Question

Answer the following questions in your own words. Explain your choices and your reasons. Provide examples where possible. Be sure to number your answers and present them in order:

Explain the rise of feminism and discuss the issue of gender inequality in health care and education as it relates to women in the United States.

Explain the conflict perspective on Social Security and discuss intergenerational competition and conflict.

Compare and contrast the functionalist (pluralist) and conflict (power elite) perspectives on U.S. power.

Discuss the globalization of capitalism, including its effects on workers, the division of wealth, and the global superclass.

Answer 1

• Functionalists view the state as having arisen out of the basic needs of the social group. To protect themselves from oppressors, people formed a government and gave it the monopoly on violence. The risk is that the state can turn that force against its own citizens.
• States have a tendency to become muggers. Thus, people must find a balance between having no government which would lead to anarchy, a condition of disorder and violence and having a government that protects them from violence, but that also may turn against them. When functioning well, then, the state is a balanced system that protects its citizens both from one another and from government.
• Functionalists say that pluralism, a diffusion of power among many special-interest groups, prevents any one group from gaining control of the government and using it to oppress the people.
• To keep the government from coming under the control of any one group, the founders of the United States set up three branches of government: the executive branch (the president), the judiciary branch (the courts), and the legislative branch (the Senate and House of Representatives).
• Each is sworn to uphold the Constitution, which guarantees rights to citizens, and each can nullify the actions of the other two. This system, known as checks and balances, was designed to ensure that no one branch of government dominates the others.
• Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1956) took the position that the country’s most important matters are not decided by lobbyists or even by Congress. Rather, the decisions that have the greatest impact on the lives of Americans and people across the globeare made by a power elite.
• The power elite consists of the top leaders of the largest corporations, the most powerful generals and admirals of the armed forces, and certain elite politicians—the president, the president’s cabinet, and senior members of Congress who chair the major committees. It is they who wield power, who make the decisions that direct the country and shake the world.
• He said that the corporate leaders are the most dominant. Because all three segments of the power elite view capitalism as essential to the welfare of the country, Mills said that business interests take center stage in setting national policy.
  
• Sociologist William Domhoff uses the term ruling class to refer to the power elite. He focuses on the 1 percent of Americans who belong to the super-rich, the powerful capitalist class.
• Members of this class control our top corporations and foundations, even the boards that oversee our major universities. It is no accident, says Domhoff, that from this group come most members of the president’s cabinet and the ambassadors to the most powerful countries of the world.
• Conflict theorists take the position that a power elite dominates the United States. With connections that extend to the highest centers of power, this ruling class determines the economic and political conditions under which the rest of the country operates.
• They say that we should not think of the power elite (or ruling class) as some secret group that meets to agree on specific matters. Rather, the group’s unity springs from the members having similar backgrounds and orientations to life.
• They have attended prestigious private schools, belong to exclusive clubs, and are millionaires many times over. Their behavior stems not from some grand conspiracy to control the country but from a mutual interest in solving the problems that face big business.
• The functionalist and conflict views of power in U.S. society cannot be reconciled. Either competing interests block any single group from being dominant, as functionalists assert, or a power elite oversees the major decisions of the United States, as conflict theorists maintain.
• Due to time limit,remaining questions can be asked as another question,they will be answered,thankyou for your cooperation