Igloo Talk

[Heather]

Hey Frits, sorry it took me so long to get this up.

Before I start, I should note that I'll be disucssing these in the most basic forms. They both have influenced societies and different disciplines in so many ways that I could not convey them all here. But for those who are interested in these subjects, I encourage you to learn about them.

Structural Functionalism (Emile Durkheim)
• Sees society much like an organic entity where institutions (families, schools, governments, organizations, churches etc) within society are interdependent and if one of them falls apart, it will have an effect on the rest of the institutions.

• Structural functionalism can be coercive (force people through policies & legislation for example) to adopt certain values and get them to behave in a certain way.

• For example, if you remove family from the picture, you remove the replacement personnel that society needs in order to function: (think abortion laws) birth of children are needed to attend school so that they can operate various institutions in society.

• If you remove schools, it will have an effect on those institutions, etc. etc.

• These institutions exist outside of the individuals. For example, if I were to die, they would still be there and while I am still here, they exert their influence. They create the expected norms and behaviours.

• It also creates division of labour between men & women. For example: men go off to work in the institutions (get paid), women stay home and prepare the kids to enter those institutions in society (unpaid).

• It creates a class system. Imagine a ladder (going from top down), the resource owners are at the top, then you have the legislators, workers, and of course those who are at the bottom: usually people who had traditional forms of living or those who were employed but fell to the bottom due to economic recession etc.

• Methods used for studying structural functionalism come from the positivist paradigm (the belief that there are natural laws making things happen) and the use of objectivity (to avoid imposing our own ideas and emotions on to what we are studying).


I will get into Symbolic Interactionism (Weber) a little later if that is okay.
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"It is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together." -Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592).