Discuss how Merton’s conceptions of manifest and latent functions, deviance, and dysfunction enhanced Parsons’s conception of society and structural functionalism in general.
What will be an ideal response?
In contrast to Parsons, who sought to delineate a highly abstract, master conceptual schema, Merton favored what he called middle-range theory. Merton’s middle-range reformulation of structural functionalism made it eminently more useful. Perhaps the single most important contribution that Merton made to functionalism—and sociology—is that he extended Parsons’s point that society is a system of interrelated parts and reworked it in order to emphasize that the components of the system may or may not be “in sync,” and that the results are not always predictable. This pivotal theoretical contribution is readily apparent not only in Merton’s highly influential concepts of manifest and latent function and dysfunction, but also in his oft-cited theory of deviance.
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