Functionalism and Symbolic Interactionism

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Why is a rain ceremony that brings no rain still performed?

An outsider can easily dismiss the Hopi rain ceremonies as “superstition”. In 1949, in the first edition of Social Theory and Social Structure, Robert K. Merton takes aim at exactly this reflex: calling something “superstition” is not an explanation, it is sticking on a label. Meteorologists agree that the ceremony does not produce rain. But for Merton the question does not end there, because a practice’s stated purpose and its actual consequences need not be the same thing.

Merton asks a different question of the ceremony: what does it do for those who perform it, and for the community? A candidate answer: by regularly bringing scattered people together in a common activity it may strengthen the group’s identity. This is a functionalist question: it tries to understand a phenomenon through its contribution to the continuation of the whole.

Now ask the same ceremony one more thing: what does it mean to the participants? Which gesture, which word produces the feeling “we are calling the rain”, and how do children learn it, and from whom? That is an interactionist question: it looks at how meaning is built between people. (This second question is not Merton’s; we added it to put the two views side by side.)

This lesson introduces the two questions to each other. Both will come knocking when we study media.

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Why does media theory start with sociology?

When you read a communication theory you meet two kinds of question. The first: what job does the media do for society? The second: what do people do when they meet the media, and what meaning do they give it?

The first question comes from the functionalist tradition. In 1948 Harold Lasswell said that communication does three jobs in society: surveying the environment, correlating the parts of society in their response to it, and transmitting the heritage. (More in the concept the three social functions of communication.) In the same collected volume there was a chapter signed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton that carried Merton’s language of “function” and “dysfunction” over to the media.

The second question comes from the interactionist tradition. In 1933, in his research on the movies, Herbert Blumer asked people to write about their experiences of the cinema in their own words: he looked for meaning in people’s own accounts.

So when you talk today about “the functions of the media” or “media and identity”, you are continuing two sociological inheritances. This lesson introduces that inheritance; the lessons Functions of the Media and The Social Construction of Reality will continue from these two veins.

From here on you can test every concept with two questions: what does it add to the system? and what does it mean, and to whom?

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Who is who? Six names, two wings

First a look at the cast. (W. I. Thomas will also turn up in passing; he belongs to another lesson.)

The functionalist wing - Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), Harvard. The great theorist who built society as a system; The Structure of Social Action (1937) and The Social System (1951). - Robert K. Merton (1910–2003), Columbia. Studied under Parsons at Harvard; brought functionalism closer to testable research and drew the manifest/latent distinction in Social Theory and Social Structure (1949); he is also the person behind the middle-range theory idea you met in the previous lesson (What Is a Theory? Paradigms and Classifications).

The interactionist wing - Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), Michigan. The “looking-glass self.” - George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), Chicago. The self, the “I” and the “me”, the generalized other. - Herbert Blumer (1900–1987). The person who named “symbolic interactionism” in 1937. - Erving Goffman (1922–1982). Analysed everyday life in the language of the stage.

Look at the calendar: Cooley’s book came out in 1902, Mead’s compilation in 1934, Parsons’s first major book in 1937. Both traditions took book form in the first half of the same century; in the coming sections you will see how they parted.

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Mead’s masterpiece was not written by Mead

The book that carries the name of the man who changed social psychology did not actually come from his hand. When Mead died in 1931 he had published many papers but had not gathered his thinking in one long book; the book’s editor, Charles W. Morris, says so plainly in the preface.

Mead’s thinking lived in the classroom, and he lectured without notes. A student, George Anagnos, sensed the value of these lectures; with the means provided by Alvin Carus, stenographers were hired and the lectures were taken down word for word.

Mind, Self, and Society (1934) was compiled from these records: the stenographic record of the 1927 course was taken as the base; student notes from 1930, the last year the course was given in its complete form, and selections from unpublished manuscripts were added; repetitions were pruned, the style corrected, and the headings supplied by the editor. Morris’s own assessment is that this is not a court record, but one of the most faithful records left of a great thinker’s last years.

What this teaches: when you see “Mead says”, you are often reading an edited student record. That does not invalidate his ideas; it just shows that you need to know how far to trust the source.

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Two views, two questions

Put the two claims side by side: structural functionalism and symbolic interactionism.

Structural functionalism sees society as a system made of interdependent parts. To understand an institution or a habit, it asks: what does it contribute to the system’s continuation? Its main question is how social order is achieved. This is a macro view: it looks at social systems and institutional structures.

