Last Updated on August 27, 2026 by Karl Thompson
This post covers the functionalist perspective in sociology in the depth second-year A-level students need: Emile Durkheim on social facts and solidarity, Talcott Parsons on the organic analogy and functional prerequisites, Robert Merton’s revisions, and the criticisms that a 20-mark answer has to engage with.
New to functionalism? Start with Functionalism in Sociology: An Introduction, which covers the same theorists more simply.
Revising? Functionalism Revision Notes for A-Level Sociology has the whole perspective in note form.
The key ideas of the Functionalist perspective
- There is a social structure that exists independently of individuals, made up of norms and values transmitted through institutions.
- Society should be studied scientifically and at the macro level, looking for general laws that explain human action.
- Socialisation matters, and individuals need regulating for the benefit of everyone. Integration and regulation are good things.
- Society should be analysed as a system, examining each part by what it contributes to the whole.
- Institutions generally perform positive functions: value consensus, social integration, social regulation, the prevention of anomie.
- Advanced industrial society is an improvement on simpler forms — which is why social order matters so much, because the alternative is regression.
Points 2 and 6 are the ones students usually miss, and both are useful in evaluation. Point 2 links functionalism directly to positivism and so to the methods half of Theory and Methods. Point 6 is where the charge of ideological bias bites hardest.
Emile Durkheim: historical context
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was the first ever Professor of Sociology and a student of the positivist Auguste Comte. His major works were published between 1893 and 1912, in the middle of modernity, as France industrialised and urbanised.
Durkheim believed the changes modernity brought threatened social order, and his sociology is a response to that threat. His work had two aims: to ensure modern societies were harmonious and orderly, and to build a science of society capable of producing reliable knowledge about how to achieve that.
Durkheim on social structure and social facts
Durkheim argued that a social structure exists, made up of norms and values, and that it sits above the level of the individual — because norms and values precede us. They are already there when we are born into a society. Behaviour is shaped by the system of norms and values a person is born into.
He called the components of this structure social facts: phenomena external to the individual which constrain how they act. A social fact is recognisable by two features — it exists outside any particular person, and it exerts a coercive power over them.
The scientific method applied to society
Durkheim argued that studying society required objective, scientific methods capable of identifying the general laws that govern it. His study of suicide was intended to demonstrate exactly this: that a phenomenon which appears entirely individual has social causes, visible as stable statistical patterns across societies and groups.
This is the point at which functionalism connects to the methods half of the course. See Positivism, sociology and social research for Durkheim’s method and the suicide study in detail.
Why Durkheim thought individuals need restraining
Durkheim believed people have a natural tendency towards selfishness, and that it falls to society to regulate those desires for the general benefit. Too much freedom is bad for the individual and for society.
The argument is less austere than it sounds. Durkheim’s claim was simply that greater human happiness and progress are achievable when people cooperate than when they compete over scarce resources.
Societies therefore need to create social solidarity — making individuals feel part of something bigger — and moral regulation, teaching the standards of acceptable behaviour. Both depend on effective socialisation.
| Key term: social solidarity | A sense of belonging to something greater; a shared feeling of working together towards collectively agreed goals. |
|---|
Mechanical and organic solidarity
Durkheim argued that solidarity is achieved differently in simple and in advanced industrial societies, and that it is much harder in the second.
In pre-industrial societies — feudal Britain, for instance — communities were small and local, people stayed in one place, and there was little division of labour. People shared the same experiences, the same activities and the same religion, which supplied a common moral code. Durkheim called this mechanical solidarity: solidarity based on similarity.
In advanced industrial societies the division of labour becomes far more complex. People specialise, become less self-sufficient, and depend on large numbers of others they will never meet. Religion’s capacity to supply a single moral code to everyone declines. People no longer lead the same lives, and society has to find a way of achieving solidarity based on difference rather than similarity. Durkheim called that organic solidarity.
