Functionalism: The Major Sociological Perspective

The major theoretical perspective are known as Functionalist perspective, Conflict perspective, and Interactionist perspective. These three views are the ones most widely used by sociologists, which altogether will approach and provide an introductory look at the discipline. Some iconic sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois and many others are major contributors to sociology. Functionalist perspective emphasizes the way in which the parts of a society are structured to maintain its stability. The functionalist perspective sees stability and agreement while the conflict sociologist sees the world as a continual struggle. Conflict perspective assumes that social behavior is best understood in terms of tension between groups over power or the allocation of resources, including housing, money, access to services, and political representation.
The interactionist perspective generalizes about everyday forms of social interactions in order to explain society as a whole. These major sociological perspectives can be compared in the sense that conflict perspective and functionalist perspective are mainly macro sociological and deal with the dynamics of whole societies. Macrosociology concentrates on large-scale phenomena or entire civilizations; while interactionist perspective does not make an assumption when compared to the other two perspectives. Sociologist make use of these major theoretical perspectives because each of these have a unique insight into the same issue and they are perspectives that are used in our daily