• Structural functionalism, especially through Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and their followers, was the dominant sociological theory for many years.

• Over the last three decades, structural functionalism has declined dramatically in importance and is largely of historical significance today (Chriss, 1995; Colomy, 1990a).

• It played a key role in the emergence of neofunctionalism in the 1980s (Nielsen, 2007b), which sought to synthesize sociological theory (Abrahamson, 2001).

• The future of neofunctionalism is uncertain; its founder Jeffrey Alexander has distanced himself from the movement.

• The major alternative to structural functionalism has been conflict theory, with notable contributions from Ralf Dahrendorf and more recent integrative work by Randall Collins.

• Following Thomas Bernard (1983), these theories fall within the broader debate between consensus theories (including structural functionalism) and conflict theories.

• Consensus theories emphasize shared norms and values, social order based on tacit agreements, and slow, orderly social change.

• Conflict theories stress dominance and control by some social groups over others and view social change as rapid and disorderly, often involving overthrow of dominant groups.

• Bernard traces this debate back to ancient Greece (Plato representing consensus, Aristotle conflict) and through the history of philosophy.

• In sociology, this debate involved pairs such as Marx and Comte, Simmel and Durkheim, and Dahrendorf and Parsons.

• The chapter focuses on Dahrendorf’s conflict theory and Parsons’s consensus theory.

• Despite their differences, structural functionalism and conflict theory share important similarities: both are macro-level theories concerned with large-scale social structures and institutions.

• Both theories fit within the same sociological “social facts” paradigm (Ritzer, 1980).

Structural Functionalism

• Robert Nisbet described structural functionalism as “without any doubt, the single most significant body of theory in the social sciences in the twentieth century” (cited in Turner and Maryanski, 1979).

• Kingsley Davis (1959) equated structural functionalism almost directly with sociology itself.

• Alvin Gouldner (1970) criticized Western sociology mainly through a critical analysis of Talcott Parsons’s structural-functional theories.

• Despite dominance after World War II, structural functionalism has declined in importance as a sociological theory.

• Wilbert Moore (1978), a major proponent, called it “an embarrassment in contemporary theoretical sociology.”

• Turner and Maryanski (1979) declared functionalism as an explanatory theory to be “dead”, recommending abandonment for more promising perspectives.

• Nicholas Demerath and Richard Peterson (1967) took a more optimistic view, suggesting structural functionalism is not a passing fad but likely to evolve into new sociological theories.

• The emergence of neofunctionalism supports Demerath and Peterson’s perspective.

• In structural functionalism, structural and functional aspects can be studied separately, but their combination is typical.

• One can study social structures without focusing on their functions, or study functions of social processes not tied to structures.

• Structural functionalism broadly focuses on both structures and their functions.

• Among its forms, societal functionalism is dominant, emphasizing large-scale social structures and institutions, their interrelationships, and their constraining effects on actors.

The Functional Theory of Stratification and Its Critics

• The functional theory of stratification by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) is a key piece of structural-functional theory.

• They argued that social stratification is universal and necessary; no society is unstratified or totally classless.

• Stratification is viewed as a functional necessity—all societies develop a system of stratification.

• Stratification refers to a system of positions, not individuals occupying them.

• The theory focuses on how certain positions gain different degrees of prestige and how society motivates individuals to occupy and fulfill these positions.

• Two main problems:

  1. How to instill the desire to fill certain positions in the right individuals.

  2. How to ensure those individuals fulfill the requirements of their positions.

• Proper placement is challenging because:

  • Some positions are more pleasant than others.

  • Some are more important to society’s survival.

  • Different positions require different abilities and talents.

• High-ranking positions are assumed to be less pleasant, more important, and require the greatest talent.

• Society must offer sufficient rewards (prestige, salary, leisure) to attract people to these roles and motivate diligence.

• Low-ranking positions are presumed more pleasant, less important, requiring less ability, with less social need to fill them diligently.

• Stratification is an “unconsciously evolved device” that all societies develop to survive.

• Rewards like prestige, high salary, and leisure are necessary incentives for demanding roles (e.g., doctors).

• Without such rewards, important positions would be understaffed and society could crumble.

• The theory has faced much criticism:

  • It perpetuates privileges of those already powerful by justifying their rewards as necessary.

  • Assumes stratification is inevitable and permanent, ignoring possibilities of future non-stratified societies.

  • The importance of positions is questioned—e.g., garbage collectors vs. advertising executives or nurses vs. movie stars.

