ABSTRACT
Literature focusing on improving intergroup relations, whether racial, minority, or otherwise, has traditionally focused on the problem’s particular level of analysis: individual, group, institutional, societal, and international. Looking specifically at the United States, it is obvious the society has barely begun to acknowledge the extent of general inequality within it, leaving aside the need to deal with this vital issue effectively. Sociology, particularly in its professional form, has tended to involve attempts by establishment thinkers to impose scientific rationality on contemporary society in a manner which reflects their own ideological interests rather than modifying the social order effectively to deal with its social problems, particularly inequality. Their models of societal types have been limited and ethnocentric, highlighting differences, for example, between the traditional and contemporary, developed and underdeveloped, central versus peripheral position in the world system, and modern versus post-modern.
