structural functionalism theory and public education

In contrast to this ambivalence, conflict theory’s views are uniformly critical. We just saw that functionalism has mixed views about the benefits and disadvantages of cities and urban life and thus of urbanization. Supporting Wirth’s hypothesis, contemporary research finds that urban residents indeed hold more tolerant views on several kinds of issues (Moore & Ovadia, 2006).Īn example of the greater tolerance of urban residents (and thus the lower tolerance of rural residents) appears in Figure 14.5 “Urban/Rural Residence and Belief That Premarital Sex Is “Always Wrong” (%)”, which depicts the percentage of Americans in the nation’s twelve largest metropolitan areas and in its rural areas who say that premarital sex is “always wrong.” Rural residents are twice as likely as urban residents to feel this way. In particular, he said that urban residents are more tolerant than rural residents of nontraditional attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles, in part because they are much more exposed than rural residents to these nontraditional ways. But he also agreed with Durkheim that cities generate more creativity and greater tolerance for new ways of thinking. He agreed with Tönnies that cities have a weaker sense of community and weaker social bonds than do rural areas. In 1938, University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth wrote a very influential essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” in which he took both a positive and a negative view of cities (Wirth, 1938). In these neighborhoods, a sense of community and strong social bonds do, in fact, exist. Although cities can be anonymous (think of the mass of people walking by each other on a busy street in the downtown area of a large city), many city residents live in neighborhoods where people do know each other, associate with each other, and look out for each other. This interdependence of roles creases a solidarity that retains much of the bonding and sense of community found in small, rural societies (Durkheim, 1893/1933).Ĭontemporary research tends to emphasize that strong social bonds do exist in cities (Guest, Cover, Matsueda, & Kubrin, 2006). When there is a division of labor, he wrote, everyone has to depend on everyone else to perform their jobs. He called these latter ties organic solidarity, which he said stems from the division of labor. However, he also thought that these societies stifled individual freedom and that social ties still exist in larger, urban societies. He certainly appreciated the social bonds and community feeling, which he called mechanical solidarity, characteristic of small, rural societies. One of the key founders of sociology, French scholar Émile Durkheim, was more positive than Tönnies about the nature of cities and urbanized societies. He lamented the loss in urban societies of close social bonds and of a strong sense of community, and he feared that a sense of rootlessness in these societies begins to replace the feeling of stability and steadiness characteristic of small, rural societies. Tönnies called this type of society a Gesellschaft, and he was quite critical of this development. As societies grew and industrialized and as people moved to cities, he wrote, social ties weakened and became more impersonal. In these societies, family, kin, and community ties are quite strong, with people caring for each other and looking out for one another. He said that a sense of community, or Gemeinschaft, characterizes traditional societies. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1887/1963) raised this question when he wrote about the changes that occurred as societies changed from small, rural, and traditional cultures to larger, urban, and industrial settings.

Since sociologists began studying urbanization in the early years of the discipline, an important question has been the degree to which cities are impersonal and alienating for their residents. They are sites of creativity, high culture, population diversity, and excitement, but they are also sites of crime, impersonality, and other problems. In essence, there is no one answer to this question, because cities are too complex for a simple answer. A basic debate within the functionalist perspective centers on the relative merits of cities and urbanization: In what ways and to what extent are cities useful (functional) for society, and in what ways and to what extent are cities disadvantageous and even harmful (dysfunctional) for society? Put more simply, are cities good or bad?

Structural functionalism theory and public education