Michael A. Faia

A strong defense of functionalism. I mostly like the book and find it useful.

I see functionalism as part of studying social systems by means of general systems theory (GST). I think the way to do it is to first do qualitative study, defining the system with GST by defining the system boundary and then constructing the hierarchy of subsystems. After that we do the quantitative study. My main disagreement with the author is that he pays little attention to the qualitative and skips over to doing equations. He says, approximately, that with loglinear analysis we do not need the qualitative.… (mehr)