Complete the account of Parsons’s and Merton’s versions of functionalism.
Parsons argued that every system must solve four functional problems: adaptation, ______, integration and pattern maintenance. Merton resisted such generality and argued for theories of the ______ range, and distinguished the intended and recognised, or ______, functions of an institution from its unintended and unrecognised, or ______, ones.
Word bank: goal attainment · middle · manifest · latent · differentiation · residual
Hints
- The scheme’s four letters stand for adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency.
- A rain dance that fails to bring rain may still hold a group together, and Merton has a word for that second effect.
Show the answer
Parsons argued that every system must solve four functional problems: adaptation, goal attainment, integration and pattern maintenance. Merton resisted such generality and argued for theories of the middle range, and distinguished the intended and recognised, or manifest, functions of an institution from its unintended and unrecognised, or latent, ones.
The latent function is the tool that outlived the theory. It licenses the sociologist to ask what an institution actually does as against what it says it does, without accusing anyone of hypocrisy, which is why it is still used by researchers who would not describe themselves as functionalists at all.
Practise Sociology Becomes a Profession
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Sociology Becomes a Profession
- Arrange these landmarks in the professionalisation of sociology, earliest first.
- Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro was based on a house-to-house survey of a single city ward and appeared…
- The Thomas theorem states that situations defined as real are real in their consequences. Which claims follow…
- Mills attacked grand theory and abstracted empiricism together in 1959, although they look like opposite…
- Sort each research practice by whether it belongs to the Chicago tradition or to structural functionalism.
- Estimate how many years separate the founding of the first American sociology department and the publication…
- Chicago sociology and Parsonian functionalism took fundamentally different stances towards empirical reality.…
- In which year was the first university department of sociology in the United States founded?
- Parsons’s functionalism contains no account of social change, because a system in equilibrium cannot by…