Symbolic interactionism sees society as a process arising from people’s actions toward one another, the meanings they share and the continual interpretation of those meanings. Encyclopedia entries classify it as a micro-level orientation, one that focuses on interpersonal and interactional processes.

Applied to media: the first asks “what does the media add to society’s order?”; the second “what do people do when they meet the media, and what do they take it to be?”. Imagine the evening news: to a functionalist eye it is “a habit that brings society together around a common agenda”, to an interactionist eye “the half hour that fills the silence between me and my father”. Both are correct but different readings of the same scene. Neither view is right and the other wrong: which question you ask decides which detail of the scene you will see.

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AGIL: four exams for a system

According to Parsons, a social system must meet four functional requirements to persist. Their initials give the name of the AGIL scheme: AGIL.

• A – Adaptation: securing resources from the environment and adjusting to changing conditions.
• G – Goal attainment: setting goals and directing resources toward them.
• I – Integration: keeping the parts in harmony and regulating conflict.
• L – Latency (pattern maintenance): preserving values and motivation and passing them on across generations; institutions like the family and the school come in here.

At the level of society, the adaptation job is likened to the economy and the goal-attainment job to politics. The scheme took shape in the 1950s; it reached its detailed form in 1956.

Imagine (our own example, not Parsons’s): a small local newspaper. Advertising and subscription income keeps it alive (A). Circulation and news targets give it direction (G). Editor and reporter agreeing on the rules holds it together (I). Passing the paper’s principles on to newcomers makes it “the same paper” (L). AGIL is a ready-made checklist for asking what an institution is for.

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Merton’s fine-tuning: function, dysfunction, manifest and latent

Merton tidied up functionalism’s conceptual toolkit in 1949; the first chapter of his book is devoted to exactly this. Four terms are enough:

• Function: observed consequences that contribute to a system’s adjustment.
• Dysfunction: consequences that lessen the same system’s adjustment.
• Manifest function: functional consequences that were intended.
• Latent function: functional consequences that were unintended and unrecognised.

(Some Turkish sources say “gizli” instead of “gizil” for “latent”. Concept pages: manifest and latent functions, dysfunction.) There can also be consequences that are neither functional nor dysfunctional, simply irrelevant to the system.

Two points to watch. First, you cannot call consequences functional or dysfunctional without asking “for which unit?”: an item may be functional for one section and dysfunctional for another; Merton stresses that a cultural item usually has both kinds of consequence. Second, “latent” does not mean a secret plot: it only means nobody intended or noticed it.

The appeal of the latent function is this: before you stamp “stupidity” on an apparently “absurd” habit, it makes you stop and ask: the stated aim may not be met, but what else does it do?

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The looking-glass self: you in someone else’s mind

In 1902 Charles Horton Cooley describes a shame we all know: we are ashamed to seem evasive before a straightforward man, cowardly before a brave one, coarse in the eyes of a refined one. A man will boast to one person of a sharp piece of business and be ashamed to own to it before another. The same behaviour feels different depending on who is in front of you: pride and shame are not only inside you, they sit where you imagine the other person has put you in their mind.

Cooley calls this the “looking-glass self” and names three elements: (1) imagining how our appearance looks to the other person, (2) imagining that person’s judgment of that appearance, (3) a self-feeling such as pride or mortification. The key is the second: Cooley writes that the mirror comparison hardly suggests this element, though the imagined judgment is essential. What moves us is not the reflection itself but the feeling we assume goes on in the other’s mind in response to it.

So the looking-glass self is not only about “how you appear” but about “how you think you appear”: you can be wrong. (The idea that being wrong can have real consequences is our own link; you will meet it in a moment in Thomas’s sentence.)

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From play to team to society: the generalized other

Mead describes how a child builds the self in two stages. The first stage is play: the child becomes mother, teacher or police officer, moving from one role to another as the whim takes them. They take the standpoint of one particular other at a time.

The second stage is the game, and Mead’s example is the baseball team: the child in the team has to carry the responses of every position within their own position; they keep in mind both the one who will throw the ball and the one who will catch it, and these roles are tied to each other in a definite relationship. The question is no longer “what will that person say to me?” but “what does the team as a whole expect?”.

Mead calls the standpoint of this organised whole the “generalized other”: the organised community or social group that gives the individual their unity of self. On Mead’s account society influences an individual’s behaviour and thinking in this form; even in abstract thought a person takes the attitude of the generalized other.

