1. Structures (universal and persistent, patterns of inter-relationships
2. Functions (system stability, observed consequences)
3. Societal Functionalism: “A variety of S-F that focuses on large scale structures and institutions of society, their interrelationships, and their constraining effects on individuals.” (page 65)
4. Functional Theory of Stratification
   1. Social Stratification: system of positions—prestige ranking rather than how specific individuals come to occupy
   2. Davis and Moore: (see article)
      1. Motivates, selection and screening, attract best to most critical jobs—insures applicants and that applicants do what is expected. 
      2. Less pleasant and requiring most talent/training.
      3. System of insuring societal needs are fulfilled.
      4. Not (necessarily) conscious creation— evolves as a means of system survival.
   3. Criticisms: Type of reward necessary, Fails to draw on talents of lower classes, justification of rewards for some jobs, Issue of scarcity,  legitimacy of wide gulfs in distribution, patterns suggest that being drawn to certain occupations is not necessarily economically motivated--socialization into medicine.
      1. Specifically: Melvin Tumin

Structural Functionalism

"Structural functionalism concentrates on the positive and negative functions of social structures.  Societal functionalism is a particular type of structural functionalism that aims to explain the role of social structures and institutions in society, the relationship between these structures, and the manner in which these structures constrain the actions of individuals.  According to structural functionalists, individuals have little to no control over the ways in which particular structures operate.  Indeed, structural functionalists understand individuals in terms of social positions.  For example, when the structural functionalists Kingsley Davis and Wilbur Moore discuss social stratification, they do not refer to individuals, but to the positions these individuals occupy.  It is not individuals who are ranked, but positions that are ranked according to the degree to which they contribute to the survival of society.  High-ranking positions offer high rewards that make them worth an individual’s time and effort to occupy.  The structural functionalist account of stratification has been criticized on the grounds that there must be other ways to motivate individuals to occupy particular positions and perform certain tasks without such a disparate system of rewards." (1)

Talcott Parsons’s Structural Functionalism

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History and Biography: Talcott Parsons (local copy) (see also the ASA page on Parsons)

Influences and Basic Ideas: Classics, especially Durkheim and Weber (introduced to USA)

1. Action theory—individuals orienting themselves to situations with certain level of intentionality.
2. Voluntarism: choice is at least potentially free
3. Culture: values, norms, ideas, beliefs, as causally relevant
4. Emergence: higher order systems emerge from lower, but need explanation on their own terms.

Action Theory (local copy of Bolender's page)

1. Micro approach, rooted in Weber.
2. Yet, focused on “consciousness”
   1. Consciousness as “social”
   2. Intentionality
   3. Appropriate means
   4. Constrained by situation
   5. Choose and Judge
   6. Rules and norms guide
   7. Need to use "Verstehen."

3. Essence of Parson’s action theory:

• Unit act: actor, end or goal (future state), takes place within a situation that contains conditions (constraints—not controlled by actor) and means (actors can control), and Norms and Values shape means and ends. “no such thing as action except as effort to conform to norms" (The Structure of Social Action, 1937, pages 76-77, in Ritzer, Classical Sociological Theory, p. 463.
• Voluntarism, yet understanding the act is not (totally) free—constraints and directions: social structure and culture.
• Verstehen

4. By late 1940s he is turning away from action theory, and 1951: The Social System:

Giddens on Parsons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy_UzSm0NnY)

Unit act becomes status-role (position within structure).  (link to local original)

Personality: needs-dispositions, socio-culturally shaped biological needs,

Value and Motivational orientations (internalization).

1. The issue becomes needs-dispositions and orientation of actors to situations.
2. Motivational orientations: analyze social phenomena to see if fits needs disposition.  Cognitive, Cathetic, and Evaluative
3. Value Orientations: norms, standards, and criteria for choice. Cognitive, Appreciative, Moral

Four types of action:

1. Intellectual (cognitive interests and standards)
2. Expressive (cathectic and appreciative)
3. Moral (evaluative and moral)
4. Instrumental (goals: cathectic and appreciative, means: cognitive).

