Conflict Sociology Research Paper

1. Major Axes In The Analysis Of Conflict

There are two central choices for sociological theory in the treatment of conflict. First, should it be treated as exceptional or as endemic? In the former case, the theory assumes that normally social life will proceed without conflict, or at least without its overt expression in hostile actions. If conflict becomes evident, this is a sign that some or other institution is not functioning properly. Conflict is therefore seen as pathological. Alternatively, a theory may assume that social relations are likely to exhibit conflict at many points, and its expression will be expected to be frequent. In some cases the absence of conflict might be seen as pathological.

A second choice is whether, when conflict does occur, it should be regarded as of momentous importance, likely to result in major upheaval and possibly radical change; or whether it should be treated as mundane, that is, merely part of the events of everyday life, without particular moment.

These are by no means the only issues which have to be addressed by theories of conflict, but the two-by- two matrix which they form provides a useful heuristic for studying the position of different schools of thought (see Fig. 1).

2. Conflict As Momentous—Whether Exceptional Or Endemic

The following discussion is organized in terms of the momentous versus mundane dimension, the second dimension being examined within this one. This is purely for convenience of presentation and does not imply any priority of importance.

2.1 Conflict As Momentous And Exceptional: Functionalist Approaches

Functionalist theories, particularly in the structural functionalist form which dominated US and much other sociology in the first two postwar decades, are clear and strong examples of the treatment of conflict as momentous and exceptional. These theories, particularly those of Talcott Parsons (in particular, Parsons 1964), have often been accused of an incapacity to analyze conflict. This is not true. As Parsons once remarked, he was aware of the enormous capacity for conflict in social relations and was surprised that so much cooperation in fact took place. The purpose of his theories was therefore to demonstrate how it was that, in practice, conflict did not overwhelm social relations. As a result, the emphasis of the theoretical tradition he launched was on how conflict was rendered exceptional.

Functionalism views social institutions as overwhelmingly interconnected and equipped with integration mechanisms. While for most of the time conflict does not occur, social relations are highly vulnerable should it do so. It is a sign that something is malfunctioning, that something pathological is occurring, and major disorder, possibly leading to change, can be expected (Cohen 1966). Structural functionalism fits box I of Fig. 1.

2.2 Conflict As Momentous And Endemic: Marxist Approaches

During the 1960s and 1970s there was a major polemical confrontation between structural functionalist and Marxist theorists, in both western Europe and the USA. For Marxists, conflict is endemic to all significant social relations, because these embody in various ways the class relations that are fundamental to social life and that are based on opposed interests. Marxist writers have therefore been unhappy with behaviorist approaches to social conflict, which regard a conflict as existing only when it is openly manifest. According to Marxists and other critical sociologists, this conceals from view conflicts of interest which the weaker parties to a relationship are powerless or fearful to express. Convinced that the conflict will in principle be there, such sociologists search for subtle and implicit expressions of it (Lukes 1974).

To take a simple example, a functionalist sociologist carrying out research on a factory or office would regard evidence of conflict between management and workers as evidence that something was wrong, that institutions governing social relations in the workplace were not operating correctly. A Marxist sociologist, on the other hand, would regard such instances of conflict as evidence that the reality of the relationship between management and workers was revealing itself; it would be the absence of conflict in such a relationship that would require explanation as some-thing denying that fundamental reality.

However, opposed as functionalism and Marxism might be, they are in fact agreed on the momentous– mundane dimension. For Marxist sociology as much as for functionalist, conflict is likely to be momentous in its consequences, bringing widespread and un-containable disorder before it ushers in social change. This is because for Marxists conflict is the way in which the underlying contradictions of the class relations on which the social order rests are finally and catastrophically resolved. Marxism occupies box II in the matrix.

Therefore, contrary to initial appearances, structural functionalism and Marxism are not diametrically opposed in their treatment of conflict. One ironic consequence of this has been the way in which Marxist accounts of an ongoing social order—one in which the fundamental flaws have not yet been revealed— sometimes resemble functionalist ones. For both schools all social institutions are interconnected and, to the extent that (for Marxists) class domination is operating effectively, all institutions tend towards maintenance of the stability of the existing order. This inherent functionalism of much Marxist theory be-came particularly evident in the structural Marxism which developed in France during the 1970s, exemplified by such writers as Althusser (1968) and Poulantzas (1968). These depicted the totality of capitalist domination in such a way that social conflict seemed almost impossible.

