Does structural-functionalist theory leave genuine room for individual agency, or does its picture of society as a self-regulating system reduce people to actors simply executing the roles their position assigns them?

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.