Kingsley Davis has evolved a functional theory of the social stratification or class from the abstract structural point of view. But I would point out some problems in his approach to the social stratification or class phenomena, including his explanation on the universal presence of stratification in human society as fuctional necessity to maintenance of the social system.
(1) According to Davis, social stratification is the system of the institutionalized inequality, and its essence is the differential prestige or rewards attached to the different position. Moreover, he regards the social class as one type of social stratification-based entirely on the equality of opportunity.
But from his standpoint, not in terms of social groups and collectivities, but of individual positions, the positional differentiation and hierarchical organization are approachable, as he says. However, the range and distribution of prestige or reward differentials, especially the class differentials, the shape and span of its hierarchical structure, and the other factors relevant to social class or stratification and their interrelation are difficult to handle. In the case when classes are concerned with from his standpoint, he must inevitably regard them as mere collectivities or abstract categories of persons having the same amount of prestige or rewards, and occupying the same positions.
Thus his conception of social stratification confuses the theory of social stratification or class with the theory of certain aspects of social differentiation and hierarchical organization, and misses the essence of the social class, especially the differential distribution of power between classes and therefore class conflict or structural change of society.
(2) Davis points out a close correlation of superior capacities, functional importance of positions to the society, and high rewards. He, accordingly, assumes social stratification system upon the system of absolute equal opportunity in competition for positions. On the other hand, he conceives of the family with its influence running counter to the competitive principle behind stratification, and with its contribution to all the caste elements preventing the equality of opportunity.
These attempts to characterize social stratification in terms of competitive achievement of positions, spoil the significance of the classification by himself in two ideal type concepts-class and caste-of stratification, and make impossible dealing with wide and complex dynamics interwoven by different factors of stratification. Also, it is difficult to take up the dynamics between classes from his standpoints that ultimately regard stratification as a status continuum which reduce to individual abilities or talents. Last, he succeeds only in justifying the persistence of the evisting class system and social institutionalized inequality from the standpoints of the aristocratic individualism.
(3) Davis' stratification concepts influence the functional analysis on the system of stratification.
He takes up the social stratification as a functional necessity characterizing the social system. As a result, he insists on the universal necessity and indispensability of social stratification and explains the universal presence of it, in terms of positive functionality of contributing to the societal survice.
But his functional analysis is one-sided because of seeing only the positive functionality of social stratification to the maintenance of the society as a whole, therefore his assertion on its positive sunctionality and indispensability is uncertain. In other words, he disregards the dysfunction or nonfunction and functional alternatives of stratification system or regards simply them as a subsidiary one, even if he takes up them. Especially, he ignores its functionality to individual members occupying the particular pesitions and belonging to the particular classes.

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1. One of our present-day problems is the.problem of personality disintegration, and three social causes of resulting in such a problem have been indicated. They are : a) Incongruent principles of behavior expectation between the primary and secondory groups ; b) Incompatible social expectations imposed upon the individual through his multi-group membership ; c) Multiple role expectations imposed upon one social status.
The main concern of this paper is to introduce the problems of role conflict which contemporary Protestant parish ministers in the United States are confronting and required to solve them, by refering to the research materials collected by S. W.Blizzard.
2. From a theoretical point of view, the following three aspects have been discussed in order to conceptualize the problem of role conflict. 1) Under what conditions role conflict will take place ; this aspect makes clear the concept of role conflict ; 2) What factors are relevant to variations and intensity of role conflict ; 3) With what methods the individual tends to adjust, internally and externally, to role conflict.
As to the first aspect, three types of role conflict have been classified : a) Self-role conflict, which emerges when role expectations are not reconciled with the structure of self, because of the mechanism of self-defense ; b) Role-role conflict, which takes place when the contents of more than two roles are incompatible between each other ; c) the third rype of role conflict occurs when the means for role performance become competitive and makes it difficult to distribute them properly to each role.
For the second aspect, both personal and situational factors must be identified. Such factors as differences in self as a cognitive structure, personality type and personal competence may be important as a personal factor. The important situational factors which introduce variations in role conflct are role definition, group norms and group structure Whether role difinition in clear-cut or ambiguous, social sanctions are permissive or strict, group structure : in bureaucratic or informal, etc.
As a mechanism of adjustment to conflicting situations, such psychological methods as rationalization, projection, isolation and so on may be mentioned. But, generally, they may be grouped into the following three : 1) negative adjustment (withdrawal); 2) positive adjustment ; 3) a compromised method, say, compartmentalization. Principle of hierarchization and segregation has been pointed out by J. Toby.
3. The main findings of Blizzard's research may be summarized as follows. Contemporary Protestant parish ministers are functionally playing six major practitioner roles : 1) Administrator role, 2) Organizer role, 3) Pastor role, 4) Preacher role, 5) Priest role, 6) Teacher role.
The dilemma was found in the discrepance between two hierarchial orders of these six roles : the functional priority order and normative priority order. (S. W. Blizzard, “The Minister's Dilemma”). This is to say that ministers are forced to spend much of their time doing those things they feel are least important and which they are least motivated to do. Blizzard pointed out also several themes of related conflict : 1) A need for acquiring adequate emotional maturity and self-understanding ; 2) Being a man of belief and a saint is often challenged and jeopardized when the minister expresses ethical judgement as a prophet ; 3) Incongruent expectation being a man of action and a scholar of religion, a contemplative role ; 4) Discrepancies between the general practitioner expectation of the parishioner and the success image of denominational advancement which emphasizes a spicified roles ; and conflict between the obligations to family and obligations to job.

