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Lecture 2

Structural Functionalism/Functionalist Perspective

• The functionalism perspective is a paradigm influenced by American sociology from

roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, although its origins lay in the work of the French
sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing at the end of the 19th century. Functionalism is a
structural theory and posits that the social institutions and organization of society
influence the running of society and individuals' behaviors.
• Talcott Parsons expanded upon Durkheim's idea of the society as a moral regulator to
create a "grand" theory of sociology intended to explain all of human behavior in
relation to institutions.
• According to both Parsons and Durkheim, societies undergo an evolution, and large,
formalized structures (such as the family or education) evolve to serve the purpose
that small communities once had. People become more interdependent.
• Functionalism has been heavily criticized by a number of schools of thought, but has
been revised beginning in the 1970s by American Sociologists. Functionalist theories
largely argue that social problems and phenomena are, rather than a symptom of a
societal flaw, in some way beneficial to society.

What is a Functionalist Theory in Sociology?

Functionalism examines how the social institutions that make up society, such as the
economy, education, family, religion, and media, all perform a useful purpose, and also
influence members of society.
Functionalism is a theory that views society as a complex but orderly and stable system with
interconnected structures and social patterns that operate to meet the needs of individuals in a
society.

The main ideas of the Functionalist perspective are that:

1. There is a social structure that exists independently from individuals. This social
structure consists of norms and values passed on through institutions that shape the
individual.
2. Sociologists should study society scientifically in a way that looks for the general
laws explaining human action on a macro level.
3. Socialization is important because individuals need to be regulated for the benefit of
everyone. Thus, the integration and regulation of individuals are good.
4. Sociologists should analyze society as a system by looking at each social phenomenon
and the contribution it makes to the whole of society. Talcott Parsons believed that
society acts in a similar way to the human body, as social institutions interact in the
same way as human organs. Both are interconnected and inter-dependent parts which
function for the good of the whole.
5. Social institutions usually perform positive functions — such as creating value
consensus, social integration, social regulation, preventing anomie, and so on.
Functionalism is a consensus theory which assumes that the institutions of society are
working together to maintain social cohesion and stability.
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6. Advanced industrial society is better than primitive society, and social order is
important so that civilization does not go forward.

Functionalism originated in British anthropology. In particular, the Polish-British

anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1943) proposed functional analysis as a solution for
sociologists to interpret social situations through intuition rather than observation.

According to Malinowski, this functional analysis brings scientific attention to the study of
cultures different from those of the ones observing it. Thus, before analyzing a social
phenomenon typical of a given culture — say, an institution, material object, or idea —
people first must think about what function that social phenomenon has within this culture.

The essential assumption of Malinowski's functionalism is that in every single civilization,

every custom, material object, idea, and opinion fulfills some vital function, helping to both
express and maintain it. This expressing and maintaining of culture through phenomena that
take place within it is called integration.

Examples of Functionalism

The Family
An example of functionalism would be the family. According to functionalism, the family is
a societal structure that provides for the reproduction and protection of children. Families
serve as a primary agent of socialization, fostering an understanding of expected behaviors,
norms, and values.

By meeting the emotional needs of its members, stable families underpin social order and
economic stability. Social Problems Mid-twentieth century sociologists were often concerned
with policy, and, correspondingly, social problems (Tumin, 1965).

Crime and Deviance

Crime serves a function in society to reinforce what is acceptable behavior, as the public
nature of the punishments shows people what will happen for breaking the rules. Very serious
crimes can also led to society coming together to condemn the perpetrators.

Deviance refers to actions which go against the norms and values of a society. These may not
be against the law but are frowned upon by most in society.

The Education System

An example of functionalism would be the education system. Durkheim and Parsons argued
that schools are a ‘society in miniature’ that teach universalistic values. For functionalists,
education is central in passing on the mainstream norms and values that keep society
together, through the process of secondary socialization. This is achieved hidden curriculum
and PSHE lessons

The education system also allows young people to specialize and train for specific jobs based
on their abilities. This allows students to move from the ascribed status and particularistic
values of the home to an achieved status within society.

Disengagement Theory of Aging

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Functionalism underlines perhaps the oldest theory of aging — disengagement theory.

Disengagement theory suggests that withdrawal from society and social relationships is a
natural part of becoming old. The theory, developed by Elaine Cumming and Warren Earl
Henry in their 1961 book, "Growing Old," has largely been disproven.