The risk in the transition is excessive individualism and a crisis of moral regulation — anomie. Durkheim argued that achieving organic solidarity was the central problem facing modern societies.
Given the decline of religion, he thought labour organisations and education would have to supply the necessary moral regulation. Education is doing two things at once on this account: teaching the diverse specialist skills an advanced division of labour requires, and supplying shared norms and values through subjects like history and through shared rituals such as assemblies.
| Key term: anomie | A condition in which excessive individualism produces a general lack of agreement around norms and values — sometimes described as a state of normlessness. |
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Talcott Parsons: the social system
Writing in the 1940s and 1950s, Talcott Parsons built on Durkheim’s work and developed functionalism into a systematic theory of how societies hold together.
The organic analogy
The organic analogy is the idea that society works like a human body. Institutions are like organs: each performs a specific function necessary to the maintenance of the whole, and each part should be understood in terms of its contribution to that whole.
| The body | Society |
|---|---|
| Each organ has a unique function | Each institution has a unique function |
| The parts work together harmoniously | Institutions work together harmoniously |
| Organs are interdependent | Institutions are interdependent |
| Has an identifiable boundary | Has an identifiable boundary, e.g. the nation |
| The sum is greater than its parts | The system is greater than its institutions |
| Normal state: healthy | Normal state: low rates of social problems |
The analogy is doing real theoretical work, not just illustrating. It sets the method — explain a part by its contribution to the whole — and it smuggles in a standard of health, which is where much of the criticism of functionalism starts.
Institutions perform positive functions
Following the analogy, Parsons analysed institutions by the positive functions they perform in maintaining social order.
Institutions promote value consensus, agreement around shared values, which Parsons took to be the basis of order in society. Two shared values matter most in industrial societies: the work ethic and a belief in meritocracy. The work ethic ensures people value work; meritocracy means people accept unequal rewards because they believe effort is what produces them.
The family passes on basic norms and values through primary socialisation, stabilises adult personalities, and provides a refuge from the pressures of modern life — Parsons’ “warm bath” argument.
Education integrates individuals into wider society, giving them a sense of belonging through a shared history and language. See also Durkheim’s account of the role of education.
Other institutions regulate behaviour through social sanctions, preventing crime and deviance from escalating.
Functional prerequisites and Parsons’ AGIL scheme
Functional prerequisites are the things a society needs in order to survive. Just as a human being requires certain things to stay alive, Parsons argued, every society must do certain things to keep functioning: produce and distribute resources such as food and shelter, resolve conflicts, and socialise the young.
Parsons identified four such needs, known by the acronym AGIL, each met by a specialised sub-system in advanced industrial societies:
| Function | What it involves | Institutions |
|---|---|---|
| Adaptation | Adapting to the environment; producing goods and services | The economy, the workplace |
| Goal attainment | Deciding what society should aim at | Government, the political system |
| Integration | Achieving social cohesion | Law, the courts, the media |
| Latency (pattern maintenance) | Socialising the young into shared values | The family, education, religion |
Parsons argued that the needs of the system come before the needs of the individual, which is precisely why he stressed the family and education so heavily: they are the institutions transmitting the values that bind people into value consensus.
Where the idea of functional prerequisites came from
Functionalist claims about what societies “need” are not arbitrary, but nor are they well founded, and it is worth knowing where they came from because that is a legitimate line of criticism.
The first source was comparative. Sociologists and anthropologists studied large numbers of societies looking for institutions present in all of them. George Peter Murdock argued in the 1940s that the family exists in every society. Davis and Moore argued in the 1940s that every society has some form of stratification. Functionalists concluded that societies must therefore need both.
The second source was hypothetical. Marion J. Levy Jr. (1952) asked what conditions would cause a society to collapse — members dying out, becoming wholly apathetic, descending into a war of all against all, or being absorbed by another society — and reasoned that every society must have mechanisms preventing these outcomes, including a means of reproducing new members.
