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This paper attempts both to ‘bring up to date’ the author's conception of social stratification as set forth in two previous general papers written in 1940 and 1953, and to broaden the field of consideration by giving special attention to the forces pressing toward equality in various respects, as well as the bases of inequality, The position taken is that the erosion of the legitimacy of the traditional bases of inequality has brought to a new level of prominence value-commitment to an essential equality of status of all members of modern societal communities. Inequalities, among units of societal structure which are essential in such fields as economic productivity, authority and power, and culturally based competence, must be justified in terms of their contribution to societal functioning. The balancing of the respects in which all members of the societal community and many of its collective subunits must be held to be equal with the imperatives of inequality constitutes one of the primary foci of the problem of integration in modern society. A few suggestions about the mechanisms by which this integrative process can operate are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on culture and social systems. Actions of individual persons in their capacities as members of a social system must be oriented in terms of the meanings of cultural symbol systems, of what is sometimes called patterns of culture. Furthermore, the society itself and various other social systems as object of orientation must also have meanings defined in cultural terms. Moreover, the two sets of meanings, that is, from the point of view of actors as components of their orientation patterns and of the objects to which they are oriented, must to some degree be integrated with each other at the cultural level. Cultural systems, however, are by no means fully integrated but may be regarded as varying from a pole of virtually complete integration to one of a nearly random assortment of meaning components. Furthermore, the actual behavior of individuals, their symbolically oriented action, may be to a widely varying degree congruent with the meanings of the cultural system.

The article presents a text of a memorandum sent by Talcott Parsons to Henry H. Fowler in 1944 regarding a study on the Japanese economy. The most significant suggestion that Parsons thinks he can make appropos of the plans for study of the control of the Japanese economy is that very special attention should be devoted to the prewar status of small and medium-sized business in Japan and of the prospects for stimulating its postwar development. His reason for special interest in this sector of the economy is not in its economic significance as such, but in its potential significance for the social structure and orientation of the country. It is a very striking feature of Japanese society that in modern times at least there has been no strong locally independent middle class which could form a stabilizing factor in the society. Japanese feudalism was highly centralized lacking a small and moderate-scale gentry with strong roots in the land of their local communities. The Samurai were directly dependent on the Daimyo and controlled from his court, and this circumstance largely explains the fact that it was possible to shift so abruptly from feudalism to a westernized capitalistic economy. There was no Japanese equivalent for the Chinese town-dwelling, land-owning gentry who were the real backbone of the traditional Chinese class structure.