A check on your own life (our example): when you ask “what will people say if I do this?”, who exactly are those “people”?

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“I” and “me”: the self as both order and surprise

For Mead the self has two faces. The “me” is the organised set of others’ attitudes that a person takes on: the part of you that knows what your teammates expect. The “I” is the response to those attitudes. (Mead puts the distinction not as a metaphysical split but as a functional distinction within conduct.)

The baseball example helps again: the player knows what the team expects (the “me”). But exactly what they will do on the field neither they nor anyone else knows: perhaps a brilliant play, perhaps an error. That uncertain response is the “I”. Mead also writes that the “I” is hard to catch: when we turn to look at ourselves we see a “me”; the “I” appears after the act, in memory, as “the me of a second ago”. That is why, in Mead’s words, we can surprise ourselves by our own action.

Why does it matter? The “me” is where social order enters the self; the “I” is the source of spontaneity and novelty. Recall the tension from the first section: the functionalist view puts order first, the interactionist view puts being rebuilt first. Mead’s self keeps both inside one person.

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If people define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences

In 1928 William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas report a startling incident in The Child in America. The warden of Dannemora prison had refused to obey a court order to send an inmate outside the walls, on the ground that the man was too dangerous. The man had killed several people who had the habit of talking to themselves on the street: from the movement of their lips he imagined they were calling him names, and behaved accordingly. (The authors tell the incident anonymously; we rely only on the book’s account.)

The insults were not real. But for the man they were, and the consequences were terribly real. In the same passage of the book comes the sentence: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

This is called the “definition of the situation”: people respond not only to the objective features of a situation but to the meaning it has for them. In his 1949 book Merton refers to the sentence as the “Thomas theorem” and counts it among the basic propositions of the social sciences. For the interactionist tradition it is a key idea: meaning does not sit ready-made in the situation; it comes from how people define it.

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Goffman: is life a stage? (Briefly)

Erving Goffman, drawing on his field research in the Shetland Islands, analysed everyday encounters in the language of theatre. The result was The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: first a 1956 monograph published in Edinburgh, then in 1959 Doubleday’s American edition.

The basic idea: people present themselves to others and manage the impression they leave. The presentation is given on the “front stage”, where the official definitions are shown; on the “back stage” the impression is prepared and the everyday dirty work of the show is hidden. According to Goffman, gaining information about the person in front of you helps you define the situation: we look for clues to what we can expect from whom. (Notice the kinship with Thomas’s “definition of the situation”?)

In this lesson we take Goffman only as a bridge: he brings Mead’s “the self is built in others’ eyes” down to observable behaviour (gesture, clothing, setting). He is associated with interactionism, but Goffman kept his distance from binding himself to a school. Dramaturgy is a metaphor: it does not say life is theatre, only that the vocabulary of theatre helps us understand everyday life.

Step by step

Blumer’s three premises: where does meaning live?

In 1969, in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, Blumer reduced symbolic interactionism to three premises. In our own words:

1. People act toward things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them. A “thing” may be an object (a phone), a person (a teacher) or a situation (an exam).
2. These meanings arise from interaction with others. Meaning does not sit ready-made in the object; it comes out of what people say to each other about the thing and how they behave toward it.
3. Meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process. In dealing with what they meet, a person uses the meaning but at the same time reinterprets it.

Imagine a group of teenagers watching the trailer of a new series. By the first premise, the one who says “weird” and the one who says “just my thing” will act differently. By the second, these judgments take shape in talk among friends. By the third, when the second episode comes out, the judgments may change.

Beneath these three premises lies an assumption: to understand society you have to look at what people interpret before they act.

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Functionalism’s quiet assumptions (and Merton’s objection)

In 1949 Merton says that most functional analyses (chiefly in anthropology) rested on three interconnected assumptions, and he finds them “debatable and unnecessary”. In turn:

1. Functional unity: all parts of society work together in harmony. Merton points out that this is not an assumption but a hypothesis to be tested, that the degree of integration actually varies, and that an item may be functional for one section and dysfunctional for another.
2. Universal functionalism: every existing cultural item performs a positive function. Merton says we must be ready to find that persisting items also carry dysfunctional consequences.
3. Indispensability: only a particular institution can perform a given function. Here Merton shows that two claims are being mixed up (some functions are indispensable; some forms are indispensable) and in place of the second proposes the concept of “functional alternatives”: other structures can meet the same need.