The logical problem is worth stating plainly, because it earns evaluation marks: neither route establishes necessity. Finding an institution everywhere shows it is common, not that society could not exist without it. And reasoning backwards from imagined collapse tells you what would prevent that particular scenario, not what any society must have.
Social change and social evolution
Parsons saw social change as social evolution, from simple hunter-gatherer societies towards more complex industrial ones.
More complex societies are better, on his account, because they are more adaptive — more able to respond to environmental change, more innovative, and better at drawing on the talents of a wider range of people, because they are meritocratic. They are therefore more likely to survive.
Parsons argued that economic and technological change drives evolution initially, but that values increasingly become the driving force, and that the values of advanced industrial societies are superior because they permit adaptation, where traditional values tend to prevent change.
This is the argument that turns into modernisation theory when applied to global development — see modernisation theory. It is also where the accusation that functionalism is ethnocentric has most force.
Robert Merton’s internal critique
Merton was a functionalist, which is what makes his criticisms useful: they cannot be dismissed as an outsider’s misunderstanding.
He rejected three of Parsons’ assumptions. Not everything is necessary — an institution can exist without being indispensable. Not everything is interconnected — parts of a society can change without the rest changing with them. And some institutions are dysfunctional, harmful to some groups even where they benefit others.
Merton also distinguished manifest functions, the intended and recognised consequences of an institution, from latent functions, the unintended ones. See Merton’s internal critique of functionalism for the detail.
Criticisms of the Functionalist perspective
Is there really a structure independent of individuals? The claim is central and hard to demonstrate. What can be observed is regular behaviour; whether that requires a structure existing over and above individuals is a further step.
The effects of institutions are very difficult to assess. Establishing that an institution performs a positive function would mean measuring all its effects on all individuals and all other institutions, and isolating those effects from everything else. In practice this cannot be done.
Functionalism exaggerates value consensus. Parsons largely assumes consensus rather than demonstrating it.
Michael Mann argues stability may result from a lack of consensus, not its presence. If everyone genuinely believed in achievement, disorder might follow, because not everyone can be rewarded. Social stability is more likely, on Mann’s argument, if those at the bottom are disengaged from the dominant values rather than committed to them. This is a sharper criticism than the standard Marxist one and worth using for that reason.
It is deterministic. Behaviour is portrayed as shaped by the system, as though individuals were programmed by institutions, leaving no room for agency.
It ignores conflict and coercion. Marxists argue that the values functionalists call shared are in fact the values of elite groups, and that order is imposed on the majority rather than agreed by it.
It is ideological. By arguing that particular institutions are necessary — the family, religion, stratification — functionalism justifies the existing order. Focusing on positive functions produces a systematically flattering account of arrangements that suit some people much better than others.
For a worked exam treatment, see Outline and explain two criticisms of the Functionalist view of society (10).
Is Functionalism still relevant?
Despite everything above, the perspective should not be dismissed out of hand, and an answer that dismisses it entirely is usually weaker than one that does not.
The idea that society can usefully be treated as a system of interdependent parts is an assumption governments act on constantly. Funding education or welfare in order to produce an effect elsewhere is functionalist reasoning in practice.
The same logic underpins a great deal of development policy — the idea that aid can move countries from less to more developed forms — which is modernisation theory, and which remains influential despite decades of criticism.
And Durkheim’s basic empirical claim holds up. Position in the social structure still predicts life chances with considerable reliability: educational outcomes, health, and likelihood of contact with the criminal justice system all vary systematically by class, gender and ethnicity. Whatever else is wrong with functionalism, the observation that social position shapes individual fate has not been refuted.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written for second-year A-level sociology students on the AQA specification, where functionalism is examined as part of Theory and Methods on Paper 3 and Paper 1.
Starting out: Functionalism in Sociology: An Introduction
Revising: Functionalism Revision Notes for A-Level Sociology
Related: Durkheim on social facts · Merton’s internal critique · Criticisms of the functionalist view of society · Functionalist and Marxist views of education compared
For the other perspectives, see the main social theories page.
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