[This is the first of a two-part article that examines both structural and processural paradigms of social theory.  This argues that the structural-based theories cannot do what they claim to do; in this case, explain the emergence of large-scale protest movements.  In the second part, a processural paradigm is advanced, with focus being on what is called a “Polyconflictual Model of Society,” which it claims that it can explain such social phenomena. Part 2 can be read here. The author seeks responses to his new theory, with focuses primarily upon substantial and presentational issues.]

Two great waves of social movements from the “bottom” of societies have shaken the world since 1986, including significant protest movements in the United States and Europe (see Scipes, 2022; see also Bevins, 2023). 

Although suggesting otherwise, mainstream sociology has no way to describe theoretically the social movements that have emerged from the “bottom” of various societies to do the shaking. And I want to take advantage of this situation to challenge the theoretical basis of established social theory in general.[i]

This article is an effort both to discuss the limitations of established macrosociological theory, which make it impossible to understand theoretically this global-wide upsurge, and to propose a processural model of society called “Polyconflictualism,” which arguably can theoretically explain the rebellions and their resulting consequences, as well as larger macrosociological processes.

In short, as will be seen herein, this paper is a challenge to the structural-based models of society on which mainstream sociology has been built over the past 100 or so years.

ESTABLISHED MACROSOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Sociology is a theoretically based discipline so the issues at hand are critical.

Sociological understandings are said to be based on established theory, in a dialectical process that leads from gathering data on social developments to analyzing what is going on and why, over time, patterns emerge, gathering more data, seeing if the analysis still holds, gathering more data, etc., until sociologists develop theory that allows them to predict accurately future behavior.  And then, additional data is gathered to confirm or falsify (reject) previous findings and the theory based on them.

Although writing specifically on development theory, what Jan Nederveen Pieterse says applies to theory in general:

Theory is the critique, revision, and summation of past knowledge in the form of general propositions and the fusion of diverse views and partial knowledges in general frameworks of explanation.

Theory is a meeting place of ideology, politics, and explanation.  Framing, defining the field, the rank order of questions, are the business of theory.

Theory is a distillation of reflections on practices in conceptual language so as to connect with past knowledge (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 2-3).

Sociology theorizes at three different levels of society:  micro, meso and macro—most restrictive and most constrained to the most expansive—yet the discussion herein is focused only on the macrosociological or big-picture level; after all, in this paper, we’re trying to understand developments on a global scale.[ii]  This is not to say that the analysis herein cannot be extended to either or both of the other levels, but for this article, it’s limited to the macro level.

Macrosociological theory should be required to do at least two things—and perhaps more—but these two things seem essential:  (1) a theory needs to accurately represent how any society “operates” on a day-to-day basis—how do people decide what they are going to do in relation to others (not only individual people, but natural, physical, and social environments as well), both those similar to and different from themselves, yet present in a commonly-defined physical area, generally in the same social order?—and how do people respond to changes in context, whether actual or perceived?; and (2) it needs to allow for the possibility of social change and describe how people come to accept, modify, or reject such changes.  In other words, any theory should be tested for its ability to accomplish both things, and it seems important that theory should be required to do these two things.

However, to do this, we must recognize that not everyone sees the world the same way; as discussed below, there are at least two major ways that people understand the world—and most people are not consciously aware of these different understandings.  People individually gather information and knowledge through their experiences—generally these are inchoate and unsystematic processes that develop as they proceed through life—and act upon understandings of “society” that they unconsciously assemble in their minds.  These understandings are communicated to others at various times in their lives; these understandings can be congruent or contradictory from one another.  These unconscious assemblages are not necessarily wrong; they are generally unsystematic, and they are not usually subject to conscious systematization.  In many cases, they remain inchoate.  And I argue that most people assume that everyone else—especially those who live in a similar social situation—sees the world similarly to them.[iii]

Sociology, as an intellectual tradition and current discipline, tries to organize thinking about social processes and systematizes such.  It overwhelmingly focuses on group interactions and social processes at any one time, although it tries to recognize how changes in social context affect these social relationships.  In my opinion, the best sociology is that which recognizes the historicity of the social processes so that one can understand how they have developed over time, joining with contemporary developments and, ultimately, suggesting how they might develop in the future; sociology focuses on more than just contemporary events.

To help enable all of this, sociology has created macrosociological theory to explain how social processes “work” in the broadest, most expansive arenas of study; to date, this has generally been understood to be the nation-state, although developments since the 1960s have included regionalization and globalization (Nederveen Pieterse, 2010: 1; see also, among numerous others, McCoy, 2017, 2021; Bevins, 2023; Scipes, 2023), expanding our respective fields of study.

