WHAT IS STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONAL THEORY HOW TO

He broke it down by religion, the rate of suicide for Protestants, the rate of suicide for Catholics. What Durkheim did in Suicide is he looked at suicide rates for countries in Europe, and he broke them down by sub-groups, which is the rate of suicide for men, the rate of suicide for women. In addition to social facts, Durkheim wrote a great book called On Suicide. So that's what was happening in this case when you were stealing.

So these social facts make themselves felt in your life when you try to go around them, they push back on you. Maybe that's morally permissible in your eyes, but the collective has decided that no, you can't do that. We collectively, as a society, decided that we value people who are honest.

So Durkheim gave us this idea of a social fact, which we'll define as a phenomenon arising from collective consensus, or our norms, our values, and our mores. He was regarded by many as one of the big theorists in sociology. So again this is a macro orientation.įrench sociologist Emile Durkheim was a prominent figure who was working within this tradition. We're talking about how aggregated patterns of behavior combine to make social structures, which then have functions for society. We're up on the level of social structures. We're not down on a level of individual interactions here. Structural-functionalists are working with a macro orientation. As you can see then, this is a macro level view of society. So what sociologists working within this perspective will do, the first task is to identify the various structures and then from there begin to investigate each of their functions. Society is one big web made up of individual structures that each have a function to keep the entire system going. That's the image I want you to take away of the structural-functional approach. So it's really helpful in this approach to think of society as web-like. Otherwise, if you don't, things will come apart. That's a reminder to the rest of us that you have to obey by the rules, and the system will keep functioning. I mean, think about all those public displays of punishment.

It connects to our culture.Įven things you might think that are bad things, like deviants and crime, contribute to the overall maintenance of the system, as well. Religion helped develop the work habits and ethics that promote capitalism. Some sociologists have even said that religion is essential for capitalism to function.

WHAT IS STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONAL THEORY HOW TO

Our education system socializes us and teaches how to be members of the society, to obey laws, that participate in society and politics, that get jobs and contribute to the economy. We have education and finally, politics and government. We have the economy, capitalism, marriage and family, religion, law, courts, punishment. We have all of these different interconnections. We have society in the middle, it's web-like. If you look on the board here behind me, I've sort of laid out how society can be mapped in this way. These are functions that keep the structure going. So you can think about acts that might contribute to the maintenance of a marriage, being nice to your partner, not cheating on them, being faithful, things like that. So again, it's helpful to think of these things as routines.Īnd finally, a social function is an act that contributes to the maintenance of a structure. That's a stable pattern of social behavior. Or it can also be, Americans like to watch football on Sundays. Think routine, and that can be big or small, for instance, getting married. We can define a social structure as any stable pattern of social behavior. So these parts of society then are called structures.

Each part of society has a function that contributes to the maintenance of society as a whole. That's how structural-functionalists will look at society in the same way. If one of them goes away, the whole system fails. Your liver and kidneys do the purifying, things like that. You can't take away one organ and expect to still be healthy. Each organ in our bodies has a function to promote the overall well-being of our health. Again, let's return to the metaphor of our bodies to help make this clear. The structural-functional approach is a theoretical approach that sees society as a complex and interconnected system, whose individual parts work in concert to promote stability and harmony in the system as a whole. So let's just start by defining the structural-functional approach. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about the structural-functional approach in more detail. Hello, and welcome to Sociological Studies.

What is structural functional theory