Preface

Summary

The thesis of this book is that Kingsley Davis, in his famous presidential address before the American Sociological Association (1959), was mistaken in the claim that all sociologists are functionalists and that the functionalist paradigm is basically unsound. Using explanations of the incest taboo as an example, I argue in the first two chapters that functionalism has unique elements that are not fully exploited by most social scientists, and that this uniqueness has to do largely with the way the functionalist model focuses on the survivability of social organizations as they age.

Chapter 3 contends that the stable population model, specifically the life table, provides a way of analyzing one of the major dependent variables of functionalism–the survivorship of social organizations–and that, because the stable population model is a means of understanding population dynamics, functional analysis based on the model is inherently dynamic, that is, oriented to the study of social change.

Chapter 4 shows that the major prolegomenon of any functional analysis is to trace the behavior of relevant variables through time: If there is insufficient variability (“noise”), there is an insufficient basis for functional analysis. Using the Club of Rome world model as an example, I show that the functionalist paradigm readily comprehends the vast amount of change implied by the model, that the Club of Rome thesis is a clear instance of Marxian catastrophism, and that there is therefore no strong incompatibility between functional analysis and Marxist analysis.

Chapters 5 and 6, which make up Part II, provide copious illustrations of dynamic functionalism, followed by a brief introduction to time-series analysis.