Social cohesion through variant values: Evidence from medical role relations.

TLDR: In this article, the evolutionary survival test is replaced with a survival test based on the "survival" test, which Tumin has earlier doubted but not destroyed, and the denial of rationalism in a social decision-making is untenable, since it conspicuously exists as a norm in all contemporary societies.

Abstract: any social system will be able to overlook the consequences of the accident of birth in either the biological or sociological sense, since differential placement will likely take such consequences into account, there surely remains some interstitial area of human effort, or purpose, or conscientiousness that cannot be readily reduced to the influence of human heredity or the social environment. Though it is clearly the business of the sociologist to seek out the social sources and correlates of patterned human behavior, I do not think the evidence warrants the comfortable and individual guilt-absolving or excellence-degrading view that society is all and the complexities of individual motivation a purely dependent variable. Perhaps this difference of view only confirms the notion that assumptions regarding human nature underlie most if not all structural propositions of substantial generality. Tumin and I have both been guilty, in these short statements, of anthropomorphizing "society." Such ellipsis is normally harmless, but I do want to dissent on one point. When Tumin stipulates as a condition for the "functional theory" of social inequality that the society be "rational," I suggest two modifications. The first is the evolutionary, "survival" test which Tumin has earlier doubted but not destroyed. The second point is that the denial of rationalism in a social decision-making is untenable, since it conspicuously exists as a norm in all contemporary societies, and, now and then, as a practice. The protagonists in the current renewal of an enduring controversy are scarcely the designated spokesmen for recognizable clienteles. And lest it be thought that the issues relevant to stratification are all resolved or clarified, it should be noted that the whole concept of "class" as an explanatory variable has been barely touched in this exchange. Tumin in his suggested desiderata for the next steps in analysis of social inequality happily does not use the term "class"-which unfortunately our neighboring social scientists think is one of our most useful analytic tools-and his way of putting the questions does not presuppose that conceptual category. Can we get anyone to join the joyful march to sensible investigation ?