are drawn is itself socially produced. It assumes motivation responds to material reward alone. And it neglects stratification's dysfunctions — the waste of undiscovered talent, the hostility it generates, and the ideological work required to make it seem legitimate.

The Marxist theory

Class is defined by relation to the means of production, not by income, occupation or prestige — which is why the scheme is dichotomous in principle however many gradations appear in practice. Stratification is not functional but exploitative: the surplus produced by labour is appropriated by those who own the means of production, and the arrangement is sustained by the state and by ideology.

The mechanism of change runs through class consciousness: a class in itself, defined objectively by common position, becomes a class for itself when it recognises that position and organises around it. The obstacles are as important as the objective condition — ideology, false consciousness, the fragmentation of the workforce, and the ruling ideas of an epoch being the ideas of its ruling class.

Critiques: the predicted polarisation did not occur, and the growth of a large intermediate stratum of managers and professionals is difficult to accommodate; the separation of ownership from control in the modern corporation complicates the property criterion; the account of consciousness has proved weaker than the account of structure, since objectively exploited classes have repeatedly failed to develop it; and non-class stratification by gender, race, ethnicity and caste is not reducible to class, though later Marxist work has attempted the reduction.

The Weberian theory

Weber's is a multi-dimensional scheme, and this is its decisive advantage. Stratification occurs along three analytically distinct dimensions:

• Class is economic, defined by market position — what a person can command in the labour or commodity market, which includes property but also skill and credential. Weber therefore allows many classes rather than two.
• Status is social, consisting of honour or prestige, expressed in style of life, consumption patterns, commensality and connubium, and enforced by social closure — status groups restrict association and marriage to preserve their standing.
• Party is political, consisting of organised association to acquire power.

The three vary independently. A wealthy but socially disdained trader has class without status; an impoverished priest may have status without class; a party functionary may command power with neither. This is the single most useful proposition in Indian stratification analysis, because caste is a status order, class is an economic order, and the two demonstrably do not coincide.

Critiques: the scheme describes stratification better than it explains its origin; it risks fragmenting into a multiplicity of positions without a principle organising them; and its emphasis on market position understates production relations.

3. Dimensions and mobility

Class, status, gender, ethnicity and race are the syllabus's named dimensions, and the analytical point running through them is that stratification systems are rarely single. Intersectionality — the proposition that positions on different dimensions combine to produce experiences that neither dimension alone predicts — is the standard contemporary framing: a Dalit woman agricultural labourer occupies a position not derivable by adding caste, gender and class.

Social mobility is movement between positions.

• Open and closed systems: a closed system allocates position by ascription and permits little movement — caste in its classical description being the standard illustration; an open system allocates by achievement. All real systems are intermediate.
• Types: vertical mobility is upward or downward movement between ranks; horizontal is movement between positions at the same level. Intergenerational mobility compares a person to their parents; intragenerational compares a person to themselves over a career. Structural mobility results from change in the shape of the occupational structure — if the economy creates more professional posts, upward movement occurs without anyone displacing anyone — whereas exchange or circulation mobility is movement within a fixed structure, and is the more demanding test of openness.

The distinction between structural and exchange mobility is the most examinable point here: much observed mobility in developing economies is structural, so the appearance of openness may reflect economic transformation rather than a genuine loosening of ascriptive barriers.

Sources and causes: education and credentialism, occupational change and industrialisation, migration, differential fertility across strata, and state policy including reservation. Obstacles: cultural and social capital that schooling assumes but does not supply, network closure in recruitment, endogamy, and the conversion of educational advantage into occupational advantage.

4. Work and economic life

The syllabus asks for the social organisation of work across types of society, and the comparison is best made on three axes: who owns the means of production, how surplus is extracted, and how the worker is bound.

Slave society: the worker is owned as property; surplus is extracted directly by force; the labourer is bound by ownership itself and has no legal personality in relation to work.

