The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (104 page)
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Authors: Iain McLean
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front-bencher
Front National
front organization
A body not officially sponsored by a Communist party but actually controlled by it. The term was coined during the hysteria which led to
McCarthyism
in the United States. Front organizations have certainly existed, although there have never been as many of them as Senator McCarthy and his equivalents in other countries believed.
McCarthyism
in the United States. Front organizations have certainly existed, although there have never been as many of them as Senator McCarthy and his equivalents in other countries believed.
functionalism
The doctrine that societies or social systems have ‘needs’ and that we can explain institutions and practices in terms of the ‘functions’ they perform for the survival of the whole. Functionalist explanation is prevalent in all traditions in social science and there is no single school of modern functionalism. However, it is characteristic for functionalist accounts to draw analogies between the biological organism and the social system, to view societies as made up of component parts whose interrelation contributes to the maintenance of the whole, and to focus on the problem of order specifying forces that bring cohesion, integration, and equilibrium to society.
The origins of modern functionalism can be traced to
Comte
. Comte maintained that all of the institutions, beliefs, and morals of a society are interrelated as a whole, and so the method of explaining the existence of any one item is to discover the law which governs the coexistence of all phenomena. Through the work of
Durkheim
this approach was developed and appropriated by the social anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski who was the first to coin the term after he had carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Australian aborigines and later Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski sought to explain the existence of institutions and practices in terms of the needs or functional requisites which had to be met to maintain society (religious rituals are functional for social adaptation). The anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown further developed this approach under the title
structural functionalism
.
Normative functionalists, strongly influenced by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons , hold that there is a central value system in every society and stress the importance of
political socialization
which teaches appropriate normative expectations and regulates the potential conflict which is inherent in situations of scarce resources. This view has been particularly influential in American political science, enabling theorists to posit a number of system functions (socialization, political recruitment, political communication) through which political systems are maintained and adapt to change. General functionalism (with its distinction between ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ functions) and General Systems Theory (with its cybernetic analysis of positive and negative feedback loops) are more recent attempts to develop the insights of functionalism whilst rejecting both the ‘oversocialized concept of man’ characteristic of normative functionalism and the teleology implicit in early functionalist explanation.
A number of objections have been raised to functionalist explanation in social science. Most decisively it has been argued that all functionalist accounts rely on teleological explanation. To explain an event teleologically is to account for its occurrence on the grounds that it contributes to a goal or end-state and that this goal is sought or maintained by the system in which the event takes place. Explaining an event by showing that it has beneficial consequences for another is to treat an effect as a cause. To argue that the state exists to meet certain functions necessary for maintenance of capitalism, is to use a consequence to explain a cause. This both defies orthodox logic and is clearly ahistorical. In addition, functionalist accounts have been criticized for lacking adequate accounts of human action ( see
structuration
), for failing to account for social change and for introducing a conservative bias into methodology since every element in the ‘status quo’ becomes functional simply because it is present. Whilst functionalist accounts contain useful injunctions for political scientists—to look for relationships between institutions and social practices—functionalist methodology has come under increasing attack as its basic assumption that ‘societies have needs’ cannot be demonstrated.
PBm
The origins of modern functionalism can be traced to
Comte
. Comte maintained that all of the institutions, beliefs, and morals of a society are interrelated as a whole, and so the method of explaining the existence of any one item is to discover the law which governs the coexistence of all phenomena. Through the work of
Durkheim
this approach was developed and appropriated by the social anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski who was the first to coin the term after he had carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Australian aborigines and later Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski sought to explain the existence of institutions and practices in terms of the needs or functional requisites which had to be met to maintain society (religious rituals are functional for social adaptation). The anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown further developed this approach under the title
structural functionalism
.
Normative functionalists, strongly influenced by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons , hold that there is a central value system in every society and stress the importance of
political socialization
which teaches appropriate normative expectations and regulates the potential conflict which is inherent in situations of scarce resources. This view has been particularly influential in American political science, enabling theorists to posit a number of system functions (socialization, political recruitment, political communication) through which political systems are maintained and adapt to change. General functionalism (with its distinction between ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ functions) and General Systems Theory (with its cybernetic analysis of positive and negative feedback loops) are more recent attempts to develop the insights of functionalism whilst rejecting both the ‘oversocialized concept of man’ characteristic of normative functionalism and the teleology implicit in early functionalist explanation.
A number of objections have been raised to functionalist explanation in social science. Most decisively it has been argued that all functionalist accounts rely on teleological explanation. To explain an event teleologically is to account for its occurrence on the grounds that it contributes to a goal or end-state and that this goal is sought or maintained by the system in which the event takes place. Explaining an event by showing that it has beneficial consequences for another is to treat an effect as a cause. To argue that the state exists to meet certain functions necessary for maintenance of capitalism, is to use a consequence to explain a cause. This both defies orthodox logic and is clearly ahistorical. In addition, functionalist accounts have been criticized for lacking adequate accounts of human action ( see
structuration
), for failing to account for social change and for introducing a conservative bias into methodology since every element in the ‘status quo’ becomes functional simply because it is present. Whilst functionalist accounts contain useful injunctions for political scientists—to look for relationships between institutions and social practices—functionalist methodology has come under increasing attack as its basic assumption that ‘societies have needs’ cannot be demonstrated.
PBm
fundamentalism, Christian
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