Concepts of Social Conflict: Use in Social Work Curriculum

Abstract

tion, affecting, as it does, some of its most central institutions, and not least of all the universities, underscores the significance of processes for the development of social practice and social policies. Few as pects of social work practice unfold with out evidence of conflict, competition, or rivalry between individuals, groups, organi zations, and/or institutions. Such is pervasive in community life. Its very uni versality suggests that is a property of social organization.1 Quincy Wright, a careful student of the subject, suggests that conflict in some form ... is probably an essential and desirable element of human society. A society cannot exist without competition and conflict.2 While little empirical evidence is re corded on the subject, one has the impres sion that social workers frequently find themselves involved in interpersonal and intraorganizational disputes, that social agencies are frequently in competition and with one another, and that social agency participants and adherents are fre quently pitted against other institutions in the community, competing for scarce re sources and attempting, through a variety of patterns of organization and action, to affect changes in their modes of operation and service delivery. One might have ex pected that this general circumstance would have led the profession to a careful study of the processes of social and, con sequently, to the development of insight and skill in dealing with them. In fact, 1 Raymond W. Mack, Components of Social Con flict, Social Problems Vol. 12, No. 4 (Spring, 1965). Wherever human beings are found (1) social organization exists, (2) social ensues, and (3) social is, at least to some extent, deprecated (p. 388). See also Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 208; and E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi Sovereign People (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 71, All politics, all leadership and all organiza tion involves the management of conflict. 2 Quincy Wright, Nature of Conflict, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. IV (June, 1951), pp. 197-198, 200.

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