Poverty in Three Views

Structural Functionalism

To a structural functionalist, every aspect of society is a necessary part of an over-arching construct and thus it is no surprise that poverty is seen as a natural product of the way society must function and not as a scourge to be eradicated. Functionalists assume that social stratification is required to attract the best and brightest to challenging occupations and thus find their proper place in the hierarchy. Supporting this basic assumption are the ideas that some jobs are more important than others, some jobs are harder to execute thank others, and some jobs can only be preformed by a small percentage of the population. It follows then, that those jobs should be more highly compensated and afford those capable of learning them a higher status. In short, the value of each job is driven by talent scarcity and difficulty. What a structural functionalists count on is that if two disparate jobs are valued equally, then everyone would choose the course that is easiest to execute.  Essentially, if Wal-Mart paid cashiers the same as a neurosurgeon, than we should have no neurosurgeons. Since this would then create financial stratification, there will always be a poor underclass according to the structural functionalist. 

Conflict Theorist

Conflict theorists see every interaction in society as a war of conquest between a powerful, extreme upper class and nearly everyone else. In essence, every situation in society involves the rich and powerful suppressing and abusing the poor and weak so that they can keep the status quo and stay in power. Here, unless you are the king, you are a poor helpless victim that must somehow revolt against the bourgeois. This is the ultimate form of victimization: if you are poor, unhappy, unsuccessful, downtrodden, and weak it must be because of lack of opportunity, discrimination, or prejudice. It is interesting that those in power tend to take the exact, opposing view and assume that if you are poor it is because of some fatal internal flaw and has nothing to do with society at large. This sort of opinion may be the best argument for the conflict theorist. Research has repeatedly shown that the rich tend to stay rich and the poor tend to stay poor, the conflict theorist believes this is because the rich continue to make it so. 

Symbolic Interactionism 

Symbolic interactionists see everything in society as a structure built on a foundation of micro-scale interactions between individual members in society. Here, there is no attempt to explain why there is social economic stratification. Rather there is a focus on how belonging to different economic strata effects the interactions between people in their daily lives. A symbolic interactionist would not focus on the fact that a doctor should make more money than a dishwasher or that it is unfair that the dishwasher did not have the opportunity to become a doctor, but on the interaction between the doctor and the dishwasher in a clinical setting. They would note that the difference in social strata might intimidate the dishwasher and therefore impede the relationship between the two to such an extent that the dishwasher receives poor care.