Examples of Functionalism

1. The Family

The family is a microcosm of society. Each member of the family has a specific role to play which contributes to the smooth functioning of society as a whole.

Radcliffe-Brown argued that most societies that lack centralized institutions are based on the association of people who are related to each other; families (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940).

Murdock claimed that the nuclear family performs four functions. Together, these benefit society by reducing the potential for chaos and conflict, producing relatively well-ordered, structured, and predictable societies.

1. Socialization: The family is the primary socializing agent for children. Parents teach their children the norms and values of society.
2. Economic stability: The family provides economic stability for its members. In many families, both parents work to earn an income.
3. Reproductive/Procreative: The nuclear family provides new members of society, without which society would cease to exist.
4. Sexual relationships: The family as an institution also regulates sexual behavior. Many societies, for example, have historically forbade sex outside the family-creating bond of marriage.

Marxists believe that the family is a tool of capitalism and its main function is to maintain capitalism and reinforce social inequalities.

According to Marx, the family also gives individuals property rights and allows for the assignment and maintenance of kinship order.

Emotional support: The family provides emotional support for its members. Family members can rely on each other for love and comfort in times of need (Parson, 1951).

Additionally, the family provides important ascribed statuses such as social class and ethnicity to new members, as well as replacing dying members through reproduction.

Learn more about the functions of the family

2. Education

Like families, schools function to socialize children with the values, norms, and beliefs of society.

They also teach them the skills and knowledge they need to perform their role in society. Sociologists contend that Education has several manifest functions (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009):

• Socialization: The education system socializes children to practice social roles. In fact, Durkheim called schools “socialization agencies that teach children how to get along with others and prepare them for adult economic roles” (Durkheim, 1898)
• Cultural Transmission: The education system transmits the dominant culture to children. It does this through teaching the history, language and literature of the majority group. In this way, children learn the dominant ideology (a set of shared beliefs and values) and become functioning members of society.
• Teaching Job-Related Skills: The education system teaches job-related skills, as well as determining who is able to pursue certain occupations. This is done through vocational training and professional qualifications.

For example, in order to become a doctor, one must first study medicine at university. This process is commonly called social placement: sorting people into future jobs based on their qualifications rather than their family background.

Education also fulfills various latent functions, such as providing children with exposure to social networks and teaching students to work with others in small groups (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009).

Learn more about the functions of education

3. Religion

One purpose of religion is to separate the sacred from the profane. The sacred is special: it comes from a higher power or supernatural being. The profane is simply ordinary, with no special meaning.

Religion provides comfort and hope in times of trouble, and helps people to deal with death. It also teaches people about right and wrong, and how they should behave towards each other.

All in all, religion is a conservative force that reinforces social norms and promotes social solidarity (Burhenn, 1980).

Religion has several functions:

• Social control: Religion teaches people about right and wrong behavior. This helps to maintain order and stability in society.
• Social cohesion: Religion brings people together and gives them a sense of community. This increases social cohesion and makes it less likely that people will engage in deviant behavior.
• Socialization: Religion socializes people into the norms and values of society. For example, many religions teach that it is important to be honest and truthful.
• Hope and comfort: Religion provides hope and comfort in times of trouble. For example, when people are sick or dying, religion offers them hope for a better life after death. Additionally, religious rituals such as funerals provide emotional support for grieving individuals (Malinowski, 1979)

These functions rest on a theory Durkheim developed in his last major work. He studied totemism among Australian Aboriginal groups, where a clan treats an animal or plant as its sacred emblem.

Durkheim (1915) reached a striking conclusion. The sacred/profane distinction, he argued, is universal to religion. What makes something sacred is not any property of the object itself.

It stands for something else instead. That something is the shared identity and values of the group that reveres it.

When people worship a totem, a deity, or a holy text, Durkheim argued, the true object of their reverence is society itself, expressed in symbolic form. This is why he treated religion as inseparable from ritual.

Collective religious gatherings generate a shared emotional intensity. This renews a group’s commitment to its own values.

Durkheim expected institutional religion’s hold on everyday life to weaken as societies modernised. He still expected its underlying function to persist in secular form. Later scholars called this civil religion: the quasi-religious ritual surrounding secular institutions such as the nation-state.