Feudal society: the worker holds land but owes labour, produce or rent to a lord; extraction is by customary obligation backed by extra-economic coercion; binding is through tenure and status, not contract. Legitimacy rests on tradition and reciprocal obligation, which is the sociologically interesting feature — the relation is diffuse and personal rather than specific and contractual.

Industrial or capitalist society: the worker owns no means of production and sells labour power under a formally free contract; surplus is extracted through the wage relation rather than by force; binding is economic necessity rather than legal compulsion. The formal freedom of the contract, combined with substantive compulsion, is the feature Marx thought defining.

Formal and informal organisation of work. The formal organisation is the official structure of positions, rules and procedures; the informal organisation is the network of actual relationships, norms and practices that emerges within it. The Hawthorne studies established the classic finding: work groups generate their own output norms, enforce them socially, and can restrict production against management incentives — which demonstrated that workers respond to group membership rather than only to individual reward, and founded the human relations school.

For Indian and developing-economy material, "informal sector" carries a different and equally examinable meaning: employment outside the regulatory framework, without contract, social security or enforceable protection. The sociological point is that informality is not a residual awaiting absorption but a durable structural feature, and that the same enterprise may combine formal and informal labour deliberately.

Labour and society covers the transition from labour as a status relation to labour as a commodity, the emergence of trade unions and collective bargaining, and the more recent fragmentation of the workforce through subcontracting, casualisation and platform mediation — which reproduces the classical dimensions of alienation while removing the concentration that once produced collective organisation.

5. Politics and society

Theories of power

Weber defines power as the probability that an actor will realise their will despite resistance, and distinguishes it from authority, which is power regarded as legitimate. His three grounds of legitimacy — traditional, charismatic and rational-legal — are covered in the thinkers chapter and are the standard entry point.

The Marxist theory treats the state as an instrument of the dominant class, though later work complicates this. Gramsci's concept of hegemony is the most examinable development: domination operates not only through coercion but through consent manufactured in civil society, where the ruling class's world-view is established as common sense. This explains political stability without continuous repression, and it relocates the site of struggle to culture and ideas.

The elite theory rejects both. Pareto argued that every society is ruled by a minority, that elites are distinguished by superior qualities, and that history is a circulation of elites between two psychological types — lions who rule by force and foxes who rule by cunning. Mosca grounded the same claim organisationally: a minority is always organised and a majority is not, and organisation is the source of rule. Michels's iron law of oligarchy applies this to organisations themselves, including democratic and socialist ones: the requirements of organisation — specialisation, expertise, continuity — concentrate power in a leadership that develops interests distinct from the membership.

Mills's power elite identifies an American configuration in which the leaders of the corporate economy, the military and the political executive are interlocked by shared origins, movement between the sectors, and common outlook, and take the consequential decisions outside democratic processes. It is a structural rather than a psychological account, which distinguishes it from Pareto.

Pluralism is the counter-position: power is dispersed among competing groups, no single group prevails across all issues, and the state acts as a broker. Dahl's studies of local decision-making are its empirical foundation. The critiques are the important part: Bachrach and Baratz identified the second face of power, the capacity to keep issues off the agenda entirely, which pluralist methods studying observable decisions cannot detect; Lukes added a third face, the capacity to shape preferences so that grievances are never formed, which connects directly to Gramsci's hegemony.

Nation, state, citizenship, civil society

A state is an apparatus of administration claiming a monopoly of legitimate force over a territory; a nation is an imagined political community whose members conceive themselves as belonging together. The two are analytically independent, and their non-coincidence — nations without states, states containing multiple nations — is the source of a great deal of political conflict.

Citizenship, on Marshall's influential account, developed in three stages: civil rights of individual liberty and legal standing in the eighteenth century, political rights of participation in the nineteenth, and social rights to economic welfare and to live according to prevailing standards in the twentieth. Marshall's argument is that social rights are required for the effective exercise of the earlier two, and that citizenship thereby stands in tension with class inequality without abolishing it. The critiques note that the sequence is specific to Britain, that it treats the citizen as male and employed, and that in postcolonial states the three arrived together or in different order.

