Essay Example on Contemporary Theory: An Exploration of Social Perspectives

Contemporary theory is a modern group full of literary criticism approaches, i.e., psychoanalytic and feminist criticism. According to contemporary theory, there are many sociological perspectives in society. For example, the conflict and symbolic interactionists perspectives. Most people in a society have a belief that there is a particular activity that needs to be done by a specific gender. For example, cooking and giving care to a child are female based activities. Therefore, this task will review how the division of labor in society arises in connection with contemporary theory.

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The issue of labor division in a society is not a new thing. However, most of the people in society became aware of this problem at the end of the last century. Many people are currently applying it in their day to day activities. Thus, nowadays, the issue has highly spread and has caught attention to many. In most companies in societies, there is an increasing grouping of employees, according to their capabilities and power. According to contemporary theory, the division of labor is culturally based. Most of the individuals beliefs that there is an appropriate role for everyone according to the culture. For example, the children grow up knowing that they are expected to perform the household duties according to their gender. For instance, for boys, they follow their father's step to be a strong man who can provide security to the family as well as provide food to his family when he grows up (Hu & Tingting, 2017). In the case of girls, they are expected to perform duties of cleaning, cooking, and taking care of their little siblings.

Although there is increasing gender segregation about household labor as well as behaviors and norms, most of the United States males report being enjoying cleaning and cooking in their homes. Also, most married women highly want their husbands to help them in doing some housework. Thus, men have tried to reduce some housework as well as women's frustrations who view housework as a burden in case they are working. The theory states that men should sometimes help their women in performing the house duties and mostly to the women who are working class. Most of these working women normally experience home-work conflict due to the roles they are expected to play with limited time (Homans, 2017). This may affect them physically or emotionally, i.e., change of behaviors, and some may experience depression. These effects may also lead to severe consequences in the workplace due to poor performance.

According to some psychologists, women whose husbands fail or only support them a little with household chores, why experience psychological distress. In the United States, the loneliness of women performing the housework normally contributes towards the high growth of depression rate. Also, in most of the studies, they show that women normally spend more time performing housework, i.e., taking care of the children and supervising as compared to men. Recently, men have tried to increase spending more time with their children in some conventional gender activities, i.e., playing with the children. However, even if many couples usually share some housework before becoming parents, after having children, they normally shift to a conventional gender-based program of allocating the chores.

After marriage, the domestic work or labor of women highly increases, whereas, in men, it decreases. But women still state that the labor division is fair. Most of the women rarely seek some help in their family work or duties; as they consider that doing these services, it will help in the satisfaction of their loved ones. Although there are those women who ask for support in their domestic tasks, its viewed as a threat in family relationships. The contemporary theory states that women are spiritually or physically connected with the household work of taking care of their husbands as well as the children. Thus, housework is expected to follow naturally in women as compared to men (Farkas & Roelofsen, 2017). Also, some functionalist theories show that the society highly needs the wives to perform the expressive duties in their families and the husbands to conduct roles which are connecting the family with the outside institutions. The feminist criticizes these theories, stating that they apply methods and logic; thus showing that labor division is socially constructed. For example, according to the theories bearing and nursing of the children is women-based, but to feminists, the role of cleaning and cooking can be performed by both gender.

Children, as part of family members, also participate in carrying out household duties. Children's participation in household tasks may vary from one family to the other. For example, in some of the households, children usually perform these duties as part of their socialization as well as training or some time as a way of expressing total commitment to the family. Also, some participate in domestic household tasks due to financial and practical reasons. When assigning duties of domestic work, the tasks are normally divided according to gender base. For example, girls perform cooking and cleaning tasks. Thus, they usually spend more hours helping their mothers.

The issue of unbalanced labor division continues to bring more differences in the payment of labor. In most organizations, their job occupation remains to be segregated by gender, and female employees are still paid fewer wages as compared to men who are their coworkers. Although this has been a great issue in most of countries in the world, women still suffer the consequences. There is a principle which states, people with equal work should receive equal pay despite their differences. However, there is no nation that pays more salaries to women than men who are performing the same duties. The contemporary theory focuses on economic power by emphasizing gender inequality as well as gender conflict. According to the theory, women are forced to perform household tasks because the disparity of the economic market always ensures that the wages of women are low as compared to that of males; thus, this forces women to become domestic workers (Cohen, 2018).

Conclusion

To sum up, the issue of the division of labor is increasing at a higher rate, and women are the most affected people. Although it should be observed in some places, its application at the job place should reduce. It's unfair to pay women a peanut salary compared to that of men, and they are performing the same task. However, some of the household duties cannot be shifted to men, as it is impossible. For example, the bearing of children remains to be a woman's duty. Thus, the division of labor in a society is important if it is practiced well.

References

Cohen, R. B. (2018). 12 The new international division of labor, multinational corporations, and urban hierarchy. Urbanization and urban planning in a capitalist society, 7.

Farkas, D. F., & Roelofsen, F. (2017). Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and interrogatives. Journal of Semantics, 34(2), 237-289.

Hu, Q., & Tingting, C. (2017). The Thought of Division of Labor in "Das Kapital" and Its Contemporary Significance. Theory Horizon, (6), 4.

Homans, G. C. (2017). Contemporary theory in sociology. In Sociological Methods (pp. 51-69). Routledge.