UNDERSTANDING AND COMPARING FUNCTIONALISM AND CONFLICT

UNDERSTANDING AND COMPARING FUNCTIONALISM AND CONFLICT THEORY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

From the dawn of human, today the world is not the same. The situation surrounding for human keeps on changing. And one of the important changes we have observe is changes in system of relationship, changes in human interaction and interrelation, changes in social structure. These all constitute social change.
Many people have tried to study the pattern in these changes. And many theories come up time to time. And two major theories are the functionalism theory and the conflict theory.
Functionalism theory of social change is initial theory comes up with the rise of sociology as a subject: study of society. And major contributors are of course the father of sociology Auguste Comte and very famous Emile Durkheim.
August Comte has defined sociology as a science of society. Initially his main focus was to understand society as a science. And he suggested various methods to study sociology which included scientific methods like observing, experimenting, comparison etc. His own coined term ‘positivism’ can explain best that how he looks to society. This was well explained by Rapoport ‘Positivism…seeks to describe only what “obviously” is, what one can really be positive about, that is, sense data. A strict positivist, seeing a black sheep on a meadow could not say, “There is a black sheep.” He could only say, “I see a sheep; one side of which is black.”(Rapoport 1953:74). After applying his methods of studying sociology he also emerged with ‘The laws of three stages.” He suggested that every intellectual thought or idea or skill always pass through three stages.First stage is Theological stage in which events are explained in terms of the will or action of humanlike gods, spirits, demons, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. Second stage is Metaphysical Stage. The metaphysical stage was to be understood as a transitional stage between theological and scientific stage as latter is the third stage. One can also understand these stages by military stage to judicial stage to industrial stage. And he also suggested that there is always some friction between these stages or old ideas and new ideas. In his explanation of social static and social dynamic, we can found how he took that social structures and social behavior in terms of the component of society and their function.
According to Emile Durkheim society is consist of social structures and each structure have important roles or functions. He defined sociology as science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning. He also introduced the term social fact. Fact we are born with. He explained how social facts can change with social change and then it leads to change in individual. Every social fact has some role to play. Emile Durkheim explained that to understand society one should not look with individual perspective but with social perspective. He explained the idea of how everything is social. Like in his Suicide writings he explained how suicide is a social phenomenon; as society is in some kind of relationship with the reasons behind different individual suicide. In this he also explains his idea of social change that is to search pathologies or identifies problem and tackle them by taking suitable measures for them. He also talks about shifting in paradigm too in the context of social change.
The conflict theory of social change is given by Karl Marx. But Hegel for grounded the idea of conflict through his theory of dialectic. Where Hegel talks about idealism or dialectic, Marx talks about dialectic materialism. Marx conversions from thesis to antithesis to synthesis also include materiality in itself. As Marx’s thesis is material reality, then with consciousness antithesis or negation of that material reality generate, and then a new practice evolved or synthesis generate. According to conflict theory of social change every group have their own interest and there is clashes in interest of different groups and this clashes of interest leads to a change. Or simply conflict is the driving force behind any social change. This can be well understood if we start with the period of Slavery then with consciousness there was a conflict raised between slaves and the master which emerged as a new form of society Feudalism. And then this synthesis became thesis and again there is a conflict between feudal landlord and bourgeoisies in French revolution that again ends with a new form of society that is Capitalism. Marx had also explained the dialectic between base and structure. Without change in Base (economic production), structure (law, ideas, judiciary etc.) cannot be changed because he observed that these structures are born out of base, as group with power will manipulate the structure in its motive.
There are of course some flaws or incapability are there in functionalism theory. As it is more focused on short social changes and incapable of explain big revelation changes, which is well explained in conflict theory with the help of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And its difficult to explain small social changes and solidarity, stability by conflict theory but well explained by functionalism theory.
Functionalism theory says that in this world people are living in peace and harmony. But as we can see that inequalities, competitions, wars are also part of this world. It seems that functionalism theory is too much inspired by biology as a subject. As many things in theories are compared to human body, like searching pathology then acting upon them. It may seem true for a moment but actually it is highly romantic as our society is not as simple as human body, many variables are working over society. Functionalism also suggest that what exist have some role to play for betterment of society but again we can see the element of this world which are also harmful for the society. Whereas conflict theory goes to extreme that all the time everyone is in conflict with each other that is also not true there are still human whose thought are based on different norms and values.
Functionalism theory and Conflict theory both has explained mankind different approaches to look to social change and both have some flaws in them as this is all thoughts of scientist human. This is not the ultimate truth. What one can do is to analyze these theories and dwell further with owns capability.

Vinay Dabral
SSH
S132E0114

References
Social Change and Development class notes and lecture

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References: Social Change and Development class notes and lecture ­