So Merton’s functionalism is not a view that says “everything is in its place”. You will see this shortly in the debate over whether functionalism defends the status quo.

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The micro–macro divide and the “structure or agency?” debate

In sociology the micro–macro distinction looks at the scale of the phenomenon studied: the macro level covers social systems and institutional structures, the micro level interpersonal and interactional processes. Functionalism is mostly placed on the macro side, symbolic interactionism on the micro side.

Under this distinction lies a deeper debate: structure or agency? Structure is the network of institutions, norms and forces that influence how people think and behave; agency is the ability of individuals to make their own choices. At the two extremes there are two problems: stress structure too much and the person becomes a puppet; stress agency too much and society shrinks to the sum of individuals’ intentions. (The puppet and sum images are ours.)

In The Constitution of Society (1984) Anthony Giddens builds the two as two sides of one coin: the “duality of structure”, meaning that structures are made up of people’s actions and also limit and steer those actions.

From now on, when you hear a functionalist or interactionist sentence, you can put two questions to it: at what scale is it speaking, and how much freedom does it grant people?

Step by step

How does a functional analysis proceed?

You can draw a practical sequence from Merton’s concepts. (The order is our arrangement; Merton does not give it as a single recipe, but all its parts are in his book.)

1. Name the pattern. What exactly is the habit, ceremony, institution or media practice under study?
2. Specify the unit. For whom? A person, a subgroup, the whole system? Whether consequences are “functional” or “dysfunctional” is always relative to a unit.
3. List the consequences, not the motives. Write down the functional, dysfunctional and irrelevant consequences separately.
4. Separate manifest from latent. Which consequences were intended, and which were unintended and unrecognised?
5. Work out the net balance and ask about alternatives. What is the total effect? Could another structure meet the same need?

Merton applied this logic to an institution nobody likes, the political machines of American cities; you will see how it works in a later section. For now, take this: the steps are there not to stamp a habit “good” or “bad” but to make visible why it is needed.

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Exercise: one movie memory from 1933, two questions

This is an exercise; the two readings below are ours, not Blumer’s.

The document. Blumer’s 1933 book includes the movie memory of a fifteen-year-old high-school girl. She watched the “pretty girls” in romantic films: how they did their hair, how they sat at a table in a café, how they conversed and danced; in the end she wanted to fix her hair nicely and “act nice” in front of her boyfriends.

Attempt 1: the functionalist question. What is the habit of going to the movies doing for young people? What was intended (entertainment?), what was not (a kind of lesson in manners and dress?) For whom is it functional, for whom dysfunctional (parents, for example)? Is there another source that could meet the same need?

Attempt 2: the interactionist question. What do “the pretty girls in the café” mean to the girl? With whom, and in what settings, did she build that meaning; did she try it out and change it if she did not like it? How does her boyfriends’ reaction shape the way she sees herself? (Remember Cooley’s looking-glass self.)

Then compare the two rounds: which question made which detail visible, and which never saw it?

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Why does the most condemned institution not die? Merton’s analysis of the political machine

Merton’s 1949 book contains a striking example: the political machines of American cities. A “boss” and his neighbourhood representatives win elections in the precinct through a network woven of personal relations. What public opinion condemns is well known: patronage, bribery, “protection” for crime. People think machines are immoral and expect reform to make them disappear; yet Merton writes that machines rise again from their ashes, that is, they show a striking vitality. His question: if it is so condemned, why does it carry on?

He looks for the answer in a list of consequences: - Because the constitutional order disperses power so widely, there is no centre that can get things done; the boss fills this gap from outside. - In poor and immigrant neighbourhoods the machine personalises help: food baskets, jobs, legal advice, support for those in minor trouble; the feeling of “one of us” against the cold, probing manner of official aid agencies. - It provides political privileges to business, and opens an alternative channel of mobility for groups whose routes to social advancement are closed.

Merton writes explicitly that this is not an apology: a functional outlook gives a firmer basis for changing or eliminating the machine, provided other arrangements are set up to meet the same needs. This is the concrete form of his own answer to the criticism that “functionalism is conservative”.

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Blumer’s “tell me” method in 1933

The Payne Fund studies were a series of investigations designed to examine the influence of the movies on children and young people; one of them was Movies and Conduct (1933) by Herbert Blumer of the University of Chicago. (The story of the series is in The Payne Fund Studies and the Invasion from Mars.)

