The structural-functional approach views society as a system of interconnected structures and functions. It was originally developed in anthropology and sociology. Fred Riggs adapted this approach to the study of public administration. He argued that different structures can perform the same functions, and that one function can be performed by multiple structures. Riggs identified five core functions of any society: economic, socio-communicational, symbolic, and political. The structural-functional approach provides a framework for systematically analyzing how social and political structures function within a system.
The structural-functional approach views society as a system of interconnected structures and functions. It was originally developed in anthropology and sociology. Fred Riggs adapted this approach to the study of public administration. He argued that different structures can perform the same functions, and that one function can be performed by multiple structures. Riggs identified five core functions of any society: economic, socio-communicational, symbolic, and political. The structural-functional approach provides a framework for systematically analyzing how social and political structures function within a system.
The structural-functional approach views society as a system of interconnected structures and functions. It was originally developed in anthropology and sociology. Fred Riggs adapted this approach to the study of public administration. He argued that different structures can perform the same functions, and that one function can be performed by multiple structures. Riggs identified five core functions of any society: economic, socio-communicational, symbolic, and political. The structural-functional approach provides a framework for systematically analyzing how social and political structures function within a system.
The structural-functional approach views society as a system of interconnected structures and functions. It was originally developed in anthropology and sociology. Fred Riggs adapted this approach to the study of public administration. He argued that different structures can perform the same functions, and that one function can be performed by multiple structures. Riggs identified five core functions of any society: economic, socio-communicational, symbolic, and political. The structural-functional approach provides a framework for systematically analyzing how social and political structures function within a system.
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ATHE STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONAL APPROACH
The structural-functional approach is derived from earlier uses of
functionalism and systems models in anthropology, sociology, biology, and political science. Structural functionalism became popular around 1960 when it became clear that ways of studying U.S. and European politics were not useful in studying newly independent countries, and that a new approach was needed. Structural-functionalism assumes that a bounded (nation-state) system exists, and studies structures in terms of their function(s) within the system. For structural functionalists the question to be answered is what does a structure (guerrilla movement, political party, election, etc.) do within the political system (of country x)? The goal is to find out what something actually does in a political system, as opposed to what it is supposed to do. Thus, structural functionalists would not waste time studying constitutions in Third World countries if they found that the constitutions [structures] had little impact on political reality. Almond claimed that certain political functions existed in all political systems. On the input side he listed these functions as: political socialization, political interest articulation, political interest aggregation, and political communication. Listed as outputs were rule- making, rule implementation, and rule adjudication. Other basic functions of all political systems included the conversion process, basic pattern maintenance, and various capabilities (distributive, symbolic, etc.). Structural functionalists argued that all political systems, including Third World systems, could most fruitfully be studied and compared on the basis of how differing structures performed these functions in the various political system. Structural functionalism is based on a systems model. Conceptually, the political process can be depicted as follows: For analytical purposes the political system is considered to be the nation-state, and the environment is composed of the interactions of economic, social, and political variables and events, both domestic and external. The idea is that there are a number of actors in the national political system (political parties, bureaucracies, the military, etc.) and that the actions of all these actors affect each other as well as the system. The political analyst must determine the importance of these actors in a particular political system. This is done by analyzing the functions performed by the various actors. Any changes in the system also affect all the actors. The feedback mechanisms allow for constantly changing inputs, as actors react to outputs. Structural functionalists, like systems analysts, have a bias toward systemic equilibrium, (i.e. toward stability). Such a bias tends to make this approach conservative, as stability, or evolutionary change, is preferred [and more easily analyzed], to radical, or revolutionary change. A problem which arises with this system-based model is that the nation-state's boundaries are often permeable in the real world, rather than being the neatly bounded nation-state conceptualized by structural functionalists. In other words, in the real world it is usually difficult to state exactly what the boundaries are, leading to some conceptual difficulties. For example, some international actors are only intermittent, such as the U.S. when it intervenes directly in Haitian or Panamanian politics. Should U.S. military forces be considered a part of the Panamanian or Haitian political systems? STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM AND HISTORICAL SEQUENCES OF CRISES The structural functional approach provides a useful framework for categorizing and comparing data, but has been criticized as being essentially static. It was not very useful for analyzing or predicting change; the issue of why, how, when, and in what direction, political development occurs. This issue of development, or change, is, of course, crucial for the Third World. In response to criticisms, structural functionalists looked at history and concluded that political development takes place when an existing political system is unable to cope with problems or challenges confronting it without further structural differentiation or cultural secularization. Success at meeting such challenges constitutes political development. By challenges, Almond meant changes in the size, content, and frequency of inputs (especially demands) for the system. For structural functionalists: Political Development is defined as increased structural differentiation and increased cultural secularization. Structural functionalists argued that, historically, there have been four major challenges to political systems, and that the challenges have occurred in the following sequence (in the West). 