2.10.02
Dialectics write-up
Sean Tarjoto

	“ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY: TENSION AND CHANGE” is a required text for a CAS course that provides an overview of some classical sociological theory from Marx, Durkheim, & Weber and on more recent theories of structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism.   

	The text describes Talcott Parson’s AGIL (adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency) concepts of Integration and Latency as elements of social coordination that ensure the legitimacy and stability of any size organization.  The consistent enforcement of laws determines the legitimacy of criminal justice systems, for example. An educational system ensures long-term stability and reduces social unrest by capturing a significant portion of the labor pool, narrowing the unemployment level.  Latency also describes an economic structure based on academic ability, where high-paying and low-paying jobs are separated according to academic ability. 

	Conflict theory assumes that individuals develop their political interests based on race, ethnicity, class, religious, gender, occupational or regional identities.  These self-serving interests compete for resources that tend toward scarcity.  The most competitive interests are organized into those social institutions that control the greatest resources. Thus, instability and change can be seen as a struggle between “the haves and the have-nots”.

	Symbolic Interactionism assumes social order is based on interpretation. Language, non-verbal cues, gestures, demeanor and facial expressions exist within contexts, and individuals consciously choose and are simultaneously labeled with identities.  In the context of a college classroom, a student who wishes to be identified as an intellectual can sit in front of the classroom, ask many questions, carry large numbers of books, and speak with the instructor after class. A message from the student is sent to other students, and to the instructor. For the same student, his or her message will need to be altered within the different context of, say, a public street. For a major American corporation, advertising or public relations campaigns that do not violate any symbolic expectations of their consumers or client are a priority role.  The corporation attempts a role that establishes itself within the context of a capitalist economy.

	Symbolic interactionism closely resembles dialectical method by understanding all that interactions exist in prevailing and transient temporalities.  For an individual, different contexts are arranged depending on the types of behavior that serve as the symbols to be interpreted. Whether the quality of the role can establish itself depends on the nature of the context and the restraints on its capability to deliver the symbol to different areas of a larger social fabric.  
	
	Conflict theory establishes competitive self-preservation as the ground for a critique against the dominant social context. When the most competitive of self-serving interests possess the most wealth, and those who desire and cannot acquire that wealth appear at the moment when they are robbed of their ability to compete, than a leveling of the contextual playing field so to speak must happen if social order is to resolve itself.