SOC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Perspiration, Surface Tension, Visible Minority

• School: Irvine Valley College
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1
• Professor: brown

Document Summary

Review and critique functionalism and the contributions of its principal theorists. Functionalists view the social world as a dynamic system of interrelated and interdependent parts. Social structures (e. g. , the postsecondary education system) exist to help people fulfill their wants and desires, as defined by social values. Example, a good education will make it easier to get a well-paying job, which is an expression of our value system that recognizes and promotes the accumulation of material wealth as an expression of success. Therefore, postsecondary education is functional in the sense that it makes this possible. Universities and colleges are certainly structural (i. e. , they have buildings, employees, operating procedures, and enrolment policies) but they are also functional. The two-part system of structures and their associated functions has led some to call this theory structural-functionalism. We prefer to call the approach simply functionalism for two main reasons. First, this term recognizes the clear link to the classical sociological theorists (e. g. , comte, durkheim).