Pattern-Variables (local copy of this): “five dichotomous choices of action that actors must make in every situation—tools for analyzing conscious processes.—fundamental problem  of orienting oneself to the situation.” (Ritzer, Classical Sociological Theory, page 467)

1. Affectivity—Affective neutral (emotion dr. patient role)
2. Specificity—Diffuseness (accept dr. opinion on health, but politics)
3. Universalism—Particularism (judge based on universal standards or special (evaluating dr. versus own children)
4. Ascription—Achievement (endowed or learned)
5. Self—Collectivity (who benefits)

Enter Structural-Functionalism and AGIL (system (any type of system) functions—actually functional imperatives) (local copy)

• Adaptation (working with and through the environment—harmony, manipulation, external dangers)
• Goal Attainment (future—survival and growth)
• Integration (regulate inter-relationship between parts and the relationships between AGIL)
• Latency/Pattern Maintenance (furnish, maintain, and renew:  motivation of individuals and cultural patterns that create motivation. (Latency: success stories, differential rewards, deviance.  Pattern maintenance: macro:  insuring values and norms (for success) remain visible and accessible, and are internalized

The Action System:

1. Social System (integration)
2. Cultural System (latency/Pattern Maintenance)
3. Personality System (goal-attainment defining goals and mobilizing resources)
4. Behavioral organism (adaption—adjusting to and transforming external world)

Cultural System (latency/Pattern Maintenance)	Social System (integration)
Behavioral organism (adaption)	Personality System (goal-attainment)

Hierarchies and interrelationships: Lower provides upper with energy (conditions); higher levels control the lower (information)

1. Environment of action: Ultimate reality
2. Cultural System
3. Social System
4. Personality System
5. Behavioral Organism
6. Environment of action: physical-organic.

Problem of Order—what prevents chaos?  How does it all “hang together?”

Structural-Functionalism address this:

1. Order and interdependence property of system
2. Systems are self maintaining—tendency to equilibrium
3. Stasis or ordered change (system is in one state or the other)
4. Inter-connectedness (one part effects all)
5. Systems have boundaries
6. Allocation and integration necessary for equilibrium
7. Self-maintenance—boundary control and adjusting part-whole relationships, controlling environment, and internal control of change.

Social System: “a number of human actors that interact with one another in a situation with a physical or environmental context.” (p.73)  Relationships mediated by culture.  Society is one special type)

• Status—Role complex is the basic unit (actor as “empty vessel”)
• Structural Focus: Functional Prerequisites (of social system  and all action systems)
  1. Structured to operate compatibly with other systems.
  2. Survival dependent on support from other systems.
  3. System must meet actors’ needs.
  4. System must receive adequate participation from actors.
  5. System must control disruptive behavior.
  6. Conflict, when disruptive, must be controlled.
  7. Language is necessary.

  Internalization—Socialization: ways that norms and values (culture) transferred to actors. 

  • If successful, actors goals and interests are the systems’ (value orientations and motivational orientations: needs-dispositions)
  • Overall, socialization is life-long and successful: conformity.  Yet, there is variance.  Not necessarily a problem—social control operates and reinforces at many levels.  Flexibility is ok. Too much control stagnates.  System needs to be able to handle variety and to integrate—strength, growth, survival.

Society (relatively self-sufficient collectivity, special type of “social system”)

• Economy (adaption)
• Polity (goal definition and attainment)
• Fiduciary system (schools and family) (Latency/pattern maintenance: transmit culture and insuring internalization)
• Societal community (law) integration--coordinates actions of other areas, oversees and regulates (laws about minimum education—keeps people in schools, insures basic skills of work force, etc.

Fiduciary system (latency/Pattern Maintenance)	Societal community (integration)
Economy (adaption)	Polity (goal-attainment)

Cultural System:

1. Binding force
2. Ability to become a part of other systems (social—norms and values, personality system—internalized by actor)
3. Social stock of Knowledge.
4. “Culture is seen as a patterned, ordered system of symbols that are objects of orientations to actors, internalized aspects of the personality system, and institutionalized patterns in the social system.”  (p. 77)

Personality System:

1. Controlled by social and cultural systems (internal and external)
2. Personality: needs—disposition (not drives—biological), but drives shaped by social setting.
   • Love and affection; approval
   • Internalized cultural standards
   • Role expectations

