The Functionalist Perspective

Merton's three corrections

Robert K. Merton accepted the perspective and repaired three faults in it, and his repairs are the most examinable part of the chapter.

Manifest and latent functions. A manifest function is the consequence that is intended and recognised by the participants. A latent function is the consequence that is neither intended nor recognised. A religious festival's manifest function is worship; its latent function may be to reassert the standing of the families who fund it. The distinction is valuable precisely because latent functions are what social research discovers and participants cannot report.

Dysfunction. Earlier functionalists wrote as though every persisting practice must be doing good. Merton insisted that a part may have consequences that reduce the adaptation of the system, and that whether a given practice is functional or dysfunctional is a question to be investigated rather than assumed.

Functional alternatives. The old argument that an institution exists because it performs a necessary function assumes that only that institution could perform it. Merton pointed out that the same need may be met in different ways in different societies, so the existence of the need does not explain the existence of the particular institution.

Parsons and the four functional prerequisites

Talcott Parsons argued that every social system must solve four problems if it is to survive, usually remembered as AGIL: adaptation to the environment, largely the work of the economy; goal attainment, largely of the political system; integration, the coordination of the parts and the management of conflict, largely of law and social control; and latency or pattern maintenance, the transmission and renewal of values, largely of the family, religion and education.

For a law student the third is the one to remember: on this scheme, law's primary function is integration, keeping the parts of a differentiated society working together.

The perspective applied to law

A functionalist asks what law does for the social system, and gives a list.

• It integrates a society whose members are otherwise unlike one another, by supplying rules that apply across group boundaries.
• It resolves disputes in a way that ends them, so that conflict does not accumulate.
• It maintains order by defining and sanctioning deviance, which is developed in [Social Control: Meaning and Purpose].
• It expresses shared values, and Durkheim's insight was that punishment is less about correcting the offender than about reaffirming the collective sentiments the offence outraged.
• It adapts the system, since legislation lets a society adjust deliberately rather than only by drift.

Durkheim's most striking functionalist claim about law belongs here. Crime, he argued, is normal, found in every society; and the punishment of crime performs the function of drawing the community together in a shared reaction. That claim is taken up in [Crime and Social Deviance].

A worked example

In a village in Konkan, families of a particular community pool money each year for a temple festival that costs far more than any of them would spend alone.

The historical question asks how the festival started. The functionalist question asks what it now does, and produces four answers.

Its manifest function is religious observance. Its latent functions are several: it brings back migrants working in Mumbai, so that ties are renewed and marriages arranged; it redistributes some wealth from the better-off families who contribute most; it reasserts the community's claim to a place in the local order.

Its dysfunctions are visible too: the expenditure is heavy for poor households; the pressure to contribute can indebt a family; and the ranking of contributors publicly displays inequality that daily life leaves tactfully unstated.

The point of the example is that all four questions are empirical. Functionalism does not settle whether the festival is good. It tells you where to look.

Criticism

1. It is conservative. By explaining institutions through their contribution to stability, it makes whatever exists look necessary. Applied to caste or to the sexual division of labour, this becomes a justification, and functionalist accounts of both have been attacked for exactly that.
2. It cannot explain change well. A model whose central idea is equilibrium struggles with a society in upheaval. Change tends to be treated as disturbance rather than as normal.
3. It underrates conflict, power and coercion. It assumes value consensus. Whose values, and who is in a position to make them count, are the questions the next chapter asks.
4. It is teleological. Explaining a practice by its beneficial consequences comes close to saying that the consequence caused the practice, which reverses the order of time.
5. It gives the individual no room. People appear as occupants of roles doing what the system requires, which is the objection symbolic interactionism presses.

Quick revision

1. Society is a system of interdependent parts, each with a function for the whole; the model tends to equilibrium and rests on value consensus.
2. Organic analogy: institutions are to society what organs are to a body.
3. Durkheim: social solidarity, collective conscience, and the function of punishment.
4. Malinowski: institutions meet needs. Radcliffe-Brown: function is the contribution to structural continuity.
5. Merton: manifest and latent functions, dysfunction, and functional alternatives.
6. Parsons AGIL: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency. Law's chief job is integration.
7. Criticisms: conservative, weak on change, blind to conflict and power, teleological, and leaves no room for the individual.

Test yourself

1. State the functionalist view of society in three sentences. Society is a system of interdependent parts. Each part performs a function that contributes to the maintenance of the whole, and a change in one part produces changes in the others. Order rests on agreement about shared values rather than on force, and the system tends to return to equilibrium after a disturbance.

2. Distinguish manifest from latent functions, with an example. A manifest function is a consequence that is both intended and recognised by the participants; a latent function is neither intended nor recognised. The manifest function of a village festival is worship; its latent functions may include bringing migrants home so that marriages can be arranged, and publicly reasserting the standing of the families who pay for it.

3. What are functional alternatives, and what argument do they defeat? They are different institutions capable of performing the same function in different societies. They defeat the argument that an institution exists because its function is necessary: if the need can be met in several ways, the necessity of the need does not explain the presence of that particular institution.

4. Name Parsons's four functional prerequisites and say which one law chiefly serves. Adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency or pattern maintenance. Law chiefly serves integration: coordinating the differentiated parts of a society and managing the conflicts between them so that the system holds together.

5. Why is functionalism called conservative? Because it explains an institution by the contribution it makes to stability, so that whatever exists tends to appear necessary and beneficial. Applied to unequal arrangements such as caste or the sexual division of labour, the explanation slides easily into a justification, and it gives no natural account of why an arrangement should be changed.