Conflicts arise mainly due to differences in occupations because with each occupation, there are higher levels of power, prestige, and income to be attained. Similarly, within each company and across society, benefits are not equally distributed among different occupations.
Power differences among occupations are extremely difficult to quantify, but they exist. Occupational groups differ in the degree to which members can control their own work activities. In some occupations, neither the mode of work nor its pace, are under the worker s control. Workers have varying amounts of control over their own activities depending on the technology of the occupation and the amount and kind of supervision to which they are subject. Control over one s own work is closely related to power relations with others in relevant occupations. Within a factory or corporation, for example, there may be clear lines of authority associated with different occupational roles, and roles at each rank are superior to some and subordinate to others.
The control may not only refer to work activities themselves but to claims about the incumbency of the occupational role. In some occupations, particularly in professions, the members largely determine entrance, but once someone has entered, the rights to the position may depend upon customers, colleagues, or superiors.
Occupational strata also differ in their power to determine the units of which workers are a part. Thus, even with unionization, workers still have relatively little power in decisions about matters such as marketing choices, or new product development within the occupation of which they work. As we see, one outcome of conflicts about such issues is an alteration in the moral claims people make on one another.
Robert Ezra Park s Views On Conflict
Park distinguished four major social processes: competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation.
Competition is as universal and continuous in human society as it is in natural order. It assigns persons their position in the division of labor as well as in the ecological order (Park, 1971). Conflict on the other hand is intermittent and personal. While competition is a struggle for position in the ecological and economic order, the status of the individual, or a group of individuals, in the social order is determined by rivalry, by war or by subtler forms of conflict. Competition determines the position of the individual in the [ecological] community, conflict fixes his place in society. Location, position, ecological interdependence-these are the characteristics of the [ecological] community. Status, subordination, and super-ordination control-these are the distinctive marks of society (Park, 1971).
Accommodation implies a cessation of conflict, which comes about when the system of allocation of status and power, the relations of super-ordinates to subordinates, have been temporarily fixed and are controlled through the laws and the mores. In accommodation the antagonism of the hostile elements is, for the time being, regulated, and conflict disappears as over action, although it remains latent as a potential force. With a change in the situation, the adjustment that had hitherto successfully held in control the antagonistic forces fails (Park, 1971). Accommodation, like social control generally, is fragile and easily upset. To Park, accommodation and social order, far from being natural, are only temporary adjustments and may at any moment be upset by underlying latent conflicts that press to undermine the previous order of restraint.
In contrast to accommodation, assimilation is process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common culture (Park, 1971). While Park seems to have felt that the other three fundamental social processes operate in a wide variety of social interactions, he reserves the discussion of assimilation more especially to the sociology of culture. When assimilation is achieved, this does not mean that individual differences are eradicated or that competition and conflict cease but only that there is enough unity of experience and communality of symbolic orientation so that a community of purpose and action can emerge.
Conclusion
This paper is designed to support the topic of, How Status Effects Behavior In Society. In reading this you should now be able to compare and contrast the differences in society between perhaps the two greatest sociological thinkers, Marx and Weber. The assigning of classes and they ways in which they live, have also been revealed. Economic differences straight through sociological conflicts described by Robert Ezra Park, have never been described in such ease before now. Through hard work and weeks of painstaking research, the differences in behavior between the social classes have been exposed.