Theories or Models of Society?

There are said to be two macrosociological “theories” by which mainstream sociologists understand particular societies:  structural functionalism and conflict theory.  In reality, there is not one structural functional theory, nor is there just one conflict theory.  In fact, this author thinks these “theories” are better described as different models of society, suggestions to help us to understand how a society generally operates at a theoretical level, and not specific theories as to how they actually operate.[iv]  Accordingly, herein, I’m going to replace the word “theory” with the term “model (s) of society.”

I argue that understanding these models of society is crucial.  The importance of recognizing that there are different models is the effect on our understanding:  if one views a social situation through one model, it will give you a different understanding of what you are seeing than if you use the other model.

A quick example:  if one is driving home and the road is blocked by protestors (for whatever reason), how one understands social relations within society will affect how she/he views the protest:  one using a structural functionalist model—seeing society as basically “one big happy family,” where no “group” has more power than any other—will tend to see the protest at very least as a “disruption,” something undesirable.  Contrarily, one who uses a structural conflict model—seeing society being unequal and with one “group” having power over others—and supports those in the less-powerful position, will tend to appreciate the protestors:  right on![v]  Again, the model chosen will effect one’s understanding.

As said, sociology has developed two general theoretical approaches at the macrosociological level:  structural functional and structural conflict models.   Because their differences are generally recognized, we begin with differences and then consider similarities, which are almost never recognized.  It is argued here that both must recognized as “unities.”

Differences

While a structural functional model generally sees any society as a unified whole, they see it comprised of a number of socially constructed categories,[vi] and these categories have roughly comparable decision-making power within each society.  Thus, a structural functional model foregrounds equality and cooperation in social relations between these categories. 

Each societal member can be placed into at least one category; because it sees society as a “unity,” no one in any society exists outside of one of these categories.

This model argues that each of these categories serves a particular “function” in society, such as the health function, the education function, the political function, the economic function, etc.  The argument for the importance of each of these functions is “shown” by their long period of existence in a society; obviously each category meets some kind of social need.  Within any particular society, these categories are seen as generally equal in social importance; accordingly, no one category predominates.  Thus, since each category has roughly equal social decision-making power, the concept of power is generally downplayed or ignored in these analyses.  In this model, social change is very slow, as people in the categories across the social order must come to general consensus before change can take place.

A structural conflict model is based on a radically different perspective:[vii]  it also sees society as a unified whole but, instead of seeing each of the categories serving a social good and being basically equal, as do the structural functionalists, a conflict model sees societies being structured unequally between those with power and resources, and those without; this is a have/have-not model, and social well-being is limited to those more powerful.  Accordingly, the interests of one “category” are seen as antagonistic to those of the other; therefore, they are said to be conflictual.  Social change can be rapid.  The first great theorist from this perspective was Karl Marx, who analyzed society on the basis of “class struggle” between two social “classes,”[viii] the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,theorizing that an analysis of the production relations and the “class struggle” emerging from within any social order was key to understanding it.

However, while Marx’ theoretical analysis (and its various iterations) predominated in critical social theory circles for approximately 100 years, it came under sustained critical challenge in the late 1960s-early ‘70s.  Others, also using a structural conflict model, argued there were better perspectives from which to understand any society.  First, some theorists argued that understanding race relations was key to understanding a society (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967, basing their understanding off the work of W.E.B. DuBois; see Zuckerman, ed., 2004).  Then, an even more sustained challenge came from feminists, who argued that gender relations were key to understanding a society (Firestone, 1970; see Ferguson, 2017).  And finally, an international approach—beginning with dependency theory and then surpassed by the more sophisticated World Systems Theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (Moghadam, 2020: 4)—based on imperial relations between developed and developing countries was advanced.  So, the debate that emerged from the 1960s was not between those who saw society as being generally equal or unequal—over time, that was generally conceded to be the latter—but over which set of conflictual relations were primarily the most important in trying to understand an entire society.

The problem with these structural conflict approaches is that while each had its strengths and weaknesses, none could adequately explain all of the existing power relations in any society, although each suggested they could do so.  Theorists then got creative, and started combining these approaches to overcome these weaknesses, so we got socialist feminism or feminist socialism (depending on the author and the aspect being prioritized), and Patricia Hill Collins combined production, racial and gender analyses in the first edition of her path-breaking Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 1990); by her second edition, she had all four—production, racial, gender and imperial relations—combined for their overall explanatory power (Collins, 2000).

