Alfred Radcliff-Brown (1881–1955) defined the function of any recurrent activity as the part it played in social life as a whole, and therefore the contribution it makes to social stability and continuity (Radcliff-Brown 1952). He believed that to study society, a sociologist must look beyond individuals to social facts such as laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashion, and rituals, which all serve to govern social life. Durkheim believed that society is a complex system of interrelated and interdependent parts that work together to maintain stability (Durkheim 1893), and that society is held together by shared values, languages, and symbols. Émile Durkheim, another early sociologist, applied Spencer’s theory to explain how societies change and survive over time. The parts of society that Spencer referred to were the social institutions, or patterns of beliefs and behaviors focused on meeting social needs, such as government, education, family, healthcare, religion, and the economy. Functionalism grew out of the writings of English philosopher and biologist, Hebert Spencer (1820–1903), who saw similarities between society and the human body he argued that just as the various organs of the body work together to keep the body functioning, the various parts of society work together to keep society functioning (Spencer 1898). Laws exist as formalized morals and are based on restitution and justice rather than revenge.Functionalism, also called structural-functional theory, sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in that society. Instead of punishing members of a society for failure to assimilate to common values, organic solidarity allows people with differing values to coexist. In capitalist societies, Durkheim wrote, division of labor becomes so specialized that everyone is doing different things. In industrial societies, mechanical solidarity is replaced with organic solidarity, which is social order based around an acceptance of economic and social differences. Here we see that labor and communal self-preservation are fundamental. When people tend to do the same type of work, Durkheim argued, they tend to think and act alike. This type of thinking was common in preindustrial societies, where strong bonds of kinship and a low division and differentiation of labor created shared morals and values among people, such as those in hunter-gatherer groups. Societies with mechanical solidarity act in an automatic fashion things are done mostly because they have always been done that way. Preindustrial societies, Durkheim explained, were held together by mechanical solidarity, a type of social order maintained by the collective consciousness of a culture. In his book The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim argued that as society grew more complex, social order made the transition from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. His primary concern was that the cultural glue that held society together was failing, and people were becoming more divided. You can view it online here: Īs an observer of his social world, Durkheim was not entirely satisfied with the direction of society in his day. This is what we know as peer pressure, and is an illustrative example of how something that seems like common sense can be studied empirically.Īn interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. In his quest to understand what causes individuals to act in similar and predictable ways, he wrote, “If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in an attenuated form, the same effects as punishment” (Durkheim 1895). Durkheim called the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society the collective conscience. He asserted that individual behavior was not the same as collective behavior and that studying collective behavior was quite different from studying an individual’s actions. To him, society was greater than the sum of its parts. Émile Durkheim and Structural-FunctionalismĪs a functionalist, Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) perspective on society stressed the necessary interconnectivity of all of its elements.
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