Functionalism and conflict theory offer very different explanations of action as an element of the social system. While functionalism uses the categories of roles, norms, and values, conflict theory uses the concepts of ownership and class relations, consciousness and alienation. Both models assert that the fate of society largely lays in each individual internalizing the demands of the system; but while functionalism argues that this internalization is ultimately a voluntary acceptance of the system’s values, conflict theory distinguishes between internalization operating through a lack of consciousness (alienation) and internalization that occurs consciously, which only arises when the system's values correspond to the interests of one's own social class. Hence, while functionalism assumes that this internalization of values occurs equally and totally in both the socio-economically high and the low sectors (deviating cases are assumed to be anomalous and thus are treated as exceptions), conflict theory asserts that, in many cases, the members of a dominated class submit to the demands of the system not because they approve of its prevailing values, but because they are simply coerced by outside forces to do so. Those who resist are subject to disciplinary action and even execution.
In order to compare the analyses both frameworks offer on action within a system, we present some case studies of typical members living in El Salvador's currently prevailing social system.
*Don Lencho, the owner of several coffee plantations and some other businesses, travels to El Salvador from Miami, where he lives with his family. This year, he has decided not to harvest a portion of his holdings, since they are in conflict areas. After speaking with the administrator and foreman on his property, he presents the bank with a request for a loan, which he receives without difficulty. He participates in a convention of coffee growers and signs a petition to the government which demands that the salaries of seasonal harvesters not increase. He capitalizes on his stay in the country by inspecting the state of his business, covering a few costs, meeting with colleagues, and criticizing the character of the latest political developments, which discourage him from permanently returning to the country.
*Don Alejandro is a primary school teacher and works at a small school in the outskirts of San Salvador. His wife is secretary of a ministry, and with their salaries combined, they can afford their family’s expenses. Both work with the priest of their parish, which forms part of a base community. On several occasions, Don Alejandro has been threatened by the local commander of the Guard, who disapproves of his collaboration with the priest and mentions his ties to the teaching association ANDES, since the Guard more or less considers them “Communists.” Despite his fears, Don Alejandro continues working tirelessly in his school and in the parish, since he thinks that only a radical, bottom-up transformation can enact the most needed reforms of the country’s structure.
*Doña Matilde is 48 years old, even though she looks much older. She has lost her husband along with three of her children to “death squads” and other military projects. In the last operation launched by the army in the district in which she lived, they destroyed her home, killed her pets, and set fire to all of her property. She was scarcely able to save herself some hours before the attack, which lasted almost two weeks, by fleeing with four of her little grandchildren, each having almost nothing to eat or drink while being hunted down like animals. Today, she finds herself in a shelter of displaced persons run by a humanitarian organization. Two of her children are fighting as guerrillas. Doña Matilde dedicates all of her time caring for her grandchildren and tending to the needs of everyone in the shelter, losing neither her spirit or hope. Doña Matilde wholeheartedly believes that there is a time for crying, for remembering her children who died or those still fighting in the mountains, from whom she rarely receives news.
According to the functionalist lens, the proper way to explain the behavior of Don Lencho, Don Alejandro, and Doña Matilde would be to define the role or roles they play. Undoubtedly, each person can play several roles. Don Alejandro, for example, is an older man, husband, and member of the Christian base community, and each one of these functions is a distinct role, whether they are compatible with each other or not. Thus, it is necessary to figure out which role best represents what the person is doing, that is to say, to focus on their functional-laboral differentiation within the system. That question demands discerning the norms or normative prescriptions the person tries to follow in their activity. A norm is not the same as a law; each law is a norm, but not all norms are laws, since there are informal norms. A formal norm is one which is explicitly defined and also has an already codified expression with certain sanctions; in contrast, an informal norm is not explicitly defined, and one is often not even conscious of it, but not such that it lacks efficacy or does not carry sanctions. Don Lencho, for example, knows that he must send a bottle of whisky to the bank manager every time he goes on vacation, that is, if he wants to keep his credit facilities in order. Moreover, functionalism assumes that one can contribute something to the performance of roles, in the sense that the role fulfilled can carry idiosyncrasies corresponding to the traits of the person fulfilling it. Doña Matilde plays a maternal role with her nephews, but probably does so with idiosyncrasies, given her traits as a campesino and refugee.
Functionalism would try to find what social functions the different roles serve within the system: the coffee grower/businessman enables the production of necessary goods for the society; the teacher transmits his indispensable knowledge and skills, as well as basic values, to others in order to incorporate them into the system while performing his own work as a member of a Christian base community; finally, the grandmother, serving in lieu of a mother, attends to the rearing of children. Each one of these roles contains to a socially-necessary end whose fulfillment is required for the preservation of the social system and consequently the survival of all its members. Likewise, functionalism holds that the best way to understand the behavior of these people is to locate them in their corresponding subsystems: Don Lencho is in the economic subsystem and probably sits in the “world” of agricultural producers; Don Alejandro is in the academic and religious subsystems, depending on whether one considers his role as teacher or as member of a Christian base community the primary role; finally, Doña Matilde is in the family subsystem and, in her current circumstance, is a member of a particular subsystem called “the shelter” (See Morán, 1983). The distinct positions which these people occupy in Salvadoran socio-economic stratification—the distinct rights and resources to which they have access—are precisely due to their different functions in the system and their relative importance, which calls for different conditions, incentives, and rewards (See Text Five).
