• Conflict theory focuses on competition between groups within society for limited resources.

  • The theory of conflict considers social and economic institutions as instruments of struggle between groups or classes, used to maintain inequality and dominance of the ruling class.
  • The Marxist theory of conflict sees society as divided along the lines of economic class into a proletarian working class and a bourgeois ruling class.
  • More recent versions of conflict theory deal with other aspects of conflict between capitalist factions and between different social, religious and other types of groups.