The latest iteration in this process has been the theory of intersectionality.  This theory recognizes that there is not just one form of oppression, so that we must consider all forms of oppressive relations and their interactions, and recognize that the “key contradiction” varies by situation (Crenshaw, 1989; see also Coaston, 2019).

The problem not addressed, however, is that each of these approaches accepts a unified relationship between the established social order[ix]  and the responses to it.[x]  However, this “structural unification” cannot account for people who are dissatisfied with the social order and who insist on going beyond the limits of the established social order.[xi]  

What about Max Weber?  While Weber is recognized for his concept of verstehen (roughly, to understand), he, too, builds off a structural model, although he gives it his significant cultural twist.  Writing later than Marx and seeing particularly Western societies as developing considerably further beyond Marx’ two “classes,” his is a more sophisticated approach than is Marx’.  Yet Weber and his followers run into the problem of how does his three-category model of class-status-party operate in reality?  Those whose sociology is based on Weber’s work can provide excellent analyses, but they cannot adequately provide a theoretical understanding of how the social order, in fact, “operates.”[xii]

Weber, nonetheless, contributed a concept central to this discussion:  power.  According to Weber, “In general, we understand by ‘power’ the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participants in this action” (Gerth and Mills, eds., 1946: 180).  This issue is further discussed below.

Nothing said above is terribly controversial, as a look at almost any Introductory to Sociology textbook will confirm, although varying on details.  However, while sociology has long recognized the differences between structural functionalist and structural conflict models of society, it has tended to ignore their similarities.

It is their similarities that allow them to be placed in a common, structural paradigm.[xiii]  

Similarities

Both of these models share three commonalities: (1) they see that all members of a social order can be placed in one “socially-constructed category”—whether any one of the functionalist categories, or larger social categories such as capitalist/worker, male/female, whites/people of color,[xiv] heterosexual/homosexual, etc.;[xv] (2) they see one particular relationship between two categories as primarily determining the entire social order; and (3) that this key relationship is rigid and holds in all times and all places.

Social categories are therefore crucial to both of these models because specific location within the social structure is said to determine subsequent social behavior of people in any category.  Thus, placement of individuals and ultimately groups into particular social categories is critical, making this a categorical approach.

Accordingly, further attention must be focused on these socially constructed categories.  To be seen as viable, it is argued that they must meet three requirements; if any one is not met, then the concept is invalidated.  To “work” as a social category, all members must (a) share a common world view; (b) they must always treat other category members with respect; and (c) they must always act in solidarity with other category members.  Without any one of these—much less all three—the category is exploded, invalidated.  To continue….

Let’s take the category of “women,” and do a simple thought experiment.  Do all women share a common world view?  The answer is obvious:  no.  Do all women always treat other women with respect?  Unfortunately, no.  Do all women always act in solidarity with other category members?  Obviously not.

But what about other categories?  Do these hold for African Americans?  For LGBQT+ members?  For disabled people?  Once we recognize that there must be some commonality for a category to “work,” we see that none of them work; the concept of socially constructed social categories is invalid, and therefore, is negated:  the theories which are based on these categories simply are not valid.

And so, to take this further, even if the categories were to hold—for sake of argument—so what?  Sociologists have “morphed” the term “describe” into “determine.”  In other words, it is legitimate to describe a bunch of people who share some commonalities:  Latinos, for example, can be delineated from “Anglos” (whites) and from African Americans; that’s legitimate.  However, it is not legitimate to argue that all people in a particular category—in this case, Latinos—act as a result of their particular categorization; in other words, I argue that categorization does notdetermine behavior:  if one Latino scratches a hip at 8:00 am, this does not mean that all Latinos will scratch their hip at 8:00 am.  A simple “example,” perhaps, but an essential one:  categorization does not determine behavior.[xvi]

The point being made here is that any model of society based on socially constructed categories is invalid; the concept simply cannot hold the weight.

To synthesize:  neither structural functionalist nor structural conflict models can accurately represent collective human behavior in a social order because they are based on social categories that, once examined, fail to do what they claim to be able to do; as said, they simply cannot hold the weight.  They both fail requirement #1, presented above, that a macrosociological theory needs to be able to accurately represent how any society “operates” on a day-to-day basis—how do people decide what they are going to do in relation to others, both those similar to and different from themselves, yet present in a commonly-defined physical area in the same general social order, and how do people respond to changes in context, whether actual or perceived?

