Marx And Weber's Social Action Theory: Marxism And Functionalism
707 Words3 Pages
Unlike Marxism and Functionalism, Social Action theory is a micro theory as they analyse society from a smaller perspective and show how the individual affects society. Even though Marx and Weber agree that classes are based on people’s economic value, Weber believes that class is only a category of people with similar economic value, but their interests can vary from each other and do not identify themselves with each other (Hughes et al, 2004). Weber believes that stratification is also shaped by status and power (Giddens, 2013). Weber also believes that people should be judged based on their life chances. An example of this is that a child who are raised by working class parents is less likely to go to higher education than a child who was…show more content… Power (party) is where the common interests are known and where individuals compete for power (Hughes et al, 2004). Parties could join together based on class or status groups and could use the power they have to further increase their wealth, but wealth does not always equal power according to Weber (Hughes et al, 2004). For example, a pressure group would have more power in politics than an owner of a business which has a lot of wealth (Taylor et al, 2000). A strength of this theory is that he emphasises the importance of individuals as it’s how they interact each other and rank each other to class stratification. Another strength is that Weber mentions status because people don’t identify themselves with others because of class but rather because of their status (Hughes et al, 2004). A weakness is that Marx points out that based on Weber’s theory there would be too many classes and would be too complicated for society (Hughes et al, 2004). Another weakness is that because of the subjective nature of individuals ranking each other it will result to many social groups and having no objective way to categorise each