Nonetheless, disengagement theory has several key postulates, each of which suggesting that
the process of losing social ties as one ages is normal, and even beneficial to society. These
are (Cumming & Henry, 1961):

1. Everyone expects death, and one's abilities deteriorate over time. Thus, people will
lose ties to those they cannot benefit from.
2. Individuals will become more freed from the norms imposed by interaction with
others in society.
3. Because of men and women's different roles in society, they will disengage
differently.
4. Aging causes knowledge and skill to deteriorate. However, success in industrialized
society demands knowledge and skill. Aging is functional in that it ensures that the
young possess sufficient knowledge and skill to assume authority while the old retire
before they lose skills.
5. Complete disengagement results when both the individual and society are ready for
disengagement.
6. The loss of one's functional role in society will cause crisis and demoralization until
they assume the role of disengagement.
7. individuals become ready to disengage when they become aware of their mortality.
Each level of society grants aging individuals permission to disengage based on their
dwindling contribution to societal institutions.
8. Disengagement leads to relationships in one's remaining roles changing.
9. Disengagement theory is independent of culture.

Durkheim and Functionalism

Emile Durkheim is widely considered to be the father of sociology. Durkheim believed that
individuals are inherently selfish and social structure and social order are important in that
they constrain their selfishness.

However, Durkheim also believed that, as societies evolved in a way that made people more
individualistic, maintaining social order became an increasingly difficult problem for society
(Pope, 1975).

Durkheim's Key Ideas

Durkheim believed that there is a social structure made up of norms and values. He believed
that this structure existed above individuals because individuals are born into a society with
norms and values.

People's behaviors, according to Durkheim, were shaped by a social structure, consisting of

social facts, such as norms and values, and institutions, which exist external to the individual
and constrain the individuals' behavior.
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Secondly, Durkheim emphasized that sociologists should use scientific methods to uncover
the basic laws that govern human behavior. Durkheim's work was largely aimed at
demonstrating the importance of organic solidarity as well as trying to find out what societies
must do in order to achieve this organic solidarity (Pope, 1975).

Thirdly, Durkheim believed that individuals have an inborn tendency to be selfish and that it
was the goal of society to regulate these selfish desires. This means that Durkheim considered
too much freedom to be bad for both the individual and society.

He thought that greater levels of human happiness and "progress" could be achieved if people
cooperated together, rather than competing in a war of all against all for scarce resources.

Durkheim and Social Solidarity

Social solidarity and cohesion is achieved and maintained through socialization process and
learning of norms and values of society.
To restrain naturally selfish tendencies, Durheim believed that societies need to create a sense
of social solidarity — making individuals feel as if they are part of something bigger and
teaching them the standards of acceptable behavior.

This is what Durkheim called moral regulation. Both social solidarity and moral regulation
rely on effectively socializing individuals into wider society (Pope, 1975). While Durkheim
believed that solidarity and moral regulation were achieved in different ways in primitive and
advanced industrial societies, these goals were far harder to achieve in industrialized ones.

For example, in "primitive" societies such as Feudal Europe, social regulation worked on a
small scale and was locally based, and people lived in the same area their entire lives. There
was very little role differentiation and no complex division of labor.

That is to say, people generally had the shared experiences of living in the same village,
carrying out the same activities, and living with the same people their entire lives.

Durkheim believed that, because the people in societies such as Feudal Britain shared the
same reality, the same goals, and even the same religion, they are closely reliant on one
another, meaning that moral regulation and social solidarity are easily achieved. Durkheim
called this situation mechanical solidarity: solidarity based on similarity (Pope, 1975).

Meanwhile, during the industrial revolution, the number of specialized tasks increased.
The division of labor, as a result, also became more complex. Individuals, despite shifting
more toward individualism, became more interdependent — trading self-sufficiency for
dependence on a large number of people that they did not know.

As a result, the ability of large social institutions — like religion — to provide universal
morals declined. As people within a society ceased to live the same lives, a need to find
solidarity grounded in something other than similarity arose. Durkheim called this organic
solidarity, a social cohesion that results from the interdependence of people in a society.

Durkheim and Anomie

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Without a sense of social solidarity society can fall into anomie, a normlessness where a
person doesn’t know what it means to be normal within society.
Durkheim (1897) believed that the vast differences between individuals in industrialized
societies created a crisis of moral regulation. Durkheim calls this condition anomie.

