door Liam Kilmartin 3 jaren geleden
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REVIEW
In this unit, we looked at functionalist, conflict and post-structuralist perspectives in the context of a changing society. Thus relatively little work has been concerned with the relationship between discourses and social structure-the relationship between the two being taken for granted in the functionalist perspective. Sociologists such as Lynch have been steadily concerned with this issue within the context of a conflict perspective. Work in a post structuralist perspective has tended to be more concerned with purely cultural phenomena although work such as Tovey’s has made an important contribution in this area of environment. My own work on gender (particularly 1995, 1998, 2000) has also wrestled with these issues.
Within the functionalist perspective the main focus is on the presentation of society as consensual. This view dominated not only academia, but also the wider society in Ireland up to the 1970s. In the 1970s and 1980s there was an increasing recognition of conflicting perspectives in Irish society. A key source of this conflict arose from the changing relationship between the institutional Roman Catholic Church and the State- much of this conflict revolving around the areas of the family and sexuality. In the 1990s the economic discourse became established as a dominant discourse –reflecting and reinforced by the economic boom that was dubbed the Celtic Tiger. Competing discourses in the shape of environmentalism and familism were identified- although the former has to some extent been co-opted and the latter has remained marginalised.
Finally, drawing on Gramsci’s ideas, we looked at the intelligentsia and speculated about its possible contribution to creating s hegemonic critique in a society where professionals make up 10% of those in the labour force-with roughly a half of these being women.