The method is interesting: Blumer’s main reliance was not an experiment but written life histories; he asked people to write down, in narrative form, what they had experienced with the movies. Accounts were collected from 634 university students, 481 women’s-college students, 583 high-school students (from ten public high schools in Chicago), 67 office workers and 58 factory workers. That comes to more than 1,800 “movie autobiographies” (we did the addition; Wikipedia gives 1,823).

One finding as an example: in the autobiographies of 458 high-school students, 62 per cent write that they imitated dress and manners from films; 16 per cent are unaware of any such imitation; 22 per cent give no basis for a conclusion.

Blumer himself writes that the counts should not be taken as conclusive: since nobody was asked to write in a particular direction, the tallies are not exact. This is research of the “actor’s own account” kind; the term was coined only in 1937 and did not yet exist in 1933, but the question ran along the same line (our interpretation).

Myth check

Myth: “Functionalism justifies whatever exists”

What people assume. Functionalism justifies an institution the moment it says “it works”, that is, it protects the status quo; and it rests on a “teleological” logic that puts the result (usefulness) in the place of the cause. The list of criticisms in encyclopedias gives the same impression: a conservative approach that protects the status quo, overlooks conflict and change, and leaves the concept of “function” vague.

What the sources say. Merton takes up this criticism in his 1949 book under a heading of its own: the charge that functional analysis is inevitably “conservative”, even “reactionary”; in one critic’s words, describing institutions by their functions leads to “a conservative teleology”. Merton’s answer: that follows only if you adopt the three assumptions (functional unity, universal functionalism, indispensability) without question. An analysis that takes dysfunctions and functional alternatives into account is not doomed to that conclusion. Merton also cites voices arguing that functionalism is in fact critical and pragmatic. To mock teleology he gives an example he attributes to Franklin: God made the joints of the arm just long enough to carry a glass to the mouth, so let us adore, glass in hand.

Conclusion. The criticism is not empty: the three assumptions were often used in practice. But the generalisation “functionalism justifies whatever exists” contradicts what Merton himself wrote.

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Interactionism’s blind spot: where is structure?

If functionalism’s question is “system”, it risks turning people into puppets; if interactionism’s question is “meaning”, it risks overlooking structure.

In the 1970s researchers criticised symbolic interactionism for neglecting social structure, power relations and historical context; theorists such as Sheldon Stryker answered with a version that takes structure into account. The Turkish encyclopedia entry likewise says the theory lags behind in social conflict and macro-scale analyses. The same criticism was made of Goffman: he was said to neglect macro concerns such as class and economic structure.

On method there are objections too: the approach was found “too impressionistic”, more a framework than a theory, and hard to test.

What did defenders reply? In 1993 Gary Alan Fine described interactionism’s place in the micro/macro and structure/agency debates and its extensions into areas such as “macro-interactionism”. So the debate is not closed: interactionists try to see structure too; critics ask whether that is enough.

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The functions of media: from Lasswell to the “narcotizing dysfunction”

There are classic examples of asking the functionalist question of the media. In 1948 Lasswell listed communication’s three functions in society: surveillance, correlation, transmission. In 1960 Charles Wright added entertainment to this list as a fourth function.

Merton’s function/dysfunction language also works the other way round in the media: in their 1948 chapter Lazarsfeld and Merton argued that the media can produce not only functions but dysfunctions for society. According to the idea known as the “narcotizing dysfunction”, people flooded with information on an issue may settle for the information instead of acting: following the news takes the place of feeling that one has done something.

Today you can debate this through the notification feed, but note: “does social media narcotize people?” is not a claim we present evidence for in this lesson; it is an example of how the functionalist question is built. The questions are ready-made: for which unit (user, publisher, democracy)? Which consequences were intended, which not? What is latent? More in the lesson Functions of the Media.

You can read the three names along one line (our own summary): Lasswell listed three social functions, Wright added entertainment to the list, and Lazarsfeld and Merton brought up the dysfunction in the shadow of function.

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Front stage, back stage and the screen: interactionism in the media

In No Sense of Place (1985) Joshua Meyrowitz combined Goffman’s dramaturgy with McLuhan’s media theory. The gist: as electronic media remove the informational barriers between different social groups, the boundaries of front and back stage blur as well.

