Sociology

Sociology
Please answer the following question using all relevant course material—lecture notes, readings, and weekly discussions. Your answers should be written as fully developed paragraphs consisting of grammatically correct sentences, and they should be written in your own words as opposed to being plagiarized from lecture notes or course readings. They should clearly demonstrate your understanding of course material in order to earn the maximum points possible.
Describe the functionalist perspective on society and explain how you would apply it to American society, including providing a specific example to illustrate the concept “normative consensus”.

CLASS NOTES: Functionalists also believe that societies are for the most part integrated through consensus around basic beliefs and values. This is called normative consensus, meaning that there is general agreement on basic beliefs and values in a society. While it is possible for societies or at least parts of them to become dysfunctional, functionalists tend to see society as functioning smoothly and accepted and supported by their members.

 

What are some examples of normative consensus in our society? Normative consensus in our society would probably include things like our beliefs in freedom of speech and assembly, democracy and our right to elect our leaders, religious freedom, separation of church and state, equal opportunity, monogamy, faithfulness, private property, free enterprise, various principles that inform our justice system (e.g,. innocent until proven guilty, trial by jury, right to a fair trial with defense provided if necessary), and welfare for the poor—or perhaps at least for those who are not capable of providing for themselves.

 

At the same time, there are some fundamental beliefs and values where there is conflict and a lack of consensus in our society. I think this includes abortion in particular, but also other issues where the taking of life is in dispute such as physician-assisted suicide and the right to die. Moreover, some of the above beliefs and values are sometimes challenged and contested. Although we generally believe in the right to free speech, there are sometimes disagreements over how far it should go if it allegedly conflicts with our national security. For example, there have been significant disputes regarding The Patriot Act and efforts by the government to fight terrorism, such as detaining suspects at the Guantanamo base in Cuba or profiling people who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent at airports. There are also often conflicts over the separation of church and state in our society. Functionalists would argue that if there is not enough normative consensus overall, this can undermine society.

 

The originator of functionalism and most famous functionalist theorist in sociology is Talcott Parsons, who served a long and storied career at Harvard University from the 1930s to the early 1970s. A very elaborate and complicated theorist, Parsons developed a basic scheme known as the AGIL scheme that argued that all social systems must fulfill four basic functions:

 

1) Adaptation—a process for deriving necessary resources from its environment and distributes them.

 

2) Goal Attainment—a process for making decisions about societal goals

 

3) Integration—a way to maintain coordination and coherence among different subsystems and activities

 

4) Pattern Maintenance—a process for teaching individuals members basic cultural patterns and values necessary for functioning within the system

 

For example, even a small social system like a nuclear family must have some way of providing itself with the goods it needs (in modern society, families earn income and use that income to purchase what they need), of making decisions (today this tends to be done more equally when two parents exist), of coordinating the different activities that need to be accomplished in a coherent way (making meals, housecleaning, taking kids to school, going to work, etc.), and teaching children what their roles and responsibilities are and families rules and expectations.

 

Functionalism tends to be a more conservative perspective on society, and it was dominant in American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s, and early 1960s, which was also a more conservative era in American society in general. Functionalism tends to be conservative because it says that societies, like all organisms, strive to maintain their well-being, and that institutions and cultural practices and norms tend to emerge that help society meet its functional needs. As a result, it tends to assume that the institutions, cultural beliefs and values, and institutional arrangements exist in a society are beneficial and serve some positive function in terms of enhancing the welfare of that society.

 

Functionalism also tends to be a conservative perspective due to its focus on what is allegedly for the benefit or welfare of the society as a whole, rather than examining the treatment of specific individuals and groups within it, especially weaker and less powerful groups. For example, functionalism had little to say about the oppression of racial and ethnic minorities and women in the 1940s and 1950s in our society. In one famous essay on the family, for example, Parsons argued that the traditional nuclear family with the husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker was functional for society, without considering that relegating women to the role of homemaker was oppressive and restricted their opportunities in society.

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