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Problem setting and the research design In recent years sociologists have developed many ways of measuring social class statuses, all of which have both merits and demerits. The method used in this study is by the ranking of occupations which follows the 1955 research study of the Japan Sociological Society, “Social Stratification and Mobility in Japan”; that is, I used following three methods jointly :
(1) occupational categories (non-manual vs. manual)
(2) prestige class (upper, middle, and lower)
(3) mixed method of subjective class identification and occupational categories (bourgeois, white-collar, and blue-collar)
It goes without saying that in modern industrial societies the major index of social class position is the occupation, and the composite unit of class structure is the family. Accordingly, the primary determinant of social statuses of wives consist in their husbands' occupations ; the statuses are “shared by family members”.
We can sum up the objectives of our research as follows :
(1) investigating the family structure and other beckground items.
(2) investigating the social class difference in social attitudes.
(3) investigating the social class difference in various modes of life.
(4) investigating the rate of social class endogamy by means of social mobility through marriage.
Analysis of the data (1) The mean number of household members is 4.5 ; 11 percent live together with husbands' parents, 9 percent with wives' parents, and five percent with the eldest sons and his families ; the rate of nuclear families is 76 percent, and that of extended families composed of two generations couples is 24 percent. These rates show us that the family structure in Tokyo is, at least on the structural level, far more modernized than usually thought of. In subjective class identification 59 percent said “working class”, which is saliently less than the rate of male samples in Japan Sociological Society's research, 74 percent. Inversely, the rate of answers “middle class” is 10 percent higher than that of male samples
(2) We used the criteria of “familistic” value attitudes as expressed in intra-family human relations. But we can only partially find social class differences in these items. Upper class sons are more inclined to live separately from their parents after mariage than lower class sons, and they think that married sons and their old parents must have an independent household. Upper class wives are more individualistic than lower class wives. Apparently in these items, upper class families are less “familistic” than lowers. In familistic ideologies about kôkô (filial piety), however, the situation is reversed, with lower class wives ranking highest.
(3) With respect to the social class differences in life style, we took the following four items : 1. Mass comunication contacts. Lower class wives have less contacts with newspapers but more with radio. The latter fact is due to the TV. diffusion in upper class families. 2. Personal communication contacts. Upper classes speak more about child education and voting, lower classes speak more about prices of commodities and moving pictures. 3. Role performance pattern required of wives. In this items we cannot find any consistent class differences. 4. “Going-out” companions. Lower classes have less chance to go out with others.

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Evidently, nealy half a century after it first revealed signs of decline (in late Meiji and early Taisho years), the traditional custom of ancestor worship is now found here in Japan to be even more deprived of its vitality. For all that, however, we would hardly be justified in utterly ignoring the influence it still exerts upon our social life as a whole.
With the hope to investigate the real range of such a religious factor in our rural life of to-day, a field survey was recently undertaken by the Department of Kyoto University, so as to survey on the spot those several villages which had deen chosen as representing each of these three major types of village livelihood : “agricultural”, “fishing” and “forestry”. The present article which is the result of this survey, may be summarized as follows :
In point of religious consciousness, first of all, the task consisted in determining whether the belief in ancestral spirit is faithfully maintained among the villagers or not, and if it ts, how it varies with the differences in sex, age and social status.
Secondly, from the ritual point of view, close attention is focused on religious implications still observed in the yearly circle of festivals and practices, as well as in those which mark the stages human life (such as birth-ceremony, initiation, wedding, funeral, etc.). As to the daily acts of worship e. g. that of holy tablets memorial of the deceased, the observance of which used to be obligatory; the actual extent to which they are still maintained was investigated here also in regard of the difference in sex and age.
Thirdly, a survey was conducted in an attempt to find out the relationship between inheritance and ancestor worship. The traditional predominance of the latter custom explains the fact that the former term is used to mean in fact the simultaneous succession (necessarily by right of primogeniture) of both the responsibility for sacred rites, as well as the right to secular estate, proper to each family. Now that, as a result of post-war reform, the new inheritance law does not concern ancestor worship any more than it limits inheritance to the eldest son alone, the research centers on the question of whether there still exists a tendency to allow the all real property to be inherited by the one who would be willing to take up the ritual responsibility.
Conclusion : -Admitting that a gradual increase in the horizontal and vertical mobility of society surely tends to lessen the role of such a traditional custom as ancestor worship, its influence still survives in Japanese villages more forcibly than might be expected, to a remarkable extent, especially, in the matter of “inheritance”.

