Citation

Levine DN. Sociol. Rev. 2007; 55(Suppl 1): 37-49.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00691.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Although social conflict has obvious ties with physical combat, the literature on social conflict ignores its corporeal substratum. Reviewing that literature yields a paradigm of sources of conflict comprising six major variables: hostility level, reactivity, rigidity, moral righteousness, weak conflict-aversive values, and ineffective dampening factors. Each of those variables has some representation in the body. Realizing this enables us to ask what kinds of conflict-relevant meanings emanate from processes within the human body itself, and what supra-organismic variables imbue bodily conduct with meanings that relate to conflict. That analysis in turn opens up a new dimension of the general theory of action by way of amending Parsons-Lidzes’s concept of the behavioural system. The chapter suggests calling this the actional organism– the subsystem of action where the organism’s input of energies and the inputs from sources of meanings meet and interpenetrate.