3. Conflict As Mundane—Whether Exceptional Or Endemic

An important development in the study of social conflict emerged during the 1950s with the idea of the institutionalization of conflict (e.g., Harbison 1954). This involved the hypothesis that, if mechanisms existed which separated different institutional areas from each other, conflicts appearing in one would be prevented from spreading into others, and conflict would therefore be limited. The idea can best be understood through an analogy with insulation or isolation in electricity. The cable wrapped around an electrified wire prevents the current from jumping from the wire to objects alongside it, which it might damage. Interest then focuses on what kinds of social mechanisms might serve as isolators separating one social area from another. If such isolators exist, then individual outbreaks of conflict are unlikely to have momentous implications for the wider society.

Interest in institutionalization developed from the turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century, which had seen considerable disruption caused by two political forces—communism and nazismfascism— which owed their success, in part, to a capacity to amalgamate disparate issues into totalities that pitched whole groups of populations against each other. There was particular interest in mechanisms which might separate political from industrial conflict, this combination being seen as crucial to the success of communism.

In a closely related development, political sociologists were interested in ways in which different conflictual identities might either run together or cross-cut one another (Lipset 1964). In the former case conflicts might be expected to spread across whole institutional areas and to be intense. In the latter, conflicts between groups defined according to a particular characteristic would be offset and thereby contained and diminished by cross-cutting identities. For example, a society in which most blacks were Roman Catholics and also manual workers, while most whites were Protestants and bourgeois, would be expected to generate deeper and more intransigent conflicts than one in which ethnicity, religion and class divide the population in different ways.

These approaches made it possible to conceive of conflict of no major macro-social importance as mundane.

3.1 Conflict As Mundane And Exceptional: Micro-Functionalism And Applied Sociology

Theories of conflict institutionalization often over-lapped with the functionalist approach to conflict as pathological, and many writers in that school were concerned, both intellectually and in practice, to combat Marxism. The idea of institutional isolators was also quite compatible with the functionalist approach, such mechanisms being among the devices by which social integration was ensured. On the other hand, a stress on institutional separateness could lead theorists away from the emphasis on the overall interconnectedness of social institutions which was distinctive of structural functionalism.

As sociology expanded from the 1970s onwards, and spread into a large number of specialized sub-sectors, many practitioners of the discipline lost a sense of connecting their work to an overall perspective on society, not necessarily because they did not believe in such a perspective, but because the need to develop knowledge within specialisms required its neglect. Institutional separateness was pragmatically reinforced, even among those who maintained an essentially functionalist standpoint. Their theoretical stance becomes one of micro-functionalism. Functionalism’s sense of conflict as exceptional and pathological is therefore not necessarily lost. These approaches therefore occupy box III in Fig. 1. The occurrence of strikes, divorces, crime, outbursts of violence and terrorism, can still be seen as empirical indicators of malfunctioning; but it is malfunctioning of a mundane kind. This is particularly likely to be the case with applied sociology, designed to be used for the study of perceived social problems, in such areas as the sociologies of working life, ethnic relations, the family and marriage, poverty, social movements, crime and deviance.

3.2 Conflict As Mundane And Endemic: From Critical Sociology To The Normalization Of Conflict

By no means all students of specialized fields in which conflicts may occur necessarily share a view of it as pathological. Some may be close to a Marxist or other radical position, likely to see expressions of conflict as demonstrating the realization of certain fundamental contradictions within institutions. This is, for example, likely to be the perspective of feminist sociologists on family conflict, or of observers from a number of perspectives on ethnic conflict. Work of this kind therefore marks a movement towards box IV (Fig. 1): conflict perceived as normal and mundane. However, to the extent that these approaches retain something of a Marxist or more generally ‘critical’ idea of conflict revealing inherent contradictions, they are unlikely to remain fully at the level of the mundane; conflicts will be expected to involve major disruption and possibly change. For example, if growing family conflict (both divorce and difficult intergenerational relationships) are seen as evidence of challenges to patriarchy, they are unlikely to be mundane conflicts that just rumble along without coming to some kind of crisis.