Civil society is the sphere of voluntary association between family and state. Its contested status is examinable: for one tradition it is the site of democratic vitality and a check on state power; for Gramsci it is where hegemony is produced and therefore an instrument of domination as much as of resistance.

Ideology in the Marxist sense is a system of ideas serving to sustain existing relations of domination by presenting them as natural or just, and the associated notion of false consciousness is a misrecognition by the subordinated of their own position. Mannheim's sociology of knowledge generalised the argument, distinguishing ideology, which defends an existing order, from utopia, which projects an alternative one — and raising the reflexive problem that the sociologist's own thought is equally socially situated.

Collective action and social movements

Protest is expression of grievance; agitation is sustained mobilisation; a social movement is organised, sustained collective action pursuing or resisting change, with some continuity of organisation and a shared identity; revolution is the rapid, fundamental transformation of state and class structure.

The theories of movements form an examinable sequence. Relative deprivation theory locates the cause in the gap between expectation and attainment, which explains why movements often arise after improvement rather than at the point of greatest suffering — Davies's J-curve formalises this as a period of rising expectations followed by a sharp reversal. Resource mobilisation theory objects that grievances are ubiquitous while movements are not, and relocates explanation to the availability of resources, organisation, leadership and networks. Political process theory adds political opportunity structure — movements emerge when the political system's openness, elite alignments and repressive capacity make mobilisation viable. New social movement theory argues that post-industrial movements differ in kind: organised around identity, autonomy and quality of life rather than distribution, with loose networked organisation rather than hierarchy, and a middle-class rather than working-class base — the environmental, women's and identity movements being the illustrations.

6. Religion and society

Theories

The three classical positions are compared in the method chapter and are restated here in their essentials. Durkheim treats religion as society worshipping itself: the sacred–profane distinction is the elementary religious fact, the totem symbolises simultaneously the god and the clan, and ritual functions to renew solidarity. Weber treats religious ideas as causally effective in conduct, the Protestant Ethic being the demonstration and the comparative studies of Chinese, Indian and ancient Judaic religion the test. Marx and Engels treat religion as ideological — the sigh of the oppressed creature, simultaneously a protest against real suffering and an obstacle to addressing it.

Two further positions are worth holding. Malinowski's functionalism locates religion's role in managing anxiety at moments of uncertainty and crisis — his observation that Trobriand islanders performed magic for open-sea fishing and not for lagoon fishing is the classic evidence. Phenomenological approaches, following Berger, treat religion as a sacred canopy supplying a nomos, an ordered meaningful world, against the constant threat of anomy — which reframes secularisation as the loss of a plausibility structure rather than merely a decline in belief.

Types of religious practice

Animism attributes spirit to natural objects and phenomena; monism holds that reality is ultimately one; monotheism and polytheism distinguish the number of deities; pluralism in the sociological sense describes a society containing multiple coexisting religious traditions.

The organisational typology matters more for questions. A church is a large, institutionalised, bureaucratic body into which members are typically born and which is accommodated to the wider society. A sect is a smaller, voluntary body demanding intense commitment, in tension with the wider society, often formed by schism. A denomination is a sect that has accommodated. A cult, in the sociological rather than the pejorative sense, is a loose, individualistic and often innovative body, frequently importing beliefs from elsewhere and making few demands.

Religion in modern society

Secularisation is the examinable core, and the argument is genuinely unsettled — which is why an answer that presents it as a settled decline is weak.

The secularisation thesis proposes that modernity erodes religion through several mechanisms: differentiation, as functions once performed by religious institutions are transferred to specialised secular ones; rationalisation, Weber's disenchantment, as calculation displaces mystery; societalisation, as the local community in which religion was embedded gives way to large-scale impersonal organisation; and pluralism, which by exposing each tradition to alternatives undermines the taken-for-grantedness on which belief rested.

