functionalism

(anthropology) The view that a social system is an expression of human biological and social needs.

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The doctrine that societies or social systems have ‘needs’ and that we can explain institutions and practices in terms of the ‘functions’ they perform for the survival of the whole. Functionalist explanation is prevalent in all traditions in social science and there is no single school of modern functionalism. However, it is characteristic for functionalist accounts to draw analogies between the biological organism and the social system, to view societies as made up of component parts whose interrelation contributes to the maintenance of the whole, and to focus on the problem of order specifying forces that bring cohesion, integration, and equilibrium to society.

The origins of modern functionalism can be traced to Comte. Comte maintained that all of the institutions, beliefs, and morals of a society are interrelated as a whole, and so the method of explaining the existence of any one item is to discover the law which governs the coexistence of all phenomena. Through the work of Durkheim this approach was developed and appropriated by the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) who was the first to coin the term after he had carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Australian aborigines and later Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski sought to explain the existence of institutions and practices in terms of the needs or functional requisites which had to be met to maintain society (religious rituals are functional for social adaptation). The anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) further developed this approach under the title structural functionalism.

Normative functionalists, strongly influenced by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-79), hold that there is a central value system in every society and stress the importance of political socialization which teaches appropriate normative expectations and regulates the potential conflict which is inherent in situations of scarce resources. This view has been particularly influential in American political science, enabling theorists to posit a number of system functions (socialization, political recruitment, political communication) through which political systems are maintained and adapt to change. General functionalism (with its distinction between ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ functions) and General Systems Theory (with its cybernetic analysis of positive and negative feedback loops) are more recent attempts to develop the insights of functionalism whilst rejecting both the ‘oversocialized concept of man’ characteristic of normative functionalism and the teleology implicit in early functionalist explanation.

A number of objections have been raised to functionalist explanation in social science. Most decisively it has been argued that all functionalist accounts rely on teleological explanation. To explain an event teleologically is to account for its occurrence on the grounds that it contributes to a goal or end-state and that this goal is sought or maintained by the system in which the event takes place. Explaining an event by showing that it has beneficial consequences for another is to treat an effect as a cause. To argue that the state exists to meet certain functions necessary for the maintenance of capitalism, is to use a consequence to explain a cause. This both defies orthodox logic and is clearly ahistorical. In addition, functionalist accounts have been criticized for lacking adequate accounts of human action (see structuration), for failing to account for social change, and for introducing a conservative bias into methodology since every element in the ‘status quo’ becomes functional simply because it is present. Whilst functionalist accounts contain useful injunctions for political scientists—to look for relationships between institutions and social practices—functionalist methodology has come under increasing attack as its basic assumption that ‘societies have needs’ cannot be demonstrated.

— Peter Burnham