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What do you need to survive? Food, shelter, clothing, right? Anything else? Oh, yeah, oxygen. Anything more? I mean besides a Butterfinger now and again. Okay, seriously, the list of things that you need to survive is really rather small and it is clearly defined. Without food, shelter, and air your body would cease to exist.
One way to think about society is that it is like an organism, or a body. This approach is called the "organismic analogy." The organismic analogy is a way of looking at society that understands the form of society and the way society changes as if it were an organism. For example, in order for you to survive you need oxygen and you get your oxygen from air. Because of that need and because of that source, your body has a specific structure built inside it-your lungs. It also has other structures and systems (such as the circulatory system) that aid the lungs in fulfilling this need. Fish don't have lungs and neither do plants. They have other structures and systems that are designed to meet their specific needs within their environment.
So one way to understand why society is the way it is is to think of it in organismic terms. Societies have specific needs, just like your body. Sociologists called those needs "requisite needs." The term underscores the idea that these needs are required for survival. Societies develop certain structures that meet those needs, and we call those structures institutions. Institutions have specific structures, just like your lungs. Just like your lungs are built differently than your stomach because they fulfill a different function, so different social institutions are built different from one another because they function to fulfill different social needs. Another similarity with your body is that institutions are taken-for-granted. That is, they work without us usually being aware of them. In fact, the more we are aware of social institutions, the less power they have over our lives.
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For the past 100 years or so, Sociologists have been analyzing social institutions. One of the ways they have tried to understand these structures is through an abstract analytical scheme. For example, we might say that societies all need religion, but why? What is it that religion does that society needs. Well, we all need to believe in something. Okay, but why? What these abstract analytical schemes try to do is capture the more abstract or general issues behind the actual social structures that we see.
A man named Talcott Parsons created one such analytical scheme. Parsons argued that all societies need four things: Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, and Latent Pattern Maintenance. Parsons argued that the four requirements can be used as a kind of scheme to understand any system. When beginning a study of any system, one of the first things that must be done is identifying the various parts and how they function. Parsons's scheme allows us to categorize any part in terms of its function for the whole. I will be introducing and using this scheme to explain different social institutions as we go along. (Religion, by the way, functions as Latent Pattern Maintenance-we'll find out why later.)
- Adaptation : the subsystem that converts raw materials from the environment into usable stuffs (in the body, the digestive system; in society, the economy)
- Goal Attainment : the subsystem that motivates and guides the system as a whole (in the body, the mind; in society, government)
- Integration : the subsystem that regulates the activities of the systems diverse members (in the body, the central nervous system; in society, the law)
- Latent Pattern Maintenance : the subsystem that indirectly preserves patterns of behavior that are needed for survival (in the body, the autonomic nervous system; in society, education, religion, and family)
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