Functionalism Lupsa Ana-Maria, Sociology I

A broad paradigm in both sociology and anthropology, functionalism addresses the social structure as a whole and in terms of the necessary function of its constituent elements. A common analogy (popularized by Herbert Spencer) is to regard norms and institutions as 'organs' that work toward the proper-functioning of the entire 'body' of society. The perspective was implicit in the original sociological positivism of Comte, but was theorized in full by Durkheim, again with respect to observable, structural laws. Functionalism also has an anthropological basis in the work of theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Bronisaw Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. It is in Radcliffe-Brown's specific usage that the prefix 'structural' emerged.Classical functionalist theory is generally united by its tendency towards biological analogy and notions of social evolutionism. As Giddens states: "Functionalist thought, from Comte onwards, has looked particularly towards biology as the science providing the closest and most compatible model for social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure and the function of social systems and to analysing processes of evolution via mechanisms of adaptation ... functionalism strongly emphasises the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts (i.e. its constituent actors, human subjects)." The functionalist movement reached its crescendo in the 1940s and 1950s, and by the 1960s was in rapid decline. By the 1980s, functionalism in Europe had broadly been replaced by conflict-oriented approaches.While some of the critical approaches also gained popularity in the United States, the mainstream of the discipline instead shifted to a variety of empiricallyoriented middle-range theories with no overarching theoretical orientation. To many in the discipline, functionalism is now considered "as dead as a dodo." As the influence of both functionalism and Marxism in the 1960s began to wane, the linguistic and cultural turns led to myriad new movements in the social sciences: "According to Giddens, the orthodox consensus terminated in the late 1960s and 1970s as the middle ground shared by otherwise competing perspectives gave way and was replaced by a baffling variety of competing perspectives. This third 'generation' of social theory includes phenomenologically inspired approaches, critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism,

post-structuralism, and theories written in the tradition of hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy." Some functionalists, including Emile Durkheim, have emphasized the deterministic nature of social life by pointing out that the impetus to human social action always springs from something in the social atmosphere, that is, from superorganic sources that stand outside of individuals themselves. The term superorganicism is a functionalist's way of saying that individual behavior is driven by the social system, rather than by inner principles, and is to that degree, consistent with the arch-Modernist mindset of functionalists. Even human feelings are generated from outside rather than from inside, as Durkheim contended when he wrote "The great movements of enthusiasm, indignation, and pity in a crowd do not originate in any one of the particular individual consciousnesses. They come to each one of us from without and can carry us away in spite of ourselves...Let the individual attempt to oppose one of these collective manifestations, and the emotions that he denies will turn against him" (Durkheim The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), pages 4-5).

References:

1. www.wikipedia.org( consulted on May,17, 2011) 2. www.referatele.com( last visited on May, 17, 2011)