Yet despite these differences of region, religion and race, society functions without visible disintegration. A town like Bedford (population 95,000) can be described as a "melting pot".
4. Homogenity of a society The question must be asked do Parsons' views apply only in relatively homogeneous societies, e.g. Mid West U.S.A. both at the time when he was writing and in the present day or pre-1950 Britain, but not in heterogeneous ones (like Britain in today).
If so Parsons is not universal and his views cannot be applied to all social systems.
Summary
Functionalist sociologists view Culture as
1. a shared experience, common to most (if not all) members of a society.
2. based on language as symbolic of that common heritage.
3. largely uniform in a single society.
Criticisms of Functionalist view
1. Functionalism stems from its known time span, which is co-incident with the height of mass production as the dominant technological culture. Life for most inhabitants of the U.S.A. or Britain in 1930s to late 1950s was extremely uniform and drab. There was little in the way of consumer choice.
2. Society is now more fluid and less uniform; the idea of a common culture is less widely held. There are a plurality of cultures within any given society in C21.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Haralambos and M. Holborn, Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, 5th edn., 2000,
pages 886-889
M. Haralambos and M. Holborn, Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, 6th edn., 2004,
pages 793-795 (omits discussion of Parsons)
M. Slattery, Key Ideas in Sociology, 2003, pages 190-194,
'Structural Functionalism - Talcott Parsons'.
DAVID H. KENNETT
October 2001, revised September 2006
[DHK, code he6cult1]
