A recurring critique of structural functionalism, sharpened by conflict theorists in the 1960s, holds "it contains no sense of agency, that individuals are seen as puppets, acting as their role requires," alongside the related charge that the framework "was unable to account for social change, or for structural contradictions and conflict." Sociologist John Holmwood has countered that a sophisticated functionalism already relies on "a highly developed concept of action," so the disagreement may turn on how developed a given functionalist account is rather than on a flaw built into the paradigm itself. This is the same structure-versus-agency tension debated across sociology more broadly (compare Pierre Bourdieu's habitus, minted by an earlier society wave), applied here to functionalism's own founding claim.
What would resolve this A settled account of how much independent action a functionalist model can accommodate before it stops being distinctively functionalist, rather than shading into an agency-centered theory such as symbolic interactionism under a different name.
OpenSociological theory, specifically the structure-and-agency debateWikipedia: Structural Functionalism