In the economic sphere, Marx focused on the “mode of production” (e.g., the industrial factory) and “relations of production” (e.g., unequal power between workers and factory owners). Social institutions like government, education, and religion reflect this competition in their inherent inequalities and help maintain the unequal social structure. This perspective is a macro-level approach most identified with the writings of German philosopher and sociologist Karl Marx (1818–1883), who saw society as being made up of two classes, the bourgeoisie (capitalist) and the proletariat (workers), who must compete for social, material, and political resources such as food and housing, employment, education, and leisure time. Increasingly, during the 1980s, he turned to outlining a microsociological theory highlighting the role of ‘interaction ritual chains’ as the basic unit in the ordering of societies (compare his Conflict Sociology, 1975 and Theoretical Sociology, 1988).Sociological Paradigm #2: Conflict TheoryĬonflict theory looks at society as a competition for limited resources. Randall Collins's more recent version of conflict theory is distinguished by the fact that it is rooted in the microlevel concerns of individual actors, indeed he claims his theoretical roots lie in phenomenology. Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict (1956) attempts to incorporate the analysis of social conflict into structural-functionalism, seeing it as a process of tension management, or as part of a process of reintegration in response to social change. An economic crisis, for example, can indicate the existence of system conflict, but does not automatically lead to a breakdown in social integration. Lockwood points out that social integration can exist without system integration. Structural functionalismtends to run both together and gives priority to social integration: if that persists then the assumption is that system integration is also present. Lock-wood argues that we can distinguish between system integration, which refers to relationships between different parts of the social system, the economy, and political system and social integration, which refers to norms and values. Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change, 1964). The most effective contribution from this period is David Lockwood's paper on social integration and system integration (in G. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner took a similar orientation to the centrality of conflict. John Rex, in Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961), offered a version of conflict theory owing rather more to Marx. At the same time he argued, again against Marx, that social conflict was multi-faceted and does not congeal around one central issue.Ĭonflict theorists did not claim to present any general theory of society but emphasized coercion rather than consensus as the cause of social order. For example, Dahrendorf argued that structural functionalism was not so much wrong as partial: that power or authority within a social system was not simply integrative, something which emerges from the system in order to keep it together, but also divisive, something which has to be imposed over conflicting interests.
The claims of conflict theory against functionalism were comparatively modest compared with later criticisms.
For example, in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959)-a standard work of conflict theory-Ralf Dahrendorf, although critical of Marxist notions of class, argued that classes in the advanced ‘post-capitalist’ societies of Britain, Germany, and the United States were derived ‘from positions in associations co-ordinated by authority’, and that these societies were therefore characterized by disputes about ‘participation in or exclusion from the exercise of authority’. Conflict theorists emphasized the importance of interests over norms and values, and the ways in which the pursuit of interests generated various types of conflict as normal aspects of social life, rather than abnormal or dysfunctional occurrences. Its proponents drew on Max Weber and (to a lesser extent) Karl Marx to construct their arguments, giving differing emphases to economic conflict (Marx) and conflict about power (Weber).
Today, however, the term conflict theory is more often used to refer to the sociological writings of opponents to the dominance of structural functionalism, in the two decades after the Second World War. Many have seen Marx's theory of class as providing a conflict theory of social change. Some of the earliest approaches included Ludwig Gumplowicz's theory of ethnic conflict and Gaetano Mosca's theory of conflict between elites and masses. Conflict has always been central to sociological theory and analysis.