ABSTRACT
Nowadays, this term belongs less to sociology’s technical vocabulary than to the polemical repertoire of sociologists. Nevertheless, whatever misuses have been made of the term, as a symbol or as a term of derision, it represents a way of analysing the organization of social phenomena which, reduced to its purest form, makes a positive and original contribution. Functionalism is also a doctrine which draws out aspects of interaction and interdependence characteristic of social action and of its often unintended or unexpected consequences. Economic analysis has for a long time illuminated several relationships which can be referred to as ‘functional’, for example, between price on one hand and supply and demand on the other, or also between the level of prices and the rate of interest (or the rate of exchange, if one takes into account the economy in an international environment). In that case, the notion of function brings to mind the idea of an adjustment between global entities which could also be expressed by the term ‘function’ in its mathematical sense.