He argued that the question of how modern societies could achieve moral regulation and keep
individuals compliant was the primary problem of contemporary civilization.

He called this moral regulation organic solidarity: social solidarity based on difference (Pope,
1975).

Durkheim believed that labor organizations and education would provide society with
necessary moral regulation because education could simultaneously teach people the diverse
skills required for an advanced specialization of labor and provide them with shared norms
and values through the teaching of subjects such as history.

Talcott Parsons’ Functionalism

While functionalism before Parsons attempted to produce explanations of everything that

exists and happens in a particular time, Parsons aimed to use functionalism to create a general
theory of how all social systems work.
Parsons melded together the theories and key issues of several other sociologists —
Durkheim, Marshall and Pereto, and Weber — to create his grand theory.

The Organic Analogy

Talcott Parsons believed that society acts in a similar way to the human body, as social
institutions interact in the same way as human organs. Both are interconnected and inter-
dependent parts which function for the good of the whole. This is called the organic analogy.

The Body Social Institutions

Each Organ has a unique function Institutions have a unique function
All the bits essentially work together All institutions work together
harmoniously harmoniously
Organs are interdependent Institutions are interdependent
The sum is greater than its parts The sum is greater than its parts
Organisms like the human body have needs that need to be met and so does society. Social
institutions have evolved to meet society’s needs, such as value consensus and social order.

Parsons believed that one of the most important functions of social institutions is the creation
of value consensus: an agreement around shared values. This commitment to common values
was, for Parsons, the basis for order in society.

Value Consensus

Value consensus means that a majority of society agree with the goals that society sets to
show success. These included values such as a belief in work ethic and meritocracy.
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Parsons argued that work ethic ensures that people value working rather than leisure. This
helps creates more goods that can help society function, and a belief in meritocracy, that
people believe that hard work should be rewarded, thus incentivizing people to work harder.

Value consensus and social order are maintained through institutions of formal social control,
such as the police, and informal social groups such as family and schools, who socialize
children into social values and norms that are shared by the majority of the society.

Parsons believed that the family is responsible for passing on the basic norms and values of
society by providing early socialization, the stabilization of adult personalities, and
somewhere for people to escape from the pressures of modern life. -

Education integrates individuals into wider society, promoting a sense of belonging and
identity. Parsons believed that education does this through teaching students a shared history
and language.

Finally, other institutions can regulate individual behavior through social sanctions. This can
prevent crime and deviance from becoming unmanageable.

Functional Prerequisites

Parsons also believed that societies have certain functional prerequisites — things that
societies need in order to survive. For example, a society must produce and distribute food
and shelter, organize and resolve conflicts, and socialize young people.

Parsons believed that social systems have four needs which must be met for continued
survival: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency.

The Four Basic needs of society

1. Goal Attainment (Political Function): Parsons believed that a society is only possible
when there are common standards: the society must have a collective goal, and
acceptable means for achieving it.
2. Adaption (Economic Function) – Every society has to provide for the needs of its
members in order for the society to survive.
3. Integration (Social Harmony) – Specialist institutions develop to reduce conflict in
society. For example, education and media create a sense of belonging.
4. Latency: The unstated consequences of actions – there are 2 types of latency: Pattern
Maintenance: Maintaining value consensus through socialization and Tension
Management. Opportunities to release tension in a safe way.

Parsons also viewed social change as a process of social evolution. That is to say, he thought
that human societies underwent a progression from hunter-gatherers to complex industrial
ones and that more complex societies were inherently better because they are more adaptive
— able to respond to changes in the environment, more innovative, and more capable of
utilizing the talents of a wider range of people.

As a result, in a conclusion echoing Darwinism, these advanced societies are better able to
survive.
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Parsons believed that several factors bolster societal progress. While economic and
technological changes lead to societies evolving, he argued that values increasingly become
the driver of social progress in advanced societies.

To Parsons, the values of advanced industrialized societies are superior to those of traditional
societies because modern values allow society to be more adaptive. Parsons believed that the
collapse of major social institutions — family, education, and so forth, could cause regression
into a more primitive form of social organization.

The Social System

Parsons was influenced by many European scholars, such as Malinowski and Weber. Some
have argued that Parson's sociology addresses American society in particular, and that it is,
rather than an ideological justification of the state of America contemporary to him, an
attempt to identify the minimum requirements of integration in a society composed of
different ethnic groups with different traditions and cultures.

