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Subject: Aspects of Society

Title : Conflict and Cooperation at Work

Perspectives

The functionalist ideal of consensus and cooperation

Functionalist sociologists, such as Talcott Parsons, Kingsley Davies and Wilbert E Moore, claim that workers and management have shared interests. Parsons, for example, claims that “the whole occupational sphere is dominated by a single fundamental goal. That of ‘success’.” This is said to create a value consensus.

Conflict damages the interests of both parties. According to V.L. Allen, as a result, “it must be possible to envisage a completely strike-free economy as a permanent state.”

Marxist perspectives

Marxists argue that workers and employers have fundamentally differing interests because of the bourgeois exploitation of labour. According to Craig Littler and Graeme Salaman employers seek to maximise profits by extending control and consequently deskilling labour as much as possible. However, management must cooperate with labour to an extent, since workers need to be sufficiently motivated to be productive.
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