Conflict en radicalisme: een twee-traps model

Samenvatting

Through reconceptualization in social-psychological terms, 2 models of conflict are integrated: one a marxian polarization model, essentially a rank equivalence model, the other a rank inequivalence model as developed by sociologists in the last 2 decades. A time sequence is suggested in which one explanatory model has an ignition function for the other to become operative. Individuals, in setting their course of action, seek guidance in an evaluation of interests that flow from their participation in social structures. Insofar as, within those structures, social goods such as power, ss, and sc are unequally distributed, this inequality is assumed to create diverse interests. Holders of small shares aim at an increase, whereas holders of large shares actively strive to maintain or enlarge their shares. If both groups are subjectively aware of their interests and act accordingly, the upper group will deploy defensive strategies such as the activation of ascriptive criteria of distribution, encapsulating upwardly mobile elites, and thus manipulating the thresholds of mobility along the axes of ss, sc, and power. The degree in which social goods are subject to 0 sum conditions, is a function of these strategies. This process is triggered by the existence of groups that have inequivalent shares of social goods. Such groups have been socially mobile. Reference to upper groups with large shares gives rise to demands that small shares be allowed to increase and rank equilibrium be restored. This emergence of inequivalent groups has downward consequences too. As they have risen from the ranks whose interests they once shared, a sense of relative deprivation tends to arise and increase among the nonmobile. Increased obstruction of aspirations will lead the inequivalent groups to abandon the upper groups as a point of reference, for a renewed reference to the nonmobile whose relative deprivation offers the basis for an alliance against the upper groups. By this return of leadership to the rank, criss-crossing interests have been deactivated. The situation, as the actors define it, acquires the traits of the polarization model. A radical ideology, proclaiming new criteria of social distribution, serves to reinforce the new alliance. 6 tables. Modified AA