The counter-case is substantial. Religious participation has not declined uniformly; it has risen in several regions and among several traditions. Religion has proved capable of becoming a vehicle of political and identity mobilisation precisely under modern conditions. Revivalism and fundamentalism — the latter best defined not as traditionalism but as a modern movement asserting the inerrancy of a text and the necessity of ordering public life by it, often using modern organisational and communication techniques — are consequences of modernity rather than survivals from before it. And Berger, an early proponent, publicly revised his position.

The resolution most defensible in an answer distinguishes levels. Secularisation is well supported at the level of institutional differentiation — religious institutions have lost control over education, law, welfare and administration across a wide range of societies. It is much less supported at the level of individual belief and practice, and least supported at the level of religion's political salience, which has plainly risen. What has changed is therefore the location of religion in society rather than its quantity: it has moved from being the encompassing framework of collective life to being one basis of identity and mobilisation among others — which is arguably a more consequential change than decline would have been.

Religion and science are best treated not as a straightforward conflict but as a differentiation of authority over distinct domains, with genuine conflict arising where their claims overlap and where religious authority is invoked in matters science treats as empirical.

7. Systems of kinship

Family is a group of persons related by descent, marriage or adoption; household is a residential and economic unit; marriage is a socially sanctioned union creating rights and obligations. The distinction between family and household is examinable in itself, because members of one family may occupy several households and a household may contain unrelated persons.

Types and forms. By composition: nuclear, extended, joint. By authority: patriarchal, matriarchal, egalitarian. By residence: patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal, avunculocal. By descent: patrilineal, matrilineal, bilateral, double descent. By marriage form: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, and the rules of endogamy and exogamy governing whom one may marry.

Lineage and descent organise groups across generations. A lineage traces descent from a known common ancestor; a clan claims descent from a putative one. Descent rules govern the inheritance of property, the transmission of group membership, and ritual obligation — which is why they are consequential rather than merely classificatory. The examinable point about matriliny is that it concerns descent and inheritance and does not entail female authority, which typically rests with the mother's brother; matriliny is not matriarchy, and the confusion is common.

Patriarchy and the sexual division of labour. Patriarchy is a system of social relations in which men as a category exercise power over women and the arrangement is institutionally supported. The sociological question is how it is sustained, and four mechanisms recur: control over property and inheritance; control over sexuality and reproduction, enforced through marriage rules and honour codes; the allocation of unpaid domestic and care work to women, which both depends on and reproduces their weaker labour-market position; and ideology, which naturalises the arrangement.

The theoretical positions differ on causation. Liberal feminism locates the problem in unequal access and legal barriers, and the remedy in reform. Marxist feminism connects women's subordination to property and to capitalism's requirement of unpaid reproduction of labour power. Radical feminism treats patriarchy as an independent and primary system of domination not reducible to class. Socialist feminism attempts a dual-systems account. The domestic labour debate — whether unpaid household work produces value and how it should be theorised — is the standard Paper I reference.

Contemporary trends: declining household size, rising age at marriage, increased female labour-force participation in some settings and not others, greater divorce and remarriage, the recognition of diverse family forms, the transnational family maintained across borders by migration, and the growing burden of elder care as populations age.

8. Social change in modern society

Theories

Evolutionary theories hold that societies develop through determinate stages of increasing complexity — Comte's three stages, Spencer's movement from simple to compound and from military to industrial, Morgan's savagery-barbarism-civilisation. Their defect is unilinearity and the ethnocentrism of taking one society's trajectory as the pattern. Neo-evolutionary work replaced this with multilinear accounts in which different societies follow different paths under different conditions.

Cyclical theories deny direction. Spengler treated civilisations as organisms with a life cycle; Toynbee explained rise and fall through challenge and response, and through a creative minority that degenerates into a dominant one; Sorokin proposed alternation between ideational, sensate and idealistic cultural systems, driven by the principle of immanent change — that each system exhausts its own possibilities.

