The Evolving Landscape of Conflict Theory: Recent Trends

For much of its history, conflict theory painted a fairly straightforward picture: society is divided between the powerful and the powerless, and conflict flows from that division. Karl Marx pointed to class struggle; C. Wright Mills highlighted the power elite; Ralf Dahrendorf broadened the lens to include authority in all its forms. These were important contributions. But as societies grew more complex, it became clear that power doesn’t only operate from the top down, and conflict isn’t always visible as a grand confrontation. Recent trends in conflict theory have moved toward something more nuanced – examining how power is embedded in culture, institutions, language, and even the smallest daily interactions.

From class struggle to cultural construction 🔗

Traditional conflict theory was primarily concerned with economic structures – who owns what, and who controls whom as a result. This framework was powerful for explaining 19th-century industrial capitalism, but it struggled to account for the subtler forms of domination that emerged in modern societies. Scholars began to ask: why do inequalities persist even when formal barriers – legal discrimination, explicit exclusion – are removed? Why do people sometimes accept arrangements that disadvantage them without any obvious coercion?

The answer, contemporary theorists argued, lies in cultural and institutional constructions of power. Dominant groups don’t just control factories or governments – they shape the very frameworks through which people understand reality. Norms, language, professional standards, and institutional routines all carry power within them. Later thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu expanded the analysis to include symbolic power and cultural capital as dimensions of social conflict and stratification, recognizing that inequality gets reproduced not only through economics, but through the subtle signals embedded in everyday culture.

Michel Foucault: power is everywhere 🔗

No thinker has reshaped the conflict theory landscape more profoundly than Michel Foucault. A French philosopher and historian, Foucault (1926-89) is notable for works including Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), which challenged foundational assumptions about how power works.

The traditional view – that power is held by specific individuals or institutions and exerted downward – was, for Foucault, far too simple. He asserted that power is not merely held by sovereign entities but is pervasive throughout social practices. It isn’t concentrated in a single place you can point to; it circulates through social relationships, institutions, and discourses in ways that are often invisible.

The concept of power/knowledge 🔗

Central to Foucault’s thinking is the concept of power/knowledge – the idea that power and knowledge are inseparably linked. For Foucault, power decides what is knowable and by whom. Whoever controls what counts as legitimate knowledge – in medicine, education, law, psychology – also controls how people understand themselves and others. A medical diagnosis, for example, doesn’t just describe a condition. It defines a person, determines how they are treated by institutions, and shapes how they see themselves.

Foucault wrote that power “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.” This is a radical departure from conflict theory’s classical focus on overt domination. Power, in Foucault’s view, is productive as much as it is repressive – it creates subjects, shapes desires, and defines what is considered normal or deviant.

Discourse, institutions, and subjugated knowledges 🔗

For Foucault, power was once the preserve of sovereigns, but it has increasingly become dispersed through a dense network of institutions and processes that circulate discourses of knowledge. Prisons, hospitals, schools, and psychiatric clinics are not simply neutral service providers – they are sites where power operates by classifying, monitoring, and normalizing individuals.

Foucault also introduced the concept of subjugated knowledges – the perspectives and voices that dominant discourses push to the margins. These are marginalized perspectives that challenge dominant narratives but are systematically excluded from mainstream recognition. When communities challenge official medical classifications of their experiences, or when Indigenous groups contest colonial historical narratives, they are reclaiming subjugated knowledge.

Foucault and the limits of classical conflict theory 🔗

Foucault theorized truth and power as omnipresent and relational forces constructing all institutions, disciplines, and discourse – a significant departure from conflict theorists who focused on identifiable class interests. This has drawn both praise and criticism. Critics note that while Foucault contends there is no center of power, his account remains top-down or structural, missing the interactive and enabling aspects of power. Feminist scholars have also pointed out that his framework, despite its broad scope, fails to adequately address gender as a dimension of power. These debates don’t diminish Foucault’s contribution – they reflect how productive and generative his ideas have been for subsequent theorists.

Randall Collins: conflict in everyday life 🔗

While Foucault reshaped how sociologists understand macro-level power, Randall Collins brought conflict theory down to the ground level – to the face-to-face encounters of daily life. Collins is considered one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States and served as president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011. His work insists that to understand conflict in large social structures, we must first examine what happens between individuals in the moments of interaction that make up social life.

Interaction ritual chains 🔗

Collins’ most significant theoretical contribution is his concept of interaction ritual chains, developed most fully in his 2004 book of the same name. He argues that sex, social stratification, and much else in social life are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. When people come together – in meetings, conversations, ceremonies, or confrontations – they either build or drain what Collins calls emotional energy. Successful interactions generate solidarity, shared symbols, and motivation. Failed ones leave people feeling depleted and disconnected.

For Collins, interaction rituals are a micro-sociological mechanism that provides both the glue that holds social groups together and the energy that fuels disputes and domination. Every social institution – a corporation, a university, a political party – is sustained by countless small-scale interactions. The power dynamics within those institutions are not just set by formal rules or ownership structures; they are enacted, reinforced, or challenged through daily performances and encounters.

How daily interactions conceal and reveal conflict 🔗

Collins draws attention to the way conflict operates beneath the surface of routine social interaction. Consider a workplace meeting: the seating arrangement, who speaks first, whose ideas get acknowledged, and whose get ignored – these are not incidental. The flashpoints of conflict almost always come from the precedence of symbols and the social sentiments they embody, as Collins observed. A colleague who is consistently interrupted or overlooked is experiencing a form of conflict – even if no one raises their voice.

Collins also showed that talk itself is a site of conflict and dominance. Violating the conversational rule of no-overlap – people trying to talk over each other – is the most characteristic form of incipient conflict and struggle for dominance. These micro-level dynamics accumulate. Over time, chains of interactions shape who feels entitled to speak, who gets promoted, whose grievances are taken seriously, and who is marginalized within an organization or community.

Collins as a bridge between micro and macro 🔗

Collins’ foundational work, Conflict Sociology (1975), was an effort to develop a general theory of human society at the micro, meso, and macro levels of social reality. This is what makes his contribution so valuable to conflict theory. He doesn’t abandon the big picture – questions of class, stratification, and institutional power – but insists that these structures only exist because they are constantly reproduced (or occasionally challenged) in everyday interactions. The macro is built from the micro, one encounter at a time.

What these trends mean for understanding society 🔗

Together, Foucault and Collins represent a significant shift in how sociologists approach power and conflict. Classical conflict theory asked: who controls the economy? The newer tradition asks: how is control reproduced in culture, in institutions, and in the texture of daily life? This shift has real consequences for how we analyze social problems.

Contemporary conflict theorists analyze interactions and institutions – including those that might at first appear innocuous – as potential sources of oppression. Legal equality doesn’t automatically eliminate the subtle cultural messages embedded in professional norms, language, and institutional routines. Transforming society requires not just changing laws or economic structures, but also rethinking the micro-interactions and cultural assumptions that quietly reproduce inequality every day.

These recent developments also open up new terrain for resistance. Knowledge and power are contingent and dynamic – subject to negotiation, contestation, and change. If power is diffuse and operates through culture and interaction, then so too is the potential for challenge and transformation. Recognizing the sites where power operates is the first step toward contesting them.

What do you think? If power operates through everyday interactions and cultural norms rather than just through formal institutions, does that make it harder or easier to challenge? And when you think about conflict in organizations or communities you’re part of, can you identify moments where power was enacted – or quietly resisted – through ordinary social performance?

References

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