Blackwell Reference Online

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Function has been an important idea within specific sociological paradigms and in sociology more generally. Analyzing the function(s) of social practices has been central ever since Émile Durkheim, in Division of Labor in Society (1893), defined function as consequence, and exhorted sociologists to distinguish functions of social phenomena from their causes while examining both. Arguing that the division of labor functions to create social solidarity, Durkheim likened the “organic solidarity” associated with a complex division of labor to functional interdependence among differently specialized organs in the human body. Examining functions of social practices need not imply viewing society as an interdependent set of differentiated structures functioning together to promote societal maintenance and well-being. However, these two ideas intertwined in the post-World War II American structural functionalist paradigm. Like Durkheim, structural functionalists examined how social order is maintained and reproduced. More recently, a metatheoretical movement called neofunctionalism tried to retain structural functionalism's core while extending it to address issues of social change and microfoundations (see Ritzer 1992 ). Structural functionalism dominated American sociology in the period after World War II. Kingsley Davis, in his 1959 Presidential address to the American Sociological ... log in or subscribe to read full text