  • The idea that scarcity of capable people justifies rewards is challenged; many are prevented from training or advancement despite ability.

  • Those in high-ranking roles often work to limit competition to maintain power and income.

  • People may be motivated by job satisfaction or service to others rather than power or wealth.

TALCOTT PARSONS

• Talcott Parsons was born in 1902 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, into a religious and intellectual family; his father was a Congregational minister, professor, and college president.

• Parsons earned his undergraduate degree from Amherst College (1924) and pursued graduate work at the London School of Economics, then moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where he was influenced by Max Weber and his widow’s meetings.

• Parsons wrote his doctoral thesis at Heidelberg, partly focusing on Weber’s work.

• He became an instructor at Harvard in 1927, switching departments but remained there until his death in 1979.

• His academic progress was slow; he did not obtain tenure until 1939.

• In 1937, Parsons published The Structure of Social Action, introducing major sociological theorists like Weber and laying the groundwork for his own theory.

• Rapid progress followed: Parsons chaired the Harvard sociology department (1944) and later founded and chaired the department of social relations (1946), which included various social scientists.

• By 1949, Parsons was elected president of the American Sociological Association.

• In the 1950s-60s, Parsons became the dominant figure in American sociology, publishing influential works such as The Social System (1951).

• In the late 1960s, Parsons faced criticism from the emerging radical wing of American sociology, viewed as politically conservative and his theory seen as an elaborate categorization scheme.

• The 1980s saw a resurgence of interest in Parsonsian theory globally (Alexander, Buxton, Camic, Holton, Turner, Sciulli, Gerstein).

• Holton and Turner (1986) argued Parsons’s contribution was more powerful than Marx, Weber, Durkheim, or their followers.

• Parsons influenced both conservative and neo-Marxian theorists, especially Jurgen Habermas.

• After Parsons’s death, former students reflected on his theory and character, offering provocative insights but no fully coherent picture.

• Robert Merton, one of Parsons’s early students, noted that initially students came to Harvard to study with Pitirim Sorokin, Parsons’s department senior and later archenemy.

• Merton observed that in 1931 Parsons had no public identity as a sociologist; some students stayed to work with him despite his obscurity.

• Parsons’s first theory course provided the core for his masterwork The Structure of Social Action, which was published five years after its oral presentation.

• Despite mixed opinions on Parsons, it is acknowledged that his death marked the end of an era in sociology, leaving a great tradition of sociological thought for future generations.

Talcott Parsons’s Structural Functionalism

• Talcott Parsons conducted extensive theoretical work throughout his life, with notable differences between his early and later work.

• This section focuses on his later structural-functional theorizing.

• The discussion begins with Parsons’s four functional imperatives for all “action” systems, known as the AGIL scheme.

• After explaining the four functions, the analysis will address Parsons’s ideas on structures and systems.

AGIL

• A function is defined as “a complex of activities directed towards meeting a need or needs of the system” (Rocher, 1975; Stryker, 2007).

• Parsons identifies four functional imperatives necessary for all systems, known as the AGIL scheme: Adaptation (A), Goal Attainment (G), Integration (I), and Latency (L) (pattern maintenance).

• To survive, a system must perform these four functions:

  1. Adaptation (A): The system must cope with external situational demands by adapting to the environment and modifying the environment to meet its needs.

  2. Goal Attainment (G): The system must define and achieve its primary goals.

  3. Integration (I): The system must regulate the relationships among its components and manage the interaction between the other three functions (A, G, L).

  4. Latency (L) / Pattern Maintenance: The system must maintain and renew individual motivation and the cultural patterns that sustain that motivation.

• Parsons designed the AGIL scheme to be applicable at all levels of his theoretical system.

• The behavioral organism system performs the adaptation function by adjusting to and transforming the external world.

• The personality system performs the goal attainment function by defining goals and mobilizing resources to achieve them.

• The social system fulfills the integration function by controlling its components.

• The cultural system performs the latency function by providing norms and values that motivate actors to act.

The Action System

• Parsons’s action system is organized hierarchically with clear levels of social analysis and their interrelationships.

• Lower levels provide the energy and conditions needed for higher levels, while higher levels control the lower levels.

• The lowest level is the physical and organic environment, involving nonsymbolic aspects like human anatomy and physiology.

• The highest level, called ultimate reality, has a metaphysical flavor, addressing symbolic responses to human uncertainties and existential challenges (Jackson Toby, 1977).

• The core of Parsons’s work lies in his four action systems, developed to address the problem of order, i.e., what prevents social chaos or conflict.

