Structural Functionalism Notes

Functionalism is a bad term with which nobody wants to be associated, yet it is still relevant to sociology and anthropology today.

Structural Functionalism marked an attempt to provide social science the same legitimacy as natural ones. It has its roots in Auguste Comte. Durkheim draws upon the biological sciences for metaphors to depict organisms in society with attention to evolutionary jargon.

Structural functionalism seeks to explain the development of complex systems through universal laws, or at least acceptable generalizations, through employing synchronic examinations of comparative analysis, thus very critical of social evolutionists.

Adaptation is critical: any organism must adopt externally to its environment and internally to itself. Stability and continuance depends upon an adaptation. Homeostasis is key to development: society is a system endeavoring to formulate regularities.

Of course, it is modeled against ideological histories, moralizing tracts, and antiquarianism. There would be no more speculation on traditional societies as the sources for traditional historians were sorely lacking. History is rejected as ideographic empiricism where in searching to establish everything within a particular context, one cannot compare one thing to any other, it does not seek laws, patterns, or order.

Instead, structural-functionalism will revolve around acceptable generalizations where particular institutions would be interpreted in light of solidarity. Higher social orders and the reproduction of cultural norms are not taken for granted. Society is never merely the sum of their parts: human beings are social individuals inhabiting social institutions which limit and constrain possibilities for making purposive choices. Ideology and false consciousness, so prevelant in Marx, serve no role here, social facts have social explanations.

Society is more than determined by its economic mode of production: systems cannot be reduced to one factor. Cultural values are not ideologies.

Society is corporate, not an aggregate phenomena, and certainly more than the sum of its parts considered as individuals or mere behavior. Society is a reality of its own kind, not reduced. Social structure is distinguished from social dynamics were the former set the conditions and limits of the latter. Society is the total structure of institutions or systems of institutions which are pre-existant ensembales of positions, roles, and rules into which people are born. They are set of role expectations, markers, and values.

A complicated set of institutional roles organized formal relationships, units of analysis in this perspective, part of forming the society.

Society, morality, the presence of obligations, responsibilies that are acknowledged and understood as well as constraints and sanctions on behavior, generates solidarty among its members when its institutions are functionally adapted to one another and anomie when they are not.

Function is not identical with cause, there are manifest and latent functions. Functions do not ask about the origins for or asking about what people mean to do by their action. Bees make honey because people like it.

Manifest/latent function: What is the function of the division of labor? To increase production, according to Smith/Marx, for Durkheim that is the manifest function, but not what is important about it. How the division of labor functions to ensure solidarity is the latent function.

This is not always obvious as a deeper system maintaining social values and functions. For a society as complex and differentiated as ours, it is necessary for people to find reaosns for holding together. Too much order or too little provokes aniome.

Method: Social institutions are nonreductable to aggregates of individual conceptions/choices/behavior/psychology. A tie on with this: social factors can only have social causes and are maintained through existence of constraints. Rooted in the comparative study of social types