For social media there are two current contributions. In 2010 Bernie Hogan argued that Goffman’s stage applies to synchronous “situations”, while social media has asynchronous “exhibitions” (status updates, sets of photos) and a virtual “curator” who manages and redistributes them. In interviews with Twitter users, Alice Marwick and danah boyd showed that social media collapses many audiences into a single context (“context collapse”) and that users design an “imagined audience” and post for it; techniques such as targeting particular audiences, concealing certain subjects and maintaining authenticity came out of this.

Our own link (an interpretation): the “imagined audience” idea resembles Mead’s generalized other. In both, a person takes a standpoint even without a real person in front of them. Take this as a suggestion for reading, not a claim.

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Exercise: one post, two views (and a missing question)

This is an exercise; the scenario below is hypothetical.

Imagine: a university student posts from a single account that is followed by relatives, classmates and the people who may hire them in future. Before posting a photo they think three times; some posts they open only to a “close friends” list.

The documentary basis: the users Marwick and boyd interviewed also describe similar techniques: targeting different audiences, concealing certain subjects, trying to maintain authenticity.

The functionalist round. For whom is this practice, and what does it do? (For the user, reputation management; for families, keeping the bond going; for the platform, the flow of content.) For whom might it be dysfunctional (for example constant tension for the user)? What are the intended and unintended consequences?

The interactionist round. Who is the student’s “imagined audience”? What do they count as “appropriate”, and by whose standard? How does a friend’s comment change the way they post? In which interactions are these meanings built?

A third question. Does either round ask whether it is the platform’s design and business model that decide which audience groups meet in a single context? If not, at what scale is a question missing?

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This is how exams ask it

Frequent patterns

• “Who developed the AGIL scheme?” → Talcott Parsons. Letters: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency (pattern maintenance).
• “Who drew the manifest/latent function distinction?” → Robert K. Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949).
• “The looking-glass self?” → Charles H. Cooley (1902). “The generalized other, the I and the me?” → G. H. Mead.
• “Who coined the term ‘symbolic interactionism’?” → Herbert Blumer (1937). “The dramaturgical approach?” → Erving Goffman.
• “The definition of the situation / the Thomas theorem?” → W. I. Thomas.
• “Micro–macro”: functionalism is linked with the macro level, interactionism with the micro level.

Tempting wrong answers

• Treating Mead as the person who coined the term: Blumer named it, after Mead’s death.
• Mixing up Cooley and Mead: the looking-glass self is Cooley’s; the “I”, the “me” and the generalized other are Mead’s.
• Reading “latent” as “secret plot”: latent means unintended and unrecognised.
• Lumping Parsons and Merton together: AGIL is Parsons’s; manifest/latent function is Merton’s.
• Confusing Manford Kuhn (the Iowa line) with Thomas Kuhn (the paradigm).

Alternative names

• The AGIL letters appear in Turkish sources also as “gaye ulaştırma” (goal attainment) and “içerileme” (integration); some write “latent” instead of “gizil”.
• “Gizli işlev” is also used for “gizil işlev” (latent function). You may also meet “sembolik etkileşim kuramı” for symbolic interactionism and “yapısal-fonksiyonel yaklaşım” for structural functionalism.

Exam questions were written from general patterns; whichever source you read, match each name with its concept and each concept with its own level (micro/macro).

Summary

Summary card

• Structural functionalism sees society as a system (macro): it explains a pattern by its contribution to the whole’s continuation. Parsons’s AGIL scheme lists four requirements: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency (pattern maintenance).
• Merton distinguished function from dysfunction and manifest from latent function; he added the question “for whom?” and functional alternatives. The Hopi rain ceremonial and the political machine examples show the logic.
• Symbolic interactionism sees society as a process in which meaning is built in interaction (micro). Cooley’s looking-glass self, Mead’s “I”/“me” and generalized other, Thomas’s definition of the situation and Blumer’s three premises are the stones of this view; Blumer coined the term in 1937.
• Goffman in brief: front stage, back stage, impression management.
• The micro–macro and structure–agency debate is the two views’ shared accounting; Giddens tried to tie them together with the “duality of structure”.
• Criticism: functionalism met the charges of conservatism and teleology (Merton took these up himself; Mills’s “grand theory” criticism is contested); interactionism was accused of overlooking structure and power.
• In the media, the functionalist question is “what job does the media do for society?” (Lasswell, Wright, Lazarsfeld–Merton); the interactionist question is “how do people make sense of media and present themselves through it?” (Blumer 1933, Meyrowitz, Marwick–boyd).