Functionalist theories treat change as adjustment toward a new equilibrium. Parsons's later evolutionary work identified differentiation, adaptive upgrading, inclusion of previously excluded groups, and value generalisation as the mechanisms by which a system increases its adaptive capacity. The critique is that this cannot accommodate rapid or conflictual change and treats disruption as deviance.

Conflict theories treat change as intrinsic. In Marx it arises from the contradiction between forces and relations of production and is realised through class struggle. Dahrendorf generalised the argument beyond property, locating conflict in authority relations within any imperatively coordinated association, so that conflict persists in societies where property has been socialised.

Development and dependency

Modernisation theory treated development as a transition from traditional to modern along a single path, with the obstacles located internally in traditional values, institutions and attitudes. Rostow's stages of economic growth is its economic statement; Parsons's pattern variables supplied the sociological one; McClelland's need for achievement the psychological. Its policy implication was diffusion — capital, technology and values from developed societies.

Dependency theory inverted the explanation. Frank argued that underdevelopment is not an original condition but is actively produced by incorporation into a world economy on unequal terms — the "development of underdevelopment" — through a chain of metropolis-satellite relations extracting surplus from periphery to core. Wallerstein's world-systems analysis generalised this into a single capitalist world-economy with core, semi-periphery and periphery, in which the semi-periphery stabilises the system politically. The critiques: dependency theory explains stagnation better than the substantial growth that has occurred in parts of the periphery, and it underplays internal class structures and state capacity.

Agents of social change

Education is the most examined agent and the argument is two-sided. The functionalist account, following Durkheim and Parsons, treats education as transmitting shared values, allocating individuals to positions by achievement, and thereby enabling mobility and modernising attitudes. The reproduction critique, following Bourdieu and Bernstein, holds that schooling converts inherited advantage into apparent merit: cultural capital — the dispositions, language and familiarity that schooling assumes but does not teach — is unequally distributed, so a formally open system produces stratified outcomes and legitimates them as ability. Bernstein's distinction between elaborated and restricted codes supplies the linguistic mechanism. The defensible position is that education is simultaneously an agent of mobility and of reproduction, and which predominates depends on how sharply the distribution of cultural capital is skewed.

Science and technology change society through the transformation of production, of communication, and of the temporal and spatial organisation of life. Two frameworks are examinable: technological determinism, which treats technology as an autonomous driver of social change, and the social shaping of technology, which argues that technologies are themselves products of social choices about what to develop and deploy. Ogburn's concept of cultural lag — that non-material culture adjusts more slowly than material culture, producing a period of maladjustment — remains a serviceable framing for questions on technological change.

Other agents named in the syllabus tradition: economic transformation, political movements and the state, demographic change, urbanisation, communication and media, and globalisation.

Worked example 8.1 (a full 20-mark answer setting three positions in tension). "Examine the functionalist theory of social stratification and its critique. (20 marks)"

Model answer. Davis and Moore's argument is that stratification is universal, necessary and functional, and the case for taking it seriously is that it is the only theory which attempts to explain stratification's universality rather than merely to condemn it.

Their reasoning proceeds in four steps. A society contains positions of unequal functional importance to its survival. Some of these require scarce talent and prolonged, costly training. Unequal rewards — in income, prestige and leisure — are therefore necessary to induce the appropriately talented to undergo that training and to discharge the duties conscientiously once appointed. Stratification is thus not a design but an unconsciously evolved device by which societies ensure that their most important positions are filled by the most qualified.

Tumin's critique is decisive at several points and should be given specifically. The concept of functional importance cannot be operationalised independently of the rewards it is meant to explain: we identify important positions by observing which are highly rewarded, which makes the argument circular. The theory ignores the power of incumbents to restrict entry to their own occupations through licensing, credential inflation and professional closure, thereby manufacturing the very scarcity that justifies their reward — a Weberian point about social closure that the functionalist account has no room for. It ignores the social barriers to the discovery of talent: the pool of persons who reach training is determined by the existing distribution of resources, so stratification restricts the range of talent available and cannot be justified as selecting the best from it. It assumes that motivation requires unequal material reward, which is contradicted by the range of societies and occupations in which people undertake demanding training for other reasons. And it neglects dysfunctions: unequal reward wastes undiscovered talent, generates hostility and distrust between strata, and requires continuous ideological work to sustain its appearance of legitimacy.

