The Functions of Social Conflict

The Functions of Social Conflict: By Lewis A. Coser

When I stated reading Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien’s classic studies on knowledge gap, I thought they were Marxists, because they used the concept knowledge gap to deal with the inequalities caused by mass media. They argued that the mass media had a function similar to that of other social institutions: that of reinforcing or increasing existing inequities. This really smells like Marxism.

But CC told me I was wrong. “ They have nothing to do with Marxism. A democratic society also asks for equalities.” He said. I have to admit that this is kind of stereotype I have towards the westerns who concern about the moral issues within the social structure. The subtext is that not everyone except the Marxists would concern about that in the capitalist society.

In Marxism, inequalities are really bad things. But in Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien’s opinion, inequalities are not so bad. They quoted Lewis A. Coser many times, which indicated that they agreed with Coser ideas on social conflicts. For Coser social conflicts functioned as vaccines to the society. To some extend, social conflicts would make the society stronger. So, the knowledge gap and the inequalities caused by mass media may not bad things.

An Analysis of the Arguments in Three Papers

McCombs and Shaw in their study The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media made an arguments that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues, because the media appeared to have exerted a considerable impact on voters' judgments of what they considered the major issues of the campaign, based on the finds from the Chapel Hill voters survey in 1968 that there were strong correlation between the major item emphasis on the main campaign issues carried by the media and voters' independent judgments of what were the important issues.

In Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien’s study Mass Media Flow and Differential Growth in Knowledge, they made an argument that as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increased, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tended to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments, so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tended to increase rather than decrease, because the mass media had a function similar to that of other social institutions: that of reinforcing or increasing existing inequities, and highly educated persons were more likely to have been exposed to a heavily publicized topic in the past, based on the findings from one experiment which indicated a correlation between education and the understanding of certain issues with different levels of publicity.

In a following research of Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien, Mass Media and the Knowledge Gap: A Hypothesis Reconsidered, they found in the surveys that for the sixteen Minnesota communities as a whole, the size of the knowledge gap was only weakly related to the newspaper coverage index and in a negative direction. These findings suggested that the original hypothesis, however well supported by previous data, may not hold for all situations. So they made several modifications of the general knowledge gap hypothesis by employing some new variables:

1.     Where the issue appears to arouse general concern for a community as a whole, knowledge about that issue is more likely to become evenly distributed across educational status levels.

2.     This equalization is more likely to occur when the issue develops in a climate of social conflict.

3.     Such equalization in knowledge is more likely to occur in a small, homogeneous community than in a large, pluralistic one.

4.     Knowledge gaps on specific issues, if they appear initially, may tend to decline as public attention wanes.

Guanxi

Guanxi is a key concept in Chinese society. It is about how people are connected and the structure within Chinese society. The words like relationships, connections, or personal ties can be translated into guanxi in Chinese. However, it doesn’t work well in turn. Translations like relationships, connections, and sphere of personal influence do not fully cover the central notions of guanxi.

Compared with the value free concepts like relationships, connections, and personal ties, guanxi is involved with social norms and ethics. For example, in Confucianism, relatives and friends are two kinds of basic guanxi in people’s daily life. The guanxi with relatives is involved with the social norm of filial piety, while the guanxi with friends is involved with the social norm of loyalty.

Guanxi is embedded in the Chaxu Geju (the pattern of difference sequence) in Chinese society. In the book Rural China, Professor Fei Xiaotong described the Chaxu Geju as the water traces after throwing a stone in the lake. The person is at the center point and people who have closer guanxi with the person are in the central circles. For example, family members are in the first central circle, close friends are in the second circle, acquaintances are in the third circle, and so on.

In a narrow sense, we can see that guanxi refers in particular to the relationships with relatives and friends. In a general sense, especial in the modernizing process from acquaintance society to stranger society, when we talk about guanxi, we focus on guanxi as important resources rather than emphasizing the social norms and Chaxu Geju. Guanxi can be accumulated and used to generate more guanxi. In such as view, guanxi can be also called social capital in a metaphorical sense.

I am Penny, you are Leonard

To statistics

I am Penny, you are Leonard
We are different,
But I love you.
Vice versa.

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P.S. I have to reinstall the OS tonight, so I will write more tomorrow.

Finding short cuts

Professor Chen discussed the graph theory today, including some fundamental concepts and simple applications. What I felt most interested was the Dijkstra's algorithm.Dijkstra's algorithm is also called the greedy algorithm that I think it is easier to remember. It is greedy because "every decision it makes is the one with the most obvious immediate advantage".

Here is a demonstration on how the algorithm works.

Dijkstra's algorithm runtime

Porfessor Chen didn't go further into the details about the algorithm.We didn't go further into the details of the algorithm. But I felt that finding a short cut should be a good application of graph theory; not merely in the field of computer science, but also in social science, even in our daily life.

An obvious example for this algorithm is how to find the shortest way to build a highway between several cities. Or, if I want to make $73, what and how many bills and coins I shall choose to make sure that I take the largest possible bill or coin. Another application occurs to me is finding the shortest path in the network of links of searching results to get the most helpful information, or how to make up the shortest and most informative reading list for literature review among countless references. I am greedy too :)