Structural Functionalism

Theorists who analyze society as a system of interdependent parts, each contributing to the maintenance of social order and equilibrium, in the tradition established by Talcott Parsons's general theory of action and Robert K. Merton's account of manifest and latent functions. This group gathers the structural functionalists and the systems theorists and neofunctionalists who reworked their approach in later decades, distinguishing them from the conflict and interactionist theories that developed largely in reaction against this tradition's picture of society as a self-maintaining, integrated whole.