SES is an abbreviation of socio economic status and is comprised of the combined effects of income, education, and occupation. Conflict is particularly interested in the inequalities that exist based on all of the various aspects of master status-race or ethnicity, sex or gender, age, religion, ability or disability, and SES. The Conflict paradigm describes the inequalities that exist in all societies around the globe. The Conflict paradigm does a very good job of explaining racism, sexism, ageism, socioeconomic inequality (wealth and poverty), etc. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.\) These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Michel Foucault’s “post-structural” perspective on how professional knowledge and expertise reinforce structures of power and domination-Although Foucault is sometimes regarded as a postmodern theorist, his perspective clearly offers a critical analysis of how systems of knowledge are reflected in forms of discourse that underlie the implicitly accepted differential distribution of power in society. Jürgen Habermas’s critical theory focus on distorted versus open communication- Jürgen Habermas, one of the Frankfurt School’s younger members, focused on how people’s everyday lifeworlds at the micro level are dominated by the impersonal controls of macro-level systems. Structural Marxist perspectives as represented by Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser-Before Marx became a key figure for American sociologists, these European Marxists focused their analyses on how capitalism is reinforced through the interdependent and mutually reinforcing institutional structures that shape the overall culture through which individuals’ consciousness is formed.ĭevelopment of American critical theory, particularly as represented by Frankfurt School theorists Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse-This humanistic neo-Marxist or “new left” perspective emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the context of the protest movements targeting the Vietnam War, racial inequality, and other social problems, and its development helped contribute to the decline of functionalism. Wright Mills’ critical description of the American power structure and “mass society”-Mills’ perspective, developed in the middle part of the twentieth century, provided a rebuttal to the then-dominant perspective of functionalism in analyzing American society. The critical theorists and perspectives to be reviewed in this chapter are as follows:Ĭ. The goal of such transformations should be to advance human rights, protect human freedom, and promote the highest possible level of human fulfillment. This often requires major social transformations. For critical theorists the overriding priority should be the welfare of people and their development to their full potential as human beings, not the maintenance of particular structures as an end in itself. The overall goal of critical theory is to raise our consciousness of how existing structures and systems tend to subordinate and repress large segments of the population, molding and shaping people’s consciousness and regulating their behavior for the sake of their own maintenance. In any case, the survival of particular structures in a society should never be seen as equivalent to the survival or well-being of the individual members of the society’s population. Is there an alternative to this high priority on the maintenance of existing institutional structures for the sake of social order? For critical theorists, social systems of all types should be evaluated in terms of how they affect individuals’ well-being, as opposed to how well they maintain their particular structures or survive.
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