This means that an action is only a social action when social purposes and standards are
identified in the context of interactions that consider their finalities and rules an integral part
of the social situation.

Parsons (1951) introduced the idea of a system to address the problem of integration. Parsons
said that since people perform actions according to defined principles, rather than in a
random way, they have a "personality system."

Here, a system is the set of symbols that make the interaction possible and the network of
relationships between people that do not act in an uncoordinated way but according to the
positions assigned to them in this network of relations.

Parsons believed that the cultural, personality, and society systems all had to be the same as
each other. The culture helps people to create their personality through internalizing the rules
and values of a society (Parsons, 1951).

Meanwhile, the internalization of these cultural models gives order and stability to society
because all of the people in a society tend to behave in a way that conforms to society's
expectations.

There are three parts of every action, according to Parsons:

• the finality — the goal to reach and negative consequences to avoid (the "cathetic"
element);
• the knowledge of a situation necessary to complete an action — the knowledge
element; and, finally, the ability to pick out among many possible choices —
• the "evaluation" element.

Parson believed that personality can only arise in the context of social relations, which can
create a system of common signs and symbols for navigating symbols.

These social relations take place in mutual relations among people who act according to their
status and roles. While status defines the position that a person occupies in a system of
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relations considered to be a structure regardless of personality, roles relate to what someone

does in relation to others, and what is typical of a certain status.

Criticisms of Functionalism

Although Parson's first attempts at creating a grand theory of sociology was well-regarded in
the 1950s, Neo-Marxists, conflict theorists, and symbolic interactionists criticized him
heavily. Eventually, American sociologists attempted to revive the grand theory.

There are a number of criticisms of the functionalist perspective (Holmwood, 2005). Among
the most notable include:

1. Criticism of whether there is really a societal "structure" that exists outside of

individuals.

2. The difficulty in assessing the effects of institutions: To establish whether an

institution has positive functions, sociologists need to accurately measure all of the
effects an institution had on individuals and all other institutions.

Because institutions cannot be isolated in controlled experiments, this task is

extremely difficult, if not impossible.

3. Functionalism exaggerates value consensus and social order: scholars have criticized
persons for assuming that value consensus exists in societies rather than proving it.
Michael Mann (1970), for instance, argued that social stability might occur because of
a lack of consensus rather than because of it.

If everyone, for example, believed in the value of achievement in meritocracy, then

disorder might result because not everyone can reach the highest levels of
achievement.

Thus, Mann believed (1970), social stability is more likely if those at the bottom of
society do not follow the society's principle values, which they are less likely to
achieve.

4. Criticism of Functionalism being a deterministic theory: some have criticized

functionalism for portraying human behavior as if it is programmable in a precise way
by social institutions.

5. Functionalism ignores class conflict and coercion: Marxists argue that mainstream
social values are actually the values of elite groups, and that conflict arises from a
small group of elite actors imposing social order on the majority.

6. Criticism that functionalism is ideological: In arguing that certain institutions are

necessary, some have argued that functionalism justifies the existence of the social
order as it is. Micheal Mann (1970), for instance, argued that social stability might
occur because of a lack of consensus rather than because of it.
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Not all social institutions are functionally indispensable and that there are functional
alternatives. For example, the family are not the only institution that can perform
primary socialization.

7. Not all the institutions of society perform a positive function for society, instead for
some people they are dysfunctional. For example domestic abuse makes the
family dysfunctional for its members.

8. Generally, functionalism views societal problems as arising from society's natural

evolution, when a social problem does happen, it could threaten a society's stability:
nonetheless, this does not mean that fundamental flaws in the society exist.

For that reason, gradual social reform should be all that is needed to address a social
problem. Functionalism even suggests that social problems are functional in some
ways for society because, otherwise, these problems would not continue.

For example, while crime is a major social problem, it creates hundreds of thousands
of jobs in law enforcement, courts and corrections, home security, and the informal
economy, where people engage or deal with crime.

Similarly, poverty, while a major social problem, coerces poor people to do jobs that
people would otherwise not want to do (Gans, 1972). Poverty also provides
employment, such as for those who work in social services that help the poor.

Author: Charlotte Nickerson (2022)

Source: https://simplysociology.com/functionalist-perspectivese.html

Exercise 1
Read and make 10 points (each point must be one sentence long)