ABSTRACT
The author well remember at a meeting of the International Sociological Association, held in Washington, D.C., in 1961, Robert K. Merton very cogently made the point of objecting to the phrase "structural-functionalism." He may use an example of special concern to that category of investigators labeled "sociologists." A related polemical orientation is the claim frequently put forward that "functionalists" are incapable of accounting for social change; that is, their type of theory has a built-in "static" bias. That there is an analogy from the functional point of view of control of the development of individual organisms or social units has been enormously strengthened by the dramatic development of the science of linguistics, again in about the last generation. There is a further point about cybernetics which bears very directly on functional analysis. This is the fact that functionally specialized or differentiated sectors of living systems stand in some kind of an order of cybernetically hierarchical control relative to each other.
