Assess the Contribution of Functiponalism to Society

India Evans

Assess the contribution of functionalism to an understanding of society.

The two main broad perspectives that explain crime and deviance are Marxism and Functionalism.

The theory of society known as functionalism is the ‘agreement’ that is supposedly meant to organise our lives - this is called a consensus. We have an idea of how to behave appropriately in many situations and we can predict accurately how others will act. However, if this didn’t occur then chaos/anarchy would be the ultimate result. Functionalists believe that social institutions in society such as the family life, education system, law, media and religion, have an impact/influence on your life and the way you live it. According to functionalist’s sociologists, each of this social institution has a certain function within society. Socialization is the process in which society had to adhere to rules, morals, norms and values of what society expects.

Durkheim was one of the main functionalist sociologist’s He believed that society was almost perfect and that crime didn’t even exist. Although, as time went on he acknowledged that crime did happen but this crime was beneficial to society. For example he stated that social control could be enforced via public execution, it provided jobs for the police force, it allowed the government to know how much of a consensus (as mentioned above in intro^) there is, in society. E.g. high crime = not many happy people existed.

The most important strength about this theory is that they are very positive about society. Other sociologists argue that a crucial strength of this theory is that Durkheim was actually in fact the first sociologists to analyse crime and deviance on a large sociological theory. Functionalists look at the whole of society, not just parts of society as the action theory does. It also uses the human body to describe the different parts of society. This is explained more clearer by saying the brain is the politics and the...