Functionalism Vs American Sociology

For the majority of the the twentieth century, the concept of functionalism mainly characterized American Sociology. Which was basically were studies avoided grand theory and gathered most thoughts through the collection of observations of people in their environments. Functionalism is a macro-sociology and it focuses on the large theories of society. It’s name came from the idea that the most effective way to examine society was to identify the roles that different characteristics take apart in. It is essentially it is a more in-depth version of a theory called organicism which compares society to a living organism, with each (cell, tissue, organ system) playing an important tole in keeping the organism (society) alive.

Where as functionalism illustrates a picture of social harmony as the individual parts work together with errors here and there, the conflict theory views society in

This refrained from the big theories of sociology such as macro-sociology and in return honed in on how face-to-face interactions create the social world which is thought as micro-sociology. This was shown best by the work of Herbert Blumer, one of George Herbert Mead’s students, basically displaying the notion that people act in response to the meaning that signs and social signals hold for them. An simple example of this is a red light means stop. It seems that our actions are based off of our own inner thought rather than being formed by others, but in reality we are stirred by the perceptions of the social world. The basis for symbolic interactionism was founded by Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of social interaction. Everyday people make judgments toward class and social status based on factors such as how one speaks, dresses, and many other little details on how they present themselves but at the same exact time they use the same criteria to judge or interactions in order to classify