Although every system within a society could reflect a particular sub-culture, all share the same fundamental values: the values of the social system as such. In El Salvador, some of these core values are industry, a Christian disposition toward life, and the primary importance of the family (See Martín-Baró, 1986a, 1986b, 1988a). These values are those which, in the final instance, characterize the system and whose internalization allows people to become its actual members as they acquire a common social identity, even if it is differentiated according to their status and assigned roles. The actions of Don Lencho, Don Alejandro, and Doña Matilde demonstrate their effort to realize the values of industry, a Christian disposition toward life, and familial devotion--their efforts to materialize them through their acts.
Conflict theory takes a radically different view on what the actions of these three people are and what they mean. At the outset, one must specify to which of the different social classes in Social society each person belongs, which would at the least require a description of the mode or modes of production existing in El Salvador and the concrete social formation they compose. One could say that the capitalist order in the country is of a feudal sort, and it is intermixed with even more primitive modes of production, meaning that other divisions between social groups are produced beyond the fundamental division in capitalism between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat. This makes El Salvador’s class mosaic more than a little complex (See Jerez, 1977; Montes, 1984, 1988). Certainly, the radicalization provoked by crisis and exacerbated by the civil war has erased certain superficial agreements between groups, highlighting the most important disagreements (See Martín-Baró, 1983a); there are substantial differences which cannot be ignored when describing the behavior of people from both dominant and dominated groups in El Salvador, or even that of those who are used to being called the “middle sectors.”
Applying this framework to the examples presented earlier, it certainly appears that Don Lencho, who owns coffee plantations and has moved to Miami with his family, is among the most powerful in El Salvador’s hierarchy. As a coffee grower, he belongs more to the agro-exporter oligarchy than that of the financiers. Nevertheless, the condition of having other businesses (perhaps initially made possible by the capital accumulated from the production of coffee) links him to other industrial and commercial sectors. Doña Matilde, for her part, is a clear representative of the Salvadoran peasant, impoverished but not proletarianized in a strict sense, since she has never entered a situation of stable wage-earning. Finally, Don Alejandro belongs to the lower-middle sector, which is not always easy to label as the petite bourgeoisie. Although the level of education achieved by Don Alejandro is relatively high and allows him to enjoy some benefits reserved for the dominant classes, his material conditions and style of life altogether make him closer to the urban proletariat than the bourgeoisie.
For conflict theory, a basic understanding of these three Salvadorans' behaviors, and even the roles they perform, must be based on their relation to different social classes. Their distinct, objective membership [to a class] is the chief element for explaining their actions, as opposed to what functionalism affirms—that such membership is, in the majority of contemporary societies, the product of the persons’ actions. It is a fact, for instance, that no landowner like Don Lencho goes on to dedicate his life to teaching elementary school in El Salvador, or that an instructor like Don Alejandro ever obtains the rank or “role” of an oligarch. Similarly, Don Lencho and Doña Matilde have had to abandon their residence due to war; but applying the role of “refugee” to either does not seem very telling of their circumstances and behaviors, which is not to say that, from another angle, there is no need to mention this.
If, as Parsons’s functionalism asserts, the fundamental aim of a social system depends on its values, the transmission of its social values is one of its most important processes, one of its central tasks at hand. Logically, this occupation would tend to be encouraged and generously compensated in order to ensure its proper fulfillment (Davis and Moore, 1945/1966). However, the social treatment of teachers like Don Alejandro, especially when compared to the social treatment of property owners and economic decision-makers like Don Lencho, practically contradicts the theoretical view on the functional distribution of goods and social rewards. It thus appears clear that power obtained by social control is what substantially determines the distribution of social tasks, and even more, the distribution of produced goods.
However, action within the system, according to conflict theory, is not adequately explained by one's objective membership to a class of people; it is also necessary to take into account whether one's subjective consciousness, knowledge, and course of action are consistent or inconsistent with that membership. Class consciousness puts the interests of one's own social class into operation in daily activity, whereas alienation translates into an acceptance of the dominant ideology, of its values and lifestyles, while bringing profound interpersonal and intrapersonal contradictions. Don Lencho, convinced of the ideological claim built upon the interests of his own class, which makes him see the oppressive situation in El Salvador as natural and makes him think “functionally” that the division of labor is simply a consequence of each individual's effort and merit, objectively channels those interests and defends them with all the resources in his reach: government lobbying, biased economic decisions, and support for the military and paramilitary sectors associated with the traditional way things are. Doña Matilde has a clear consciousness about her oppressed situation, even if she articulates her convictions in religious terms; her participation in communitarian work and her support for the fight of “the boys” are the only ways through which she is able to put her consciousness into operation. Finally, Don Alejandro has diagnosed the country’s situation in a way which brought him to align himself with the teachers association, ANDES, and to participate in different protest activities. Indeed, Don Alejandro sometimes does not perceive what his position in the social system is with sufficient clarity and fails to cast off the dominant ideological discourse, having become thoroughly assimilated during his development as a teacher. This makes his behavior and his teaching sometimes contradictory to forms of coexistence or social action.
Table 1 compares the elements of the functionalist lens and conflict theory used to explain social action in the affairs of the Salvadoran social system, that is to say, the action of the people as members of that social system.
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