These differences in the extent to which conflict could be regarded as fully mundane and containable can be seen from contributions made to the study of industrial conflict by British sociologists. These have contrasted a unitary approach to industrial relations, characterized by implicit functionalist assumptions, with a pluralist one (Clegg 1975, Fox 1973). Under the former it was assumed that management and employees shared interests; as a result conflict was treated as pathological, something that should always be prevented. Under the latter, it was taken for granted that employers and employees had partially opposed interests; as a result conflict between them was endemic, and its occasional manifestation should be regarded as normal. There is then however disagreement among those who regarded such conflict as thoroughly containable and who belong fully to box IV in Fig. 1 (Clegg 1975), and those who took a more Marxist position and saw potentially momentous possibilities (Fox 1973, Hyman 1975).

More abstract theories and approaches to conflict belong fully to box IV (Fig. 1). As the Conclusion below will suggest, pursuing this path leads eventually to the disappearance of conflict sociology as such. However, the journey towards that position has involved some important contributions to the study of conflict. Already in the late nineteenth century, Georg Simmel had pointed to a paradoxical way in which conflict might actually strengthen social ties: parties to a conflict had a stronger relationship than total strangers. Many conflicts, even full-scale wars, were governed by minimal sets of rules and mutual understandings. From these insights developed the idea that conflict might be functional to social relationships. In the 1950s, Lewis Coser (1956, 1965) developed from Simmel a general theory of the functions of social conflict. At the macro-theoretical level, this was a direct challenge to the dominant view of conflict as pathological, while remaining within a broadly functionalist approach. More generally, it contributed to the perception of conflict as both endemic and mundane.

Also starting in the 1950s was a series of major contributions by Ralf Dahrendorf (1957, 1972), which took theory a significant step further. Not only could conflict be functional, but perhaps social order was actually sustained by conflict. Such an approach first required the concept discussed above of the institutionalization of conflict. Provided individual conflict zones could be mutually segregated in the way this concept anticipated, the open expression and working out of differences, difficulties and contradictions was the way in which people innovated, developed institutions and actually sustained social relations. If conflict was bottled up, there were no possibilities for doing this, relations would fail to be open and honest, and innovation would not take place. In radical contradiction with structural functionalism, this approach contended that it was the endemic and mundane character of conflict which ensured social order.

Dahrendorf was writing with the tragic history of his native Germany in the first half of the twentieth century very much in mind (Dahrendorf 1966). To that extent, his work can be seen as part of a more general tendency in postwar German sociology to stress open dialogue and communication, which necessarily implies the working out of conflicts (Habermas 1981). Conflict became normalized further by develop-ments in the 1960s and 1970s which drew on the legacy of Max Weber. There was for a long time a struggle between functionalists and others over who were the true heirs of Weber’s approach, particularly in the English-speaking world where Parsons had been influential in the translation and interpretation of the German scholar’s work Parsons 1937, Weber 1947).

As more thinkers came to read the original, as German sociology re-emerged during the post-war era, and as more neutral translations appeared, so Weber’s legacy was prised away from functionalism. Weber had neither ignored conflict nor had a special theory of it. Conflict was there as an integral part of the collection of social phenomena that resulted from different actors pursuing their own interests as they defined them. Weber had not taken the functionalist step of trying to find overall integration processes that would somehow bind these conflicting interests into a wider whole. Conflicts could rumble on indefinitely. If order was achieved, it was most likely to result from one group being able to impose its interests on others through the exercise of Herrschaft. This word translates easily as ‘domination,’ though Parsons had preferred the circumlocutory ‘imperative coordination.’

Weber had also differed from Marxists in that he did not reduce social relations—including their conflictual aspects—to those of material class interests, nor indeed of any other essentialist forms. Conflict might be about class interest, but might also be about idealistic beliefs and symbolic orders. None were treated as ontologically privileged.

This interpretation of Weber became increasingly useful to those trying to avoid the hegemonic tendencies of grand theory. A good example is the work of John Rex (1961, 1981). Of political leanings which led him towards Marxism, Rex had been born in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), and was pre-occupied with racial and ethnic conflict. He spent most of his career in the British midlands, also a region of considerable ethnic complexity and, sometimes, tension. Marxist insistence on reducing all conflicts to class did not appear to him to cope with the independent reality of these issues. He found Weber’s ideas of variously rooted status groups, and their use of a diversity of means to maximize their interests, far more useful. Ethnic relations, and by derivation many others, could therefore be seen as incorporating conflict as an intrinsic and normal aspect of attempts at interest definition and maximization.