Further, I argue that neither model can adequately explain social change—see requirement #2.  While they can explain how men have dominated women throughout history; they cannot explain the processes that have taken place in social orders around the world since the late 1960s-early ‘70s, by which women have become generally—although not yet completely—equal with men; and similarly, they cannot explain the processes by which people of color globally have changed their positions vis-à-vis white-skinned people.  Nor can either explain how people come to accept, modify, or reject such changes.

So, it is argued here—whether you see the inadequacies of social categories on which these established theories are based or you do not accept the idea that social location determines behavior, or both—that neither model in the structural paradigm can adequately represent social behavior within a society/social order, nor can they adequately explain social change, which includes the massive social changes referred to in the beginning of this paper that have taken place since the mid-1980s, much less over a longer period of time.  Might there be another model of society/paradigm that can better do these things?

References

All URLs were operational as of August 18, 2025.

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—        2001.  Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment,2^nd Ed.  New York and London: Routledge.

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[i]     I keep this article on the more detached level of sociology, which allows much more theoretical “room” for our examination than would starting from a particular political perspective.

            In other words, my critique herein is a critique much broader than of just Marxism—I critique all theories based on structural models of society—but it specifically includes Marxism.

[ii]     These terms are relational, not absolute.  Thus, the entire globe could be seen at the macro level, with the US the meso, and the State of Indiana  as the micro level in one study; yet Indiana could be the macro level in another, with the Calumet Region the meso, and the City of Gary as the micro level.

[iii]     However, as argued below, we cannot assume people living next door to us, much less others in the same social category, understand the world the same way we do; some might, and some might not.  The larger issue is that it cannot be assumed that other people understand “society” the same as we do; this must be verified and, only then, can commonality be accepted.

[iv]     While it could be argued that certain established theorists should be discussed here, it is not appropriate for what I’m trying to do in this article; I am challenging all structural-based models of society.  Further, and again in line with what I’m trying to do, the focus is not on previously established “theories,” but on proposing a new model to replace them.

[v]      In other words, think of these models similar to a color lens on a camera; a red lens will give different coloration than will a blue lens.

[vi]     The term “socially constructed categories” is used here instead of the more familiar “groups”; they are established by qualitatively different processes.  Socially constructed categories can be established by theorists/analysists (i.e., outsiders) in any way they deem necessary, whether those placed in them agree or not, or whether they accurately represent social reality.  Groups, alternatively, are established by people themselves, who place themselves in their respective, created groups.  The differences will become clearer in the latter part of this paper.

[vii]     What is here being called the “structural conflict” model is commonly referred to as “conflict theory”; they are the same, although I suggest my terminology is superior.

[viii]    It is argued here that Marx’ term, “class,” is really one form of category; this author prefers the more-inclusive term of category.

[ix]     Sociology’s terminology has been overwhelmingly established by functionalist theorists, who largely have ignored the issue of power.  For example, we use the term “society” to refer to our collective endeavors, which makes sense from a functionalist standpoint, implicitly recognizing roughly equivalent decision-making power between the different categories.  (As to individual relations within each category, we must delineate between “leaders” and “the led.”)

               However, when we approach these collective endeavors from a structural conflict standpoint, we see that the concept “society” obfuscates power relations within this collectivity; a much more accurate terminology, which foregrounds power differences, is “social order”; it recognizes the hierarchical and, therefore, unequal relationships between those in a particular collectivity with power and those without.  From here-on in this paper, “society” will be replaced with “social order.”

[x]      There is a philosophical problem here as social structure and response are basically seen as a unified “whole,” and this has been the basis for much traditional social thinking to date. 

               I argue that they must first be separated, so that the structure does not and cannot determine the response; without out this differentiation, then responses by individuals or groups of individuals cannot go beyond the limitations established by the structure.  Going beyond these limitations does not mean that the structure will be necessarily overturned/transformed from the response, but without offering this possibility, we are precluded from understanding social movements from below such as the Civil Rights/Black Power and Feminist movements that have exceeded structural limitations, nor can we understand revolutions, such as the Algerian, Chinese, Cuban, Nicaraguan, Russian, Vietnamese, and Zimbabwean as well as by others, each which emerged from the bottom of the social order.  Further comment is beyond the scope of this paper.