Personality linked to social system: roles, expectations, and self-control. Individual as relatively passive

Behavioral System:

1. Source of energy—the body, affected by conditioning and learning, yet also shaped by genetics.

Talcott Parsons’s Action System

"Talcott Parsons’s version of structural functionalism is perhaps the best known.  According to Parsons, four functional imperatives are embedded in all systems of action: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency (also known as pattern maintenance).    Adaptation refers to the fact that a system must adjust or cope with its external environment, particularly when this environment is deemed threatening.  In order for a system to function effectively, it must first define the goals it hopes to achieve.  Parsons called this functional imperative goal attainment.  Integration is also important to a system, because it needs to regulate the interrelationship of its component parts.  Finally, a system needs to furnish, maintain, and renew motivation for individual participation, including the cultural patterns that create and sustain this motivation.  Parsons referred to these functions as latency and pattern maintenance.  Parsons further differentiated among four types of action systems: the cultural, the social, the personality, and the behavioral organism.  Each of these systems compels actors to perform a specific functional imperative.  The behavioral organism takes care of adaptation, the personality performs goal attainment, the social controls integration, and the cultural is responsible for the latency function." (1)

Robert Merton’s Structural Functionalism

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Robert Merton’s Middle Range Theory

"Robert Merton expanded Parsons’s understanding of structural functionalism by explaining not only the function of social structures, but also their dysfunctions, nonfunctions, and net balances.  Merton’s theory of structural functionalism has been called “middle range” because he moved away from trying to analyze society as a whole toward studying different levels of the social world such as organizations and groups.  Merton also introduced the concepts of manifest and latent functions — referring, respectively, to intended and unintended consequences.  According to Merton, functions can also be characterized as displaying unanticipated consequences."(see)

A Structural-Functional Model

1. Criticized “functional unity” (some structures endure and may not be functional)
2. Criticized “universal functionalism” (some may be a problem).
3. Criticized “indispensability.”
4. Argued for empirical test, and standardization—societal functionalist     
   • Functions: have observable consequences that help system adapt/adjust
   • Dysfunction—always a possibility (also non-function)
   • Net Balance: not simple add/subtract—things are complex.  Points to relative significance
   • Levels of Functional Analysis: system, institution, organization, group.  Any standardized and repetitive phenomenon
   • Manifest Functions
   • Latent Functions
   • Unanticipated Consequences
   • Debunking

Social Structure and Anomie

INTERNET EXERCISE

Go to http://members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/gellner12.html, a website dedicated to the functionalist Ernest Gellner. Read the selection on industrial society from Nations and Nationalism, especially the section on high culture. Then, answer the following questions:

a.  What were the functions of the apprenticeship system of education?

b.  What are the functions of a national system of general education?

c.  Using Parsons’s terms “pattern maintenance” and “goal attainment”, state the   relationship between an industrial economy and a national education system.

Chapter 4 Review Quiz

ANNOTATED WEBLINKS (see)

• Talcott Parsons' Social System Page
• Original Works by Parsons and Merton (http://www.spc.uchicago.edu/ssr1/PRELIMS/theory.html) (on Google Scholar)
• The Robert Merton Resource Page (http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Merton/)
• Robert Merton’s Papers (http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/list.html) Links to many of Merton’s most cited works.
• Meron's Anomie Theory (a YouTube video)

Credits, references, and bibliography

1. Much of this page comes from the "Instructor's Manual" to accompany Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics, Second Edition, George Ritzer, Mcgraw-Hill, 2007. The Instructor's Manual was prepared by James Murphy, University of Maryland, College Park and Todd Stillman, Fayetteville State University. These excerpts are from chapter 4.
2. Ritzer, George. 2007/2010/2013. Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics. 2nd/3rd/4th editions. St. Louis: McGraw-Hill
3. Ritzer, George. 2008. Classical Sociological Theory. St. Louis: McGraw-Hill.
4. "Talcott Parsons." The American Sociological Association. Accessed: August 5, 2009. http://www.asanet.org/about/presidents/Talcott_Parsons.cfm.
5. "Robert Merton." The American Sociological Association. Accessed August 5, 2009. http://www.asanet.org/about/presidents/Robert_Merton.cfm

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