4. Conclusion: The Disappearance Of A Distinctive Conflict Sociology

Now that the great edifices of structural functionalism and Marxism seem finally to have collapsed, the agnostic, non-essentialist approach implied by the idea of conflict as endemic but mundane has probably become the dominant one in Western sociology. Yes, conflict is always likely to be a part of human relations; it can be ‘about’ almost anything; it does not necessarily have to be absorbed and tamed for some kind of social order to survive; it is not a special aspect of social life, but just a part of it. Research and theory based on assumptions of this kind cluster around the bottom right-hand corner of box IV (Fig. 1). Weber, perhaps along with Simmel, is probably the founding father whose approach to conflict appears most comfortable to contemporary sociologists. As heirs to the Marxist tradition seek to salvage something while dropping the dogmatism and historical certainty, they reach similar conclusions.

The more normal that conflict is seen, the more a specific conflict sociology will cease to exist. This becomes particularly true as sociological theory turns increasingly to theories based on models of rational action by calculating actors—approaches which are also found in Weber and Simmel. In these models actors are always depicted as having interests; and where there are interests, conflicts among them are normal and taken for granted (for example, Knight 1992).

For conflict sociology to continue to exist, the various specialisms of the discipline would need to draw on similar ideas and hypotheses when they come to instances of conflict within their particular area. This does happen to a limited extent. For example, studies of how protest groups engaged in difficult conflicts sustain their morale and endurance can be extended across from ethnic to industrial or environ-mental movements. Studies of the role of violence and the effect of violence on perpetrators, victims and outsiders may also be able to share knowledge across conflicts concerning very different issues. Beyond this however not much survives.

It has been noted at several points above how sociological approaches to conflict have often reflected developments in the world at large: obsession with society’s capacity for upheaval after the first half of the twentieth century; Dahrendorf’s concern to treat conflict as normal in the light of the German past; Rex’s African concern to study racial conflict. Today’s postmodern, post-Cold War world presents a scene in which conflict seems at once endemic but directionless, and sociological theory is reflecting that. Were the heartland of theoretical development to lie, not in the so-called ‘advanced’ societies, but in parts of the world where religious and ethnic struggles are fundamental to social life, the situation would probably be rather different (Ratcliffe 1994, Venkateswarlu 1992). And since it must not be expected that social change in the advanced societies has come to an end, it may well be that after a number of years the emphasis of the above account will appear very dated.

Bibliography:

1. Althusser L 1968 Lire le Capital. Maspero, Paris
2. Clegg H A 1975 Pluralism in industrial relations. British Journal of Industrial Relations XIII: 3
3. Cohen P S 1966 Modern Social Theory. Heinemann, London
4. Coser L 1956 The Functions of Social Conflict. Free Press, Glencoe, IL
5. Coser L 1965 Georg Simmel. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
6. Dahrendorf R 1957 Soziale Klassen and Klassenkonflikte in der industriellen Gesellschaft. Enke, Stuttgart, Germany
7. Dahrendorf R 1966 Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland. Piper, Munich, Germany
8. Dahrendorf R 1972 Konflikt und Freiheit auf dem Weg zur Dienstklassengesellschaft. Piper, Munich, Germany
9. Fox A 1973 Industrial relations: a critique of pluralist ideology. In: Child J (ed.) Man and/organization. Allen and Unwin, London
10. Habermas J 1981 Theorie des kommunikati en Handels. Suhr-kamp, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
11. Harbison F H 1954 Collective bargaining and American capitalism. In: Kornhauser A, Dubin R, Ross A M (eds.) Industrial Conflict. McGraw Hill, New York
12. Hyman R 1975 Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction. Macmillan, London
13. Knight J 1992 Institutions and Social Conflict. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York
14. Lipset S M 1964 Political Man
15. Lukes S 1974 Power: A Radical View. Macmillan, London
16. Parsons T 1937 The Structure of Social Action. McGraw-Hill, New York, Vol. 2
17. Parsons T 1964 The Social System. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
18. Poulantzas N 1968 Pou oir Politique et Classes Sociales. Maspero, Paris
19. Ratcliffe P (ed.) 1994 ‘Race,’ Ethnicity and Nation: International Perspectives on Social Conflict. University College London Press, London
20. Rex J 1961 Key Problems in Sociological Theory. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
21. Rex J 1981 Social Conflict: a Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis. Longman, London
22. Venkateswarlu D 1992 Conflict sociology in India—present state and future potentialities. Indian Journal of Social Sciences 2: 241–248
23. Weber M 1947 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization [trans.] Henderson A M, Parsons T. Oxford University Press, New York