Instead of punishing members of a society for failure to assimilate to common values, organic solidarity allows people with differing values to coexist. In capitalist societies, Durkheim wrote, division of labor becomes so specialized that everyone is doing different things. In industrial societies, mechanical solidarity is replaced with organic solidarity, which is social order based around an acceptance of economic and social differences. Here we see that labor and communal self-preservation are fundamental. When people tend to do the same type of work, Durkheim argued, they tend to think and act alike. This type of thinking was common in preindustrial societies, where strong bonds of kinship and a low division and differentiation of labor created shared morals and values among people, such as those in hunter-gatherer groups.

Societies with mechanical solidarity act in an automatic fashion things are done mostly because they have always been done that way.

Preindustrial societies, Durkheim explained, were held together by mechanical solidarity, a type of social order maintained by the collective consciousness of a culture. In his book The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim argued that as society grew more complex, social order made the transition from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. His primary concern was that the cultural glue that held society together was failing, and people were becoming more divided. Learn more about Émile Durkheim and the ideas that led to the development of structural-functional theory in the following video.Īs an observer of his social world, Durkheim was not entirely satisfied with the direction of society in his day. In his quest to understand what causes individuals to act in similar and predictable ways, he wrote, “If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in an attenuated form, the same effects as punishment” (Durkheim 1895). This is what we know as peer pressure, and is an illustrative example of how something that seems like common sense can be studied empirically. Durkheim called the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society the collective conscience. He asserted that individual behavior was not the same as collective behavior and that studying collective behavior was quite different from studying an individual’s actions. To him, society was greater than the sum of its parts. Émile Durkheim and Structural-FunctionalismĪs a functionalist, Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) perspective on society stressed the necessary interconnectivity of all of its elements.

Social solidarity and social facts are essential concepts that functionalists use to empirically analyze societies. (Photo courtesy of Medill DC/flickr) In previous modules, you learned about s ocial solidarity (the social ties that bind a group of people together such as kinship, shared location, and religion) and social facts (the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life). The three major sociological paradigms differ in their perspectives on these issues. Buffet advocates that the wealthy should pay higher taxes than they do, as he refutes the claim that trickle-down economics really benefits the lower and middle classes. Warren Buffett (an investor and one of the world’s richest men) has controversial ideas about taxation and spending habits of the very wealthy, particularly since they raise questions about America’s embedded system of class structure and social power.

Structural and functional theory