Sociologist Robert Bellah gave this idea its classic statement. He defined civil religion as a set of beliefs, rituals, and symbols that sanctifies a nation’s own values, independent of any single denomination (Bellah, 1967).

Civic ceremonies often borrow religious form. Swearing an oath on a sacred text at a political inauguration is one example.

A nation’s independence day works the same way. It becomes a secular “high holy day.”

Bellah argued that civil religion performs the same cohesion and legitimation functions Durkheim attributed to religion. It works at the level of the nation rather than the congregation, available in principle to citizens of every faith and none.

4. Government

According to the functionalist perspective, the government has four main manifest purposes (Domhoff, 2011):

• Planning and directing society:  The government makes decisions about how society should be run. They do this by making laws, setting taxes and creating policies.
• Meeting social needs: The government provides goods and services that benefit the entire community, such  as healthcare, education and infrastructure. In times of need, such as during a natural disaster, the government is also able to distribute resources across areas to minimize damage.
• Maintaining law and order: The government works to maintain social order by enforcing laws and maintaining a police force. Government representatives are also responsible for drafting and legislating laws that regulate what people can and cannot do within a society.
• Managing international relations: governments provide a structure for managing international relations between countries. They do this by maintaining diplomatic relations, signing treaties and participating in international organizations.

The government also has a number of latent functions, such as providing opportunities for social mobility and creating a sense of national identity (Domhoff, 2011).

Two rival models explain how these decisions actually get made in a democracy. The pluralist model holds that political power is spread across many competing interest groups, with no single group holding a monopoly (Dahl, 1961). Policy is the result of ongoing bargaining.

Most functionalists favour this view: it lets a complex society resolve competing demands without collapsing into conflict. A rival power elite model argues instead that a single, interconnected elite actually makes the decisions that matter.

This elite is drawn from the top of the corporate, military, and political hierarchies, while open competition among interest groups is largely appearance (Mills, 1956).

5. Healthcare

In the view of functionalism, good health and effective health care are essential for a society’s ability to function. The physician and patient have a hierarchical relationship: the physician is the expert, the patient is the client.

The physician’s role is to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. The patient’s role is to follow orders and cooperate in treatment. Trust between the two is essential (University of Minnesota, 2022).

Talcott Parsons (1951) was one of the leading thinkers in functionalism. He saw healthcare’s main objective as preventing premature death.

Death would stop individuals carrying out their social roles after society has already invested heavily in raising and socialising them.

The Sick Role: Rights and Obligations

Parsons (1951) set out the sick role as a package of two rights and two obligations. Illness itself is treated as a sanctioned, temporary form of deviance from normal social duties.

The sick role carries two rights. Exemption from blame is one, and exemption from ordinary obligations such as work or school is the other. Two obligations balance these: the person must want to get well. They must also seek competent medical help and cooperate with treatment.

Crucially, the whole arrangement depends on legitimation. Exemption is only granted once a physician certifies the illness is genuine. This gives doctors their distinctive social position as gatekeepers.

Parsons’s reasoning here was functional, not moral. Left unchecked, sickness would weaken society by pulling people out of their productive roles.

Some mechanism of social control is needed to contain it — the sick role, policed by medicine — and to return the sick to normal functioning quickly.

Refining the Sick Role: Freidson and Goffman

Parsons’s single sick role does not travel equally well across every illness. Eliot Freidson (1970) identified three versions of it instead, tied to how “recoverable” an illness is seen to be.

The conditional role applies to a temporary, curable condition. The unconditionally legitimate role applies to an incurable condition such as cancer. Here, reduced duties are granted without needing to prove recovery is underway.

The illegitimate role applies to a condition that carries social stigma, such as alcoholism. Others suspect the sick person bears some responsibility. Their rights are reduced as a result.

This connects to stigma: the devaluation a person experiences when an attribute they carry departs from what others expect. It disqualifies them from full acceptance, regardless of the medical facts (Goffman, 1963). A stigmatised patient may have their own account of their symptoms discounted by medical staff.

