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Functionalism and Socialisation: A Developing Tradition?

THE ideas implicit in the word ’functionalism’ are various, but one common strand would seem to be the idea that in trying to understand any social phenomenon, for example a behaviour pattern, the emphasis should be on the way in which it keeps the social system going. This stress has a number of implications of a general nature that are relevant for all sociological analysis, but there are also implications of particular relevance to the study of socialisation. First, the general implications will be considered. Since a functionalist type of analysis stresses relationships within the social structure, immediately attention must be given to the nature of the social structure, to the parts relevant to the problem under consideration, and to the interrelationships between the various parts of the social structure. Such analyses tend to be carried out at the societal level by concentrating on institutions, and at lower levels by emphasising the concept of position and the role expectations attached to particular positions. Usually the image generated by this analytical attack tends to be of a social system, in stable, rather than unstable, equilibrium, in which there is fairly general agreement on behavioural expectations and in which the parts of the system under consideration are well integrated. The ultimate aim of this paper is to construct