ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a specific kind of social entity, a formal organization through which various social activities are managed and directed. Social functionalism maintains that social features – institutions, values, laws – have the characteristics they possess because they serve important needs of the social order. Robert Merton offered a much more qualified and careful theory of social functions as a limited and empirically testable notion. In Social Theory and Social Structure, he finds that earlier versions of sociological functionalism were deeply flawed. Merton’s own theory of social functionalism draws an important distinction between manifest and latent functions – between the directly observable beneficial consequences of a given social arrangement and the indirect and unobservable consequences that the arrangement may have. Philosophers of social science and biology have expressed deep skepticism about sociological functionalism. Particularly cogent were the compelling arguments offered by Jon Elster in his discussions of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History.
