Great Recession And Functionalism Essay

For the United States, it was incredibly difficult to be raised in a period of sustained prosperity and consumption and respond to these hard times efficiently. American political attitudes and institutions adapted as needed to the horrific events. The focus of this paper is to relate functionalism and the Great Recession with one another, comparing and contrasting Durkheim’s ideas with what took place in America several years ago.
Durkheim noted that function can mean either “a system of living movements, abstracted from their consequences” or it can mean “the relation of correspondence which exists between those movements and certain needs of the organism (Jones)”. To ask for the function of the division of labor is to ask to what need it corresponds.
Functionalism holds a great deal of influence within the effects of the Great Recession. Emile Durkheim considered the foundation of this particular theory. According to the functionalist perspective, or functionalism, each visible …show more content…
The functionalist perspective would assume that the continued health of the economy is vital to the health of the nation, as it ensures the distribution of goods and services. For example, we need food to travel from farms (high-functioning and efficient agricultural systems) via roads (safe and effective trucking and rail routes) to urban centers (high-density areas where workers can gather). However, sometimes a dysfunction––a function with the potential to disrupt social institutions or organization––in the economy occurs, usually because some institutions fail to adapt quickly enough to changing social conditions. This lesson has been driven home recently with the bursting of the housing bubble. Due to irresponsible lending practices and an under-regulated financial market, we are currently living with the after-effects of a major