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Conflict Theory And Structuralism Functionalism Essay

Thus their poverty is not a result of their unwillingness to work or their unfortunate decisions. It is a result of the fact that they find themselves at the lowest end of the line in the struggle for resources. Structural functionalism is based on the idea that society is a system. Its cultural, political, and economic parts work together in such a way that people are born into (or alternately fall into) a particular stratus of society and a kind of systemic force keeps them there. The poor and their labor are needed to make capitalistic society run profitably, and the poor adopt the cultural attitudes and beliefs about themselves and their place in society that...

The idea in this theory is not that there is a struggle which keeps people down, but that things just are the way they are in this system, and that if one wants to change it one must change the system itself.
Neither conflict theory nor structural functionalism offers much hope for the underclass to escape without major changes taking place. It seems that the old adage about the poor may be true after all. If society is viewed as either a product of a struggle in which there will always be losers or a product of its own making in which the economic losers play a necessary economic role, then the problem of poverty may be permanent.

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