Émile Durkheim argued that sociological explanations 'must seek separately the efficient cause -and the function it fulfills' (1895, p. Later functionalists produced somewhat different lists of requisites. Thus, any pattern of social organization reveals these three classes of functional requisites, and the goal of sociological analysis is to see how these needs are met in empirical social systems. For Spencer, there were three basic requisites of superorganic systems: (1) the need to secure and circulate resources, (2) the need to produce usable substances, and (3) the need to regulate, control, and administer system activities (1874–1896, part 2, p. In so doing, he introduced the notion of 'functional requisites' or 'needs,' thereby creating functionalism. Spencer did not see society as an actual organism rather, he conceptualized 'superorganic systems' (organization of organisms) as revealing certain similarities in their 'principles of arrangement' to biological organisms (1874–1896, part 2, pp. Drawing upon materials from his monumental The Principles of Biology (1864–1867), Spencer's The Principles of Sociology (1874–1896) is filled with analogies between organisms and society as well as between ecological processes (variation, competition, and selection) and societal evolution (which he saw as driven by war). It was Herbert Spencer who used the organismic analogy to create an explicit form of functional analysis. Yet, since these analogies were not systematically pursued by Comte, his main contribution was to give sociology its name and to reintroduce organismic reasoning into the new science of society. 240) and to 'treat the Social Organism as definitely composed of the Families which are the true elements or cells, next the Classes or Castes which are its proper tissues, and lastly, of the cities and Communes which are its real organs' (pp.

Moreover, Comte went so far as to 'decompose structure anatomically into elements, tissues, and organs' (1851–1854, p. 239), there is a 'true correspondence between Statical Analysis of the Social Organism in Sociology, and that of the Individual Organism in Biology' (1851–1854, p. For functional theory, then, society is like a biological organism that grows, and as a consequence, its parts can be examined with respect to how they operate (or function) to maintain the viability of the body social as it grows and develops. In so doing, Comte effectively linked sociology with the prestige of biological science. In trying to legitimate the new discipline of sociology, Auguste Comte (1830–1842, 1851–1854) revived analogies made by the Greeks and, closer to his time, by Hobbes and Rousseau that society is a kind of organism. Sociology's first theoretical orientation was functionalism.

Structuralism functionalism theory