Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 495
Thus the problem of accurately defining the relations between structures and
functions is a general one in the human sciences and requires constant interdisciplinary
help. In this connexion we should recall how K. Lewin, whose social
psychology is the product of Gestaltist structuralism, came to describe the
actual needs in that language and how W. Kohler, his teacher, wrote a whole
work on ‘the place of values in a world of facts’. Let us also recall how T. Parsons
called his method in sociology ‘structural-functional’, considering structure
to be the stable arrangement of the elements of a social system unaffected
by fluctuations imposed from outside, and function as occurring in the adaptations
of structure to situations exterior to it? In economics, J. Tinbergen sees
structure as ‘the consideration of not immediately observable characteristics
concerning the manner in which the economy reacts to certain changes’. These
characteristics, expressed in terms of econometric coefficients, give on the one
hand an architectural picture of the economy but, on the other hand, indicate
the ways in which it reacts to certain variations; thus we find once again that
structure is accompanied by functions because it is capable of ‘reactions’.
If the structuralism of Uvi-Strauss leads to a certain devalorization of functionalism,
that is essentially due to the fact that genetic and historical factors are,
so to speak, bound to be overlooked when one is studying societies whose past
is unknown and doubtless lost without recall. On the other hand it is interesting
to note that the ‘neo-functionalism’ of young American sociologists such as A.
W. Gouldner and P. M. Blau is by no means closed to structuralist perspectives.
Thus both these authors endeavour to clarify the relations between sub-systems
and system, and to re-examine the classical problem of social stratification,
basing their analyses, however, on the central notion of ‘reciprocity’ in the one
case and on that of elementary ‘exchanges’ in the other. It seems clear that such
viewpoints in no way conflict (quite the reverse) with what we described in section
5 as relational structuralism, their specific nature being that they do not proceed
from totalities in order to come down to constituent relations but from the latter
in order to illuminate the functioning of sub-systems.
Generally speaking one may (cf. section 3) consider functioning as the
structuring activity whose structure constitutes the result or the organized
event. In the case of a completed structure functioning is identical with those
transformations which are real among all those which are possible, and which
characterize the system as such. As to function, the term can be used to
designate the particular rBle played by a specific transformation relative to
that entire set of transformations (the two meanings, biological and mathematica1,Z‘
of the word ‘function’ then tend to become interchangeable). But in the
case of a structure in process of formation or of development, or generally not
‘closed‘, where for that reason self-adjustment so far consists only in regulations
and where exchanges are open to the exterior, functioning is formative and not
merely transformative and functions correspond to utilities (or values) of various
kinds depending on the r6les of conservation, reinforcement or perturbation
which the functioning of sub-systems may play in relation to the total system,
or vice versa.
It is from this view point, among others, that an interdisciplinary model