Perspectives in sociology: functionalist, conflict, interactionist and feminist

1. The functionalist perspective

Functionalism sees society as a system of interrelated parts, each of which performs a function that helps the whole survive, much as the organs of a body do. Its central question is: how is social order maintained?

• Herbert Spencer — the organic analogy: society, like an organism, grows, becomes more complex and differentiates its parts.
• Émile Durkheim — social facts, collective conscience, and the move from mechanical to organic solidarity (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893). Even crime is “normal”: punishing it reaffirms shared values.
• Talcott Parsons — every social system must meet four functional prerequisites (AGIL): adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency (pattern maintenance). Society tends towards equilibrium, held together by shared values.
• Robert K. Merton — refined the approach in Social Theory and Social Structure (1949): manifest functions (intended and recognised), latent functions (unintended), and dysfunctions (consequences that harm the system).

Example. The manifest function of education is to impart knowledge; a latent function is to provide a marriage market and to keep young people out of the labour market.

Criticism. It overstates consensus and stability, cannot easily explain conflict and change, tends to justify the status quo (if an institution exists, it must be useful), and attributes purposes to society rather than to people.

2. The conflict perspective

The conflict perspective sees society as an arena of inequality and struggle between groups over scarce resources — wealth, power and prestige. Order rests on domination, not consensus, and conflict is the source of change.

• Karl Marx — history is the history of class struggle (The Communist Manifesto, 1848, with Engels). The economic base (forces and relations of production) shapes the superstructure (law, religion, state, ideas). Under capitalism the bourgeoisie owning the means of production exploits the proletariat, whose labour creates surplus value. Workers suffer alienation; ideology produces false consciousness; class consciousness leads to revolution and a classless society.
• Max Weber — inequality has three dimensions: class (economic), status (social honour) and party (power).
• Ralf Dahrendorf — in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) moved conflict from property to authority: in every association some command and others obey.
• Lewis Coser — The Functions of Social Conflict (1956): conflict can strengthen group unity and lead to useful change.
• C. Wright Mills — The Power Elite (1956): a small elite of corporate, military and political leaders controls American society.

Criticism. It neglects the consensus and co-operation that actually exist, reduces too much to economics (in Marx’s version), and its prediction of proletarian revolution in advanced capitalist societies did not come true.

3. The interactionist perspective

Functionalism and conflict theory are macro theories about whole societies. Symbolic interactionism is a micro theory: society is built up from everyday interaction in which people act on the meanings they give to things, meanings formed through symbols, above all language.

• George Herbert Mead — the self develops through social interaction; the I (spontaneous self) and the me (the internalised attitudes of others); taking the role of the generalised other (Mind, Self and Society, 1934).
• Charles Horton Cooley — the looking-glass self: we see ourselves as we imagine others see us.
• Herbert Blumer — coined the term “symbolic interactionism” (1937).
• Erving Goffman — the dramaturgical approach in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956): people perform roles on a “front stage” and relax “backstage”.
• W.I. Thomas — the Thomas theorem: if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Criticism. It ignores large structures — class, power, the economy — that shape interaction, and its findings are hard to generalise.

4. The feminist perspective

Feminist sociology argues that mainstream sociology was written by men about men, and that gender is a basic dimension of social inequality. Its central concept is patriarchy: a system in which men dominate women in the family, work, politics and culture. Ann Oakley (Sex, Gender and Society, 1972) distinguished sex (biological) from gender (socially constructed roles).

• Liberal feminism — inequality comes from prejudice and unequal laws; remedy by reform, education and equal rights. Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963).
• Marxist or socialist feminism — women’s oppression is tied to capitalism; unpaid domestic labour reproduces the workforce free of cost.
• Radical feminism — patriarchy is the oldest and deepest form of domination, rooted in the family and sexuality. Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970), Shulamith Firestone.
• Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
• Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989) — gender combines with race, class and, in India, caste. Dalit feminists stress that upper-caste and Dalit women do not experience patriarchy alike.

Criticism. Critics say it can treat women as a single group, and that radical versions overstate male domination. The variety of feminisms is itself a response to these objections.

5. One fact, four readings

How this is examined

The question names two perspectives; give each its own head with meaning, chief thinkers, key concepts, an example and criticism, then a short comparison. “Conflict perspective” as a short note (January 2026, 100-mark paper) needs Marx, Dahrendorf and Coser in compressed form. Interactionism has not been set as a long question recently but makes a ready short note.