The Marxist objection attacks the premise rather than the reasoning. Stratification does not arise from functional necessity but from the appropriation of surplus by those who own the means of production; what functionalism describes as a reward mechanism is the distribution of an exploitatively extracted surplus, and the theory's account of legitimacy is precisely the ideology by which that distribution is naturalised. The strongest form of this objection is that Davis and Moore explain why a division of labour is necessary and then illegitimately conclude that unequal reward is — the two do not follow from one another.

The Weberian objection is different again and is often more useful for Indian material. Because stratification operates along independent dimensions of class, status and party, a functional account keyed to occupational importance cannot explain hierarchies that do not track function at all. Caste is the decisive case: ritual rank has historically been substantially independent of functional contribution, and the ordering has persisted while the occupational content shifted, which no functional theory can accommodate.

Assessment. The functionalist theory retains one genuine merit — it poses the question of universality, which its critics tend to avoid, and it correctly identifies that some differentiation of reward accompanies any complex division of labour. But it fails as an explanation, because it cannot distinguish the differentiation that a division of labour requires from the inherited, institutionalised inequality that actually characterises stratified societies, and it has no account of power. The defensible position is that stratification requires explanation on all three registers: some functional differentiation, considerable exploitation, and a great deal of closure — with the balance among them varying between societies, and with the Indian case weighted heavily toward the third.

Common traps UPSC sets here

• Presenting the three stratification theories in sequence rather than in tension — the question is almost always which explains more, and why.
• Giving Tumin's critique generically — the specific points are circularity, power and closure, restricted talent pools, motivation and dysfunctions.
• Treating Weber's three dimensions as a ranking — they are independent axes, and their independence is the analytical payoff.
• Confusing structural with exchange mobility — much observed mobility reflects a changing occupational structure, not a loosening of ascription.
• Confusing matriliny with matriarchy — descent and inheritance are not authority.
• Presenting secularisation as a settled decline — it is well supported for institutional differentiation and poorly supported for belief and political salience.
• Treating fundamentalism as traditionalism — it is a modern movement using modern means, not a survival.
• Answering on power with Weber alone — the three faces of power, elite theory and Gramsci's hegemony are what the question is usually reaching for.
• Treating education as straightforwardly an agent of mobility — the reproduction critique is compulsory in any serious answer.

Memory aids

• "Functional, exploitative, multi-dimensional" — Davis-Moore, Marx, Weber in three words.
• "Class, status, party — and they vary independently" — the Weberian scheme and its payoff.
• "Structural mobility moves the ladder, exchange mobility moves the person" — the distinction that matters.
• "Own, extract, bind" — the three axes for comparing work across modes of production.
• "Decide, agenda, prefer" — the three faces of power.
• "Differentiation, rationalisation, societalisation, pluralism" — the four secularisation mechanisms.
• "Descent is not authority" — matriliny versus matriarchy.
• "Mobility and reproduction, simultaneously" — the honest position on education.

Exam protocol

• On any stratification question, set the three theories against each other and reach a verdict rather than presenting them in turn.
• Give critiques by their specific content and, where possible, by name — Tumin, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, Bourdieu.
• Use Weber's independent dimensions whenever caste or Indian material is in view, since it is the frame that fits.
• Distinguish structural from exchange mobility in any answer on openness.
• On secularisation, separate the institutional, individual and political levels and answer differently for each.
• On education, give both the functionalist and the reproduction account, and say what determines which predominates.
• On movements, use the theoretical sequence — deprivation, resource mobilisation, political process, new social movements — as the answer's spine.