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Functionalism (sometimes referred to as structural-functionalism) is a theoretical perspective and methodological strategy employed predominantly in sociology and anthropology, but it can be found in most social sciences. The English social scientist Herbert Spencer and the French sociologist Emile Durkheim explicitly laid the theoretical foundations of functionalism and provided the first empirical work applying the functionalist perspective. While both theorists assumed populations grew larger and denser leading to differentiated structures with distinct functions meant to handle the problems emerging from larger societal systems, each theorist tended to emphasize different processes of societal evolution. For Spencer, the emphasis was on the process of differentiation, which was a sign of societal adaptation staving off disintegration, conquest, or collapse. Conversely, Durkheim was more interested in understanding how these differentiated parts were integrated into the whole such that social organization and relations remained stable and potential competition or conflict was prevented. Ultimately, the idea that society was a whole with distinct parts that were mutually dependent on each other through a division of labor came to be the guiding principle of functionalist theory and analysis.

The Tenets Of Functionalism

Spencer initially drew an analogy between biological organisms and society, which he conceived of as a supraorganism. Essentially, organisms and societies are similar in that they grow in size, followed by differentiation of and growth in structure and function. Differentiation implies mutual interdependence as a division of labor emerges to deal with the increasingly specialized nature of the units constituting the greater whole, such that the whole often outlives the death of one or more of its parts. Spencer had in mind institutions— such as polity and kinship—when he referred to social units, but one could extend this analysis, as Talcott Parsons would, to any structural element of society: norms, roles, or cultural patterns such as values.

Differentiation was driven by the fact that societies have needs or requisites that social structures function to meet. As a group grows larger, problems emerge, making these needs salient and pressuring specialized units to appear to better meet these needs. For Spencer, the most important needs were production of material/symbolic/human resources, distribution of these resources, and coordination/regulation of disparate social units; Durkheim, on the other hand, saw integration as a key problem and emphasized structures such as the economic division of labor in his work. Spencer’s theory saw societies on the precipice of collapse, as they tended to keep growing, producing more pressures to differentiate, and eventually failing to successfully meet the new exigencies. At some point, a society or group would succumb to conquest from a bigger, better-organized group; collapse; or disintegrate.

Based on these assumptions, a functionalist asks the basic question, What does X look like, and how does X function for society? A second question, first posed by Robert Merton, would ask what a structure’s manifest (or overt) function was vis-à-vis its latent (or underlying) function. All social phenomena can theoretically be analyzed asking these questions, including religion or government, slavery, stratification, or status positions. The methods are meant to be comparative and, if possible, historical. For instance, one could ask what the structural elements of slavery are in societies A and B, as well as how they function to sustain the social order in both societies. If the structure and function are similar, slavery can be argued to have universal or generalizable qualities; conversely, where it varies in structure and/or function, one would want to find more cases to determine if one form is an exception to a rule, or whether slavery depends on the sociohistorical context in which it is embedded. And indeed, Spencer’s and Durkheim’s insights fueled the British anthropologist tradition of the early twentieth century—exemplified by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’s work—which applied functionalist principles to ethnographic work on preliterate peoples; this work is still relevant today.

Modern Functionalism

Talcott Parsons is the father of modern American functionalism. His goal was to build a grand synthetic theory that drew from the insights of the masters. Society was a system; it had four needs: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pattern maintenance. Visually, he represented these four needs by drawing a fourfold box representing each subsystem that functioned to meet the society’s larger needs. Each square internally differentiated into four smaller boxes representing the subsystem’s creation of structures functioning to meet its internal needs. His model attempted to account for everything from the biological level (which was analogized as located in the economic sector, the primary location for adaptive structures) to the psychological level (where the polity was oriented toward collective goal setting and attainment) to the social level (where integration occurred through roles, status positions, and expectations predicated on the other levels penetrating social life) to the cultural level (where values, ideologies, and beliefs were generated and imposed on the lower levels).

By the 1960s, a slew of criticisms emerged challenging Parsonsian functionalism. First, Parsons (and to a lesser extent Durkheim) was guilty of tautological reasoning: a social structure existed because it was necessary, and it was necessary because it existed. Second, the problem of power and conflict was noticeably absent from early functionalist thought; the dynamics of inequality were often peripheral. Third, by emphasizing the process of differentiation as the master pattern of change functionalists made the mistake of (1) reproducing nineteenth-century teleological notions of progress, (2) ignoring the multilinear and uneven evolution of societies, and (3) implying that society had a natural state of equilibrium.

Recently, neoevolutionary thought has been integrated with functionalism in an attempt to rectify the errors of the past. Jonathan Turner’s work, specifically, avoids the idea of needs by reorienting our focus toward ubiquitous forces such as population growth or resource scarcity, pressuring individuals and groups to find ways to adapt or face problems of higher magnitudes. Success, for Turner, means that a society temporarily adapts to its environment but, in doing so, unwittingly plants the seeds for new logistical loads that it must again adapt to. His innovation comes from replacing needs with selection pressures, which divorces the causes and consequences of social structures while also avoiding the teleological assumptions made by Parsons because societies are not headed in a particular direction but innovate in often surprising ways.

Other sociologists have tried to revive functionalism either by calling it something new and changing much of the language (Niklas Luhmann and systems theory), by integrating it with Marxist arguments (Immanuel Wallerstein and worldsystems analysis), or by throwing out much of what we recognize as functionalism and reorienting the entire focus of the lens (Jeffrey Alexander and neofunctionalism).What never changes is the underlying question that nearly all social scientists ask at the onset of their research: what is X, what does it look like, and how does it work?

Bibliography:

Alexander, Jeffrey C. Neofunctionalism. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1985. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Luhmann, Niklas. The Differentiation of Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge, 1922.
Parsons,Talcott. The Social System. New York: Free Press, 1951.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. Structure and Function of Primitive Society. New York: Free Press, 1965.
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Sociology. New York: Appleton, 1874–1896.
Turner, Jonathan. Human Institutions: A Theory of Societal Evolution. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
Turner, Jonathan, and Alexandra Maryanski. Functionalism. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Benjamin Cummings, 1979.