[xi]     Ken Morrison (2006) discusses the historical innovations advanced by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.  A lengthy quote explains:

            By 1905, with the publication of works such as Marx’s German Ideology and Capital, Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor and Suicide, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a body of knowledge was formed, and a common perspective emerged which began to define social thought separately from historical thought, leading in a perspective referred to as structural theory.  Based on the works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, structural theory is the name used to describe a family of perspectives in social thought which use specific techniques of interpretation for studying history, human nature, and society and, in the main, it gets its name from the tendency to conceptualize society as a structure of social fields which exist outside of the individual.  The central idea is that these structures first constitute themselves as diverse social fields, which include the economy, the political structure, the family system and the field of law and religion.  These social fields were thought to structure social activity, impose external limits on action and compel individuals to act in ways which often override their personal considerations and their private will (emphases added) (Morrison, 2006: 4).

[xii]     For an excellent overview of Weber’s work—with specific comparisons to especially Marx—see Morrison, 2006. After noting that “Weber fundamentally disagreed with Marx on a number of key theoretical issues,” Morrison specifically discusses a key difference: “Weber rejected Marx’s assertion that the central task of social theory was to change society.”  Expanding, Morrison writes, Weber “thought that the ultimate task of social theory was to search for historical truths and to gather historical facts about society and social development.  Because of this, he believed that social theory itself was in principle a search for historical patterns and relationships in which knowledge of society and history could only be discovered by a comparison of different historical periods” (Morrison, 2006: 276.)

[xiii]    This section on paradigms follows the work of Thomas Kuhn.  Kuhn does not provide a definition of “paradigm.”  The closest he comes is, “These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community” (Kuhn, 1970: viii).

               Following Kuhn, I define a paradigm as “A set of scientific efforts and achievements that share the same set of general assumptions and approaches to respectively identified research problems in a widely defined but commonly focused aspect of the social/scientific order.”  Thus, for purposes herein, it is the broadest level of theoretical abstraction in sociology.

               Kuhn argues that science advances through “scientific revolutions,” whereby a new paradigm challenges the established paradigm, and ultimately replaces the established one (Kuhn, 1970).

               This author has been addressing these issues for a number of years, and his thinking has evolved over time.  These ideas were first elaborated in written form in Scipes (2010: 139-151).  Some of the present section has been taken directly from this section in the previous book, but it not necessary to cite oneself, even when a direct quote; the thinking in this present section is a combination of this previous book and subsequent refinements and surpasses the earlier account.

[xiv]    Note that this contradiction between racial groupings—a term based on social differentiation especially based on physical characteristics, noting difference but not valuing one higher or lower, desirable/undesirable, etc., but rejecting the supposedly biological-based concept of “race”—is between whites and people of color, not whites and blacks.  The reason is simple.  The part of the country one is referring to affects the racial grouping of color under consideration and it varies:  in the South, and probably much of the eastern part of the US, the primary racial distinction would be between white and Black people.  But go to the northern Plains states (Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, etc.), much less Minnesota and Wisconsin, and there are not many African Americans there; the primary racial distinction would be between whites and Native Americans.  Go to the Southwest, and the primary racial distinction would be between whites and Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans.  Go to San Francisco, and the primary racial distinction would be between whites and Asian Americans, and particularly Chinese Americans.  Hence, in general, between whites and people of color.

[xv]     This dualistic male/female type of dichotomy is used only to illuminate these various structural category theoretical relationships; I do not think they represent social realities.  I use them only for illumination.

[xvi]    This point, interestingly, undercuts both much of Marxist analyses as well as “identity” politics, probably the two leading sets of activist-based political analyses in the US in the early 21^st Century.  Each of these two sets of politics, ultimately, are based on being placed—by oneself or by others—into a particular social category which, in turn, then is assumed to determine future behavior.  While this appears commonsensible in regard to one person/category, what happens when you have two or more people in the same category who totally disagree with the other/another in the same category?

               For one example, in my 2003 Ph.D. dissertation, I examined how industrial workers in two industries (steel and meatpacking) in two independent unions (in steel and meatpacking) in the same area (in and around Chicago, including Northwest Indiana), at the same time (1933-55), and drawing off members from the same labor pool (white ethnics, African Americans from the rural South, and Mexicans) addressed the issues of white supremacy and racism in the workplace, union, and community in which their members lived and worked.  Despite the commonalities, and despite their similar positions within the same social order, the steelworkers’ organization ignored these issues while the packinghouse workers directly confronted them (Scipes, 2003).  These contradictory actions by actors in the same structural location simply cannot be explained by a structural model.  Thus, my findings undermine structural-based theories that are based on location within a particular social order.  My 2003 study has recently been accepted for publication and will be out in late 2025 or early 2026.

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