• Parsons’s assumptions underlying structural functionalism to solve the problem of order include:

  1. Systems have order and interdependence of parts.

  2. Systems tend toward self-maintaining order or equilibrium.

  3. Systems can be static or undergo ordered change.

  4. The nature of one system part influences the form of other parts.

  5. Systems maintain boundaries with their environments.

  6. Allocation and integration are fundamental processes necessary for system equilibrium.

  7. Systems tend toward self-maintenance, controlling boundaries, parts-whole relations, environmental variations, and internal change tendencies.

• Parsons prioritized the analysis of ordered social structure over social change early in his career, believing it was inefficient to study changes before understanding the variables themselves (Parsons and Shils, 1951).

• Due to criticism of his static orientation, Parsons later devoted more attention to social change and societal evolution, though his work remained largely structured and static.

• The four action systems are analytical tools, not real-world entities, used to analyze social reality.

Social System

• Parsons’s conception of the social system begins at the micro level with interaction between ego and alter ego, seen as the most elementary social system form.

• He spent little time analyzing this micro level but argued that its features are present in more complex social systems.

• Parsons defined a social system as:

  • A plurality of individual actors interacting in a situation with a physical/environmental aspect.

  • Actors motivated by a tendency toward optimization of gratification.

  • Relations defined and mediated by a system of culturally structured and shared symbols (Parsons, 1951).

• The definition highlights key concepts: actors, interaction, environment, optimization of gratification, and culture.

• Despite valuing interaction, Parsons did not take interaction as the fundamental unit; instead, he used the status-role complex as the basic unit of the social system.

• Status refers to a structural position within the social system.

• Role is what the actor does in that position, evaluated by its functional significance for the larger system.

• Actors are viewed structurally as a bundle of statuses and roles, not by individual thoughts or actions.

• Parsons focused primarily on structural components of the social system: status-role complexes, collectivities, norms, and values.

• Parsons was both a structuralist and functionalist, outlining functional prerequisites of social systems:

  1. Social systems must be structured to operate compatibly with other systems.

  2. They must have requisite support from other systems to survive.

  3. Systems must meet a significant proportion of the needs of actors.

  4. They must elicit adequate participation from members.

  5. They must have minimum control over potentially disruptive behavior.

  6. Conflict, if disruptive, must be controlled.

  7. A social system requires a language to survive.

• Parsons’s focus was on large-scale systems and their interrelations (societal functionalism).

• Even when discussing actors, Parsons emphasized the system’s perspective.

• His analysis strongly reflects concern with the maintenance of order within the social system.

Actors and the Social System

• Parsons did not ignore the relationship between actors and social structures in his social system theory.

• He called the integration of value patterns and need-dispositions the “fundamental dynamic theorem of sociology” (Parsons, 1951).

• Key processes in this integration are internalization and socialization — how norms and values are transferred to actors within the system.

• In successful socialization, norms and values are internalized, becoming part of the actors’ consciences.

• As a result, actors pursuing their own interests also serve the interests of the system as a whole.

• Parsons stated that the value-orientation patterns acquired by actors reflect the fundamental role structure and dominant values of the social system (1951).

• Generally, actors are seen as passive recipients in the socialization process.

• Children learn societal norms, values, and morality through socialization, which is a conservative process binding them to the social system.

• Socialization shapes need-dispositions, providing means for their satisfaction, leaving little room for creativity.

• Socialization is a lifelong experience, starting in childhood but supplemented by more specific socializing experiences in adulthood.

• Norms and values learned in childhood tend to be stable and remain throughout life with some reinforcement.

• Despite lifelong socialization and conformity, there is individual variation in the system.

• Social control mechanisms help induce conformity, but social control is considered a second line of defense, best used sparingly.

• A flexible social system that tolerates some deviation is stronger than a rigid one.

• The social system should provide a wide range of role opportunities to allow personality expression without threatening system integrity.

• Socialization and social control are the main mechanisms maintaining social system equilibrium.

• Modest individuality and deviance are accommodated; more extreme deviance requires reequilibrating mechanisms.

• Social order is built into the social system’s structure to prevent deviance from becoming uncontrollable:

  “Mechanisms… capable of forestalling and reversing… tendencies for deviance… beyond ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions.” (Parsons, 1951)

• Parsons’s focus was on how the system controls the actor, not how the actor creates or maintains the system, reflecting his structural-functional orientation.

Society

• The social system includes all types of collectivities, but society is a particularly important social system.