Health care also has latent functions. It provides employment and stimulates economic activity. Building hospitals and clinics creates jobs for builders, engineers, and architects, and the purchase of medical supplies boosts the businesses that produce them.

6. Crime

Functionalists believe that crime is inevitable and even beneficial for society.  On the other hand, uncontrolled crime can bring about the collapse of society.

Hence, functionalists argue that institutions of social control are necessary to keep levels of crime at a functional level.

Socialization is not always successful. Some people do not learn the correct values and norms, or they may learn them but choose to defy them. In either case, these individuals are more likely to engage in deviant and criminal behavior.

This holds even in a fully “well-socialized” society. Sociologists argue the standard for crime would simply adjust, so the smallest slip becomes a serious offense (Downes et al., 2016).

Crime performs several important functions.

• Firstly, it can be a form of social cohesion. For example, when two gangs are fighting over turf, they are actually reaffirming the existence of their group and their territory.
• Secondly, crime can act as a safety valve, allowing people to release their frustrations in a non-destructive way. For example, when two young men get into a fistfight, they are releasing their aggression in a way that does not involve serious harm to the people who are not fighting (Downes et al., 2016).
• Thirdly, crime can serve as a form of social change. For example, when civil rights activists engage in sit-ins and protests, they are breaking the law but they are also bringing about social change.

Durkheim offered a further account of why crime persists. Societies grow larger and more anonymous over time. The close, face-to-face pressure that regulates a small community can no longer do the job alone.

So societies develop formal, written laws instead. These laws mark the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour for everyone, not just people who know each other personally.

Because laws are public, breaking them is a highly visible event. Durkheim argued that this visibility is itself functional. Publicised trials and punishment draw the law-abiding majority together in shared disapproval, reaffirming the boundary between right and wrong.

Key study: Erikson (1966) and the Salem witch trials. The most sustained empirical test of this boundary-maintenance idea comes from a historical study of colonial Massachusetts. It was carried out by the sociologist Kai Erikson.

• Aim: to test Durkheim’s claim that punishing deviance helps maintain a community’s moral boundaries, using historical records from a real community.
• Method: a historical analysis of Puritan Massachusetts Bay across three seventeenth-century “crime waves”: the Antinomian controversy, the Quaker persecutions, and the Salem witch trials, comparing the deviance targeted and the rate of prosecutions in each.
• Results: although what counted as deviant changed dramatically across the three episodes, the overall volume of people punished stayed roughly constant, as though the community needed a stable “supply” of deviant cases regardless of what they were about.
• Conclusion: the community’s reaction to deviance, not the deviant act itself, does the boundary-maintaining work Durkheim described, especially at moments when the community’s own identity is under strain (Erikson, 1966).

Erikson studied one small, unusually religious community. His evidence cannot show how far this pattern generalises to large, secular, modern societies.

Even so, its “constant quota of deviance” finding has been highly influential in the sociology of deviance ever since.

A different functionalist account of crime asks a different question. Robert K. Merton’s strain theory asks not what function crime serves for society, but why some individuals turn to it. It traces deviance to a mismatch between a society’s approved goals and the legitimate means of reaching them.

7. Media

The mass media includes television, social media, movies, books, etc. Its functions include:

• Entertainment: Firstly, media often has entertainment value, and people who consume media often say that they enjoy it. This entertainment can come in manifold forms, ranging from online gaming to meeting new friends and scrolling through aesthetically-pleasing photos (Anderson & Meyer, 1975).
• Commercial functions: The media provides a way for businesses to advertise their products and services. This is done through paid advertisements, which are typically broadcast during prime-time hours when there is a large audience. Sponsors can use data gathered by network and cable companies to target their advertising to the people most likely to watch a certain programme (Anderson & Meyer, 1975).
• Socialization: The media socializes individuals into the norms and values of society. For example, television programs often depict families that are traditional in nature, with the father working and the mother staying at home to care for the children. This teaches viewers that this is the ideal family structure.

There is controversy over the extent and impact of media socialization (Bushman & Anderson, 2002), especially when it leads to dysfunctional behaviors, such as violence.