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In the year before the Meiji Restoration (1867), there was a series of ecstatic dancing throughout Japan. This movement was apparently originally inspired by some political agitators who had been intending to capitalize on the discontent among the masses which had been expressed in the very severe peasant riots of the previous years. In order to carry out this plan, at first they put some amulets into several fairly wealthy homes, unknown to the people there. Afterwards, the same incidents began to occur in large numbers of houses, not only the wealthy but the ordinary houses as well. When the people discoverd the amulets, they assumed that some supernatural spirits had selected their houses as an indication of some particular virtue, which would be rewarded with divine protection.
This led to a series of movements which took place in different parts of the country at different times, from August of the year till the next January.
This particular research is based on Kyoto, the Imperial capital, where the movement had paticular political significance. It began here around October 20th, as soon as several samurai started from Kyoto to their Daimyo with a secret Inperial order that the shogunate should be destroyed. They must gain time, and thought of, perhaps, the miracle.
The people responded to the discovery of the amulets in a very ectatic way. They placed the deities on the alter in their houses to make a religious service, inviting their Dozoku and affinal families, the members of their Chonai (institutional neighborhood groups), and their friends to join in those religious servises, large feasts, drinking rice-wine, and dancing. There were also mutual invitations between those houses where “the amulets had descended from the heaven”. Even if uninvited, people who visited the alter to worship and to offer congratulations where welcomed. Later, some uninvited people took advantage of the festival by forcing themselves into the feasts, which sometimes led to aggressive mob behavior.
The festivity soon extended beyond their houses, into the streets, and was characterized particulary by the frenzied dancing. At first, the people of the same Dozoku and the same Chonai etc. danced whithin the street of the Chonai, and later the dancing extended out from there.
This type of dancing, “ee-ja-nai-ka odori” (literally, a dance with the refrain meaning “eveything's 0. K., isn't it ?”) had a history in the periodic pilgrimage made by commoners to Amaterasu-O-mikami's shrine at Ise about evey 60 years. This pilgrimage included ecstatic dancing and served as a release for the frustration of the common people under the feudal system of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Actually, 1867 was too early for the time of the periodic pilgrimage, but the special critical situation, directly “the descent of the deity” caused the analogous movement to develop at this time, even without the long pilgrimge to Ise.
Although for the first few days of this ecstatic celebration the deities were limited to Amateras-O-mikami, after this time, the celebration spread widely and included not only this Shinto goddess of the “Imperial Ancestor” which had been used by the original agitators to prove the divine protection on the Restoration, but also large numbers of other Shintoistic and Buddhistic folk gods as well. In those days, unidentified people, who put amulets, might be divided into various social classes : samurai, common people, priests etc..

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No matter how we approach the society, We fit into one or the other of two basic approaches : German and American types. These two approaches are mutually exclusive and we can understand them as competing, but in the end we can in fact we must use both approaches. As Karl Mannheim has written, there were hardly ever two differnt styles of study as fit to supplement each other's shortcoming as are the German and American types of sociology. In such a context, it is one of the special obligations of the sociologist to build a working model in terms of which we can use both.
The persistent theme of American sociology, which can be succinctly described as “voluntalistic nominalism”, is the adherence to a psychological conception of society from subjective point of reference. There is no discussion of the society as a whole in an historical epoch. As Talcott Parsons has said in The Social System (1951), “Obviously most empirical sociological studies are concerned with partial social systems rather than with societies as wholes”. The society as a whole, which is called a “Society”, is a aggregate of social systems. A society, then, is not only “a” social system, which of course it is, but is also a very complex network of interlocking and interdependent subsystems, each of which is equally authentically a social system. The concept of society is distinguished from that of social system. In the context of the microscopic-macroscopic range of the society, We want to make two main points. One is, we think, that the social system is organized on the level of “role-unit”. Two, that the society as a total system is organized on the level of “social systemunit”
Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in their Character and Social Structure (1954), wrote that :
Just as role is the unit with which we build our conception of institutions, so institution is the unit with which we build the conception of social structure.
We must consider not only the psychology of social system but also, and primarily, the historical logic of the society as a total system. Our analysis always involve the articulatiou of two microscopic-macroscopic levels : the role-unit and the social system-unit.

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