Page 44 - Essencials of Sociology

Theoretical Perspectives in Sociology 17

Sociologists who use the
functionalist perspective stress how
In Sum: When the family loses functions, it becomes more fragile, making an increase industrialization and urbanization
undermined the traditional functions
in divorce inevitable. These changes in economic production illustrate how the family
of the family. Before industrialization,
has lost functions. When making a living was a cooperative, home-based effort, husbands members of the family worked
and wives depended on one another for their interlocking contributions to a mutual en- together as an economic unit,
deavor. With today’s individual paychecks, husbands and wives increasingly function as as in this photo of a farm family
separate components in an impersonal, multinational, and even global system. The fewer in Minnesota in the 1890s. As
production moved away from the
functions that family members share, the fewer are their “ties that bind”—and these ties
home, it took with it first the father
are what help husbands and wives get through the problems they inevitably experience. and, more recently, the mother. One
consequence is a major dysfunction,
Conflict Theory the weakening of family ties.
Conflict theory provides a third perspective on social life. Unlike the functionalists, who
view society as a harmonious whole, with its parts working together, conflict theorists
stress that society is composed of groups that compete with one another for scarce
resources. The surface might show cooperation, but scratch that surface and you will
find a struggle for power.

Karl Marx and Conflict Theory. Karl Marx, the founder of conflict theory, witnessed
the Industrial Revolution that transformed Europe. He saw that peasants who had left
the land to work in cities earned barely enough to eat. Things were so bad that the aver-
age worker died at age 30, the average wealthy person at age 50 (Edgerton 1992:87).