Psychologists have alternatingly argued that violent media does and does not provoke physical and relational aggression (Krahé et al., 2011; Mathieson et al., 2011).

• Information: The media provides individuals with information about current events happening both locally and internationally. For example, news programs report on stories such as natural disasters, political unrest, or new scientific discoveries (Anderson & Meyer, 1975).

8. Sport

Sport promotes common values essential to the integration of society. It also socialises children by teaching them life skills such as teamwork and fair play.

Sport can build national pride, too. When a country’s team does well in international competition, citizens often feel a shared sense of pride and unity. It also generates revenue for businesses, through ticket sales, merchandise, and television contracts (Loy & Booth, 2000).

Eitzen and Sage’s Four Functions of Sport

Eitzen and Sage (1997) give the fullest functionalist statement of what sport is said to do for society, organised around four specific benefits.

• Teaches values: competitive sport is credited with raising achievement motivation, a trait prized in a modern, productivity-driven economy.
• Builds identity: supporting a shared local or national team binds otherwise unconnected people together; a stadium full of strangers can feel like one community for the length of a match.
• Releases tension: shouting and cheering at a match is acceptable in a way that expressing the same frustration at a teacher or employer is not — a safety valve, the same logic already noted for crime.
• Builds character: the discipline and self-sacrifice competitive sport demands is said to carry over into an athlete’s broader values.

Eitzen’s Paradoxes of Sport

Eitzen (1999) argued that each of these benefits is shadowed by a genuine paradox. It cuts both ways. Sport can unite classes and ethnic groups around a shared team, yet it can equally harden rival fan identities into open hostility.

Sport is said to teach fair play. Yet the same emphasis on winning creates strong incentives to cheat, through doping, foul play, or rule-bending.

At the professional level, this sometimes formalises deliberate violence through the informal role of “enforcer.”

Sport builds physical fitness. Yet elite competitive sport is also a major source of performance-enhancing drug use and serious injury. It opens pathways to education through athletic scholarships, too, yet only a small fraction of participants ever convert athletic promise into real reward.

9. Culture

Functionalists view culture as a reflection of societal values. It provides cohesion between institutions and practices, behaving as an interrelated whole rather than a collection of isolated traits. Notions of culture help people navigate both norms and everyday interactions.

Culture and Values

Membership in a culture, subculture, or counterculture brings camaraderie and social cohesion.

It benefits the larger society by giving people who share similar ideas a place to belong (White, 1945).

Functionalists study culture in terms of values. The culture of healthcare across much of the world, including material resources such as hospitals, staff, and equipment, is organized around efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

This reflects the fact that most societies have limited resources.

In other cultures, healthcare may instead be organized around individualized care, reflecting a higher value placed on the individual than on efficiency (White, 1945).

Cultural Universals

Anthropologist George Murdock developed this idea in the same research programme that produced his account of family functions. He called them cultural universals. These are specific institutions or customs that recur in every known society, despite wide variation in how each society actually carries them out (Murdock, 1945).

Alongside the family itself, Murdock’s list includes funeral rites, marriage ceremonies, a system of personal naming, and a shared language.

Humour makes the list too. He treated joking as a near-universal way of releasing social tension and building a sense of belonging.

The claim is not that every society organizes these institutions identically. It is that every known society has needed some institutionalized way of handling the same small set of recurring human problems.

Key Takeaways

• Functionalism: every social institution serves a purpose in building the whole of society, mainly through socialisation, social control, and social placement.
• Nine institutions: this article surveys the family, education, religion, government, healthcare, crime, media, sport, and culture through this lens.
• Sick role: Parsons’s model gives illness a package of rights and obligations, later refined by Freidson and Goffman to account for stigma and chronic illness.
• Boundary maintenance: Durkheim and Erikson both argue that punishing deviance reaffirms a community’s shared moral boundaries, regardless of what gets labelled deviant.
• Modern evidence: 2015+ research on YouTube and civil religion finds functionalism’s categories still useful, but reality is more fragmented than mid-century theory assumed.
• Main critique: functionalist explanation can run backwards, explaining an institution’s existence by the benefits it happens to produce — a teleological problem critics say risks becoming unfalsifiable.