• Society is defined as a relatively self-sufficient collectivity whose members can satisfy all their individual and collective needs within its framework (Rocher, 1975).

• Parsons, as a structural functionalist, distinguished four structures (subsystems) in society based on the AGIL functions they perform.

• The economy performs the function of adaptation by labor, production, and allocation, adapting the environment to society’s needs and helping society adjust to external realities.

• The polity (political system) performs the function of goal attainment by pursuing societal objectives and mobilizing actors and resources.

• The fiduciary system (e.g., schools, family) handles the latency function by transmitting culture—norms and values—to actors and enabling their internalization.

• The societal community (e.g., law) performs the integration function by coordinating various components of society.

• While the structures of the social system were important to Parsons, the cultural system was even more important.

• The cultural system was positioned at the top of Parsons’s action system hierarchy.

• Parsons labeled himself a “cultural determinist” (1966), emphasizing the primacy of culture in his theory.

Cultural System

• Parsons conceived culture as the major force binding the various elements of the social world, or the action system.

• Culture mediates interaction among actors and integrates the personality and social systems.

• Culture can become part of other systems: in the social system as norms and values, and in the personality system as internalized by the actor.

• The cultural system also has a separate existence as the social stock of knowledge, symbols, and ideas, which are available to but distinct from the social and personality systems.

• Parsons defined the cultural system by its relationship to other action systems—as a patterned, ordered system of symbols: objects of orientation to actors, internalized in personality, and institutionalized in the social system.

• Because culture is largely symbolic and subjective, it can be easily transmitted between social systems via diffusion and between personality systems via learning and socialization.

• The symbolic nature of culture also allows it to control Parsons’s other action systems, underpinning Parsons’s self-identification as a cultural determinist.

• Despite culture’s preeminence in Parsonsian theory, the theory’s integrative nature is questionable, as a truly integrative theory treats all major levels of analysis with rough equivalency.

• Cultural determinism, or any determinism, is suspect from the standpoint of an integrated sociology.

• This problem is intensified by the relatively weak development of the personality system in Parsons’s work.

Personality System

• The personality system is controlled by both the cultural system and the social system, though Parsons acknowledged some independence of the personality system.

• Parsons stated that while personality structure derives from social systems and culture through socialization, it becomes an independent system through its relation to the organism and unique life experience, not just an epiphenomenon.

• Despite this, the personality system is often seen as secondary or dependent in Parsons’s theory.

• The personality is defined as the organized system of orientation and motivation for individual action.

• The basic component of personality is the need-disposition, defined as the most significant units of motivation of action.

• Need-dispositions differ from drives, which are innate physiological tendencies; need-dispositions are drives acquired and shaped by the social setting.

• Need-dispositions motivate actors to accept, reject, or seek new objects in their environment to satisfy their needs.

• Parsons identified three types of need-dispositions:

  1. Seeking love, approval, and other social relationships.

  2. Internalized values leading to observing cultural standards.

  3. Role expectations that guide appropriate social responses.

• This portrays actors as largely passive, impelled by drives and shaped by culture through need-dispositions.

• Parsons tried to attribute some creativity to the personality, acknowledging that individuals make creative modifications as they internalize culture, though the dominant image remains passive.

• Parsons’s focus on need-dispositions limits his theory by excluding many important personality aspects, making it impoverished.

• Psychologist Alfred Baldwin criticized Parsons for not providing enough properties or mechanisms for the personality to function adequately.

• Baldwin also noted Parsons’s limited interest in the personality system, often focusing more on social systems even when discussing personality.

• Parsons linked personality to the social system through:

  • Actors learning to see themselves consistent with their social positions.

  • Attachment of role expectations to social roles.

  • Self-discipline, internalization of values, identification, and other integration forces.

• Parsons recognized the problem of malintegration between personality and social system, which must be overcome for social order.

• Parsons’s interest in internalization (transfer of social norms/values to personality) was influenced by Durkheim’s and Freud’s (superego) work, reinforcing the personality’s passivity and external control.

• Over time, Parsons moved away from studying the subjective meanings of individual actions, favoring a modified behavioristic approach that avoided introspection and empathy.

Behavioral Organism

• Parsons included the behavioral organism as one of the four action systems but said very little about it.

• The behavioral organism is important as the source of energy for the other systems.

• It is based on genetic constitution but its organization is influenced by conditioning and learning during an individual’s life.

• The behavioral organism is a residual system in Parsons’s theory.

• Parsons is credited for including it in sociology, anticipating later interests in sociobiology and the sociology of the body.