1. penetration and integration (state-building) 2. loyalty and commitment (nation-building) 3. participation 4. distribution (Perhaps a fifth, international penetration, should be added to the list. The agents of international penetration would include: other nations, international organizations, multinational corporations, prominent individuals, ideological movements, guerrillas, militaries, and technological sources such as radio broadcasts.) In Europe the challenges occurred separately, and were handled one at a time. Thus, the problem of state-building (road construction, tax system, boundaries)) was usually solved before the problem of nation-building (transferring of primary political loyalty to the national ruler, and away from the local or regional leader) became acute. The challenge of participation was solved by the gradual extension of the vote and political rights to non- propertied people, trade unionists, all males, and finally, to women. The problem of distribution is still a challenge. The question of how to divide up the goods of society has not yet been fully solved, although there seems to be a movement in the direction of more equality in distribution. The Third World is experiencing a fundamentally different pattern of challenge occurrence. In the Third World the challenges are occurring simultaneously. In many cases "solutions" to historic systemic challenges in the West have been accompanied by violence and strong systemic resistance. (Extension of participation rights to workers; U.S. Civil Rights movement of 1960s) In Third World nations all the challenges are occurring simultaneously, and demands for solutions are putting severe pressure on national political systems. From a structural functionalist point of view, the amount of violence and instability sometimes observed in Third World politics should, therefore, come as no surprise. Structural Functional Approach to Public Administration The structural functional approach to public administration is a term adapted from sociology and anthropology which interprets society as a structure with interrelated parts. This approach was developed by the celebrated anthropologist Malinowski and Radcliff Brown. So, according to them, a society has a structure and functions. These functions are norms, customs, traditions and institutions and can be analogized as organs of a body, as explained by Herbert Spencer. All these functions need to work together to make the body function as a whole. Having explained the broader meaning of the term; it makes more sense for us to understand it from the perspective of public administration which would guide our further analysis of the topic. During his stint as a Researcher at the Foreign Policy Association in USA, Fred Riggs came across an interesting phenomenon regarding the American Public Administration. He found them to be extremely narcissistic in their approach which believed that the American way of administration was unique without any counterparts elsewhere in the world and that it was capable of answering all the administrative problems emerging in the new developing countries. To explore the consequences of intermingling of contrasting systems in the developing countries, he looked at the structural functional approach of the social sciences. This approach provides a mechanism to understand social processes. The function is the consequence of patterns of actions while the structure is the resultant institution and the pattern of action itself. It reads complicated but the theory in itself is not that difficult to understand. Social structures can be concrete (like Government department and Bureaus or even specific societies held together by shared beliefs, customs and morals) and also analytic like structure of power or authority. These structures perform certain functions and in terms of structural functional approach, these functions have an interdependent pattern between structures. So as a public administration student, if one would want to study bureaucracy, the first step would be to view bureaucracy as a structure which has administrative system with characteristics like hierarchy, specialization, rules and roles. The behavioral characteristics can be rationality, neutrality, professionalism and rule orientation. Subsequently, one can proceed to analyze the functions of bureaucracy. Now, we come to an interesting and relevant question pertaining to the above explanation. Do the similar kinds of structures perform the same functions? The structural functionalists say a big Nay to that, which means that a structure can perform multiple functions and vice versa i.e. one function can be performed by multiple structures. According to Riggs, there are five functional requisites of a society: Economic Socio-communicational
Symbolic
Political
While talking about Riggs explanation of the concept and
contribution to this approach, we cannot proceed further without mentioning his Prismatic Model. This model uses a common phenomenon as an analogy, when white light passes through a prism it breaks into seven colors of different wavelength. As per Riggs, the white light is the fused structure of traditional society. The rainbow represents the diffracted (or refracted) structures of an industrialized society. Inside the prism the society was in transition.Riggs challenged the traditional approaches of public administration implying that basic principles of administration have universal application. It also contributed to the comparative study of public administration by providing a more relevant perspective; that not all systems work the same in all places, so one can take what one likes and leave the rest. A glimpse of the post-development approach Development is often accepted as an unquestioned goal of our societies. We just want to be developed. Critical discussion on this topic is almost entirely absent from the public debate in the Czech Republic. Global Politics hopes to draw your attention to an approach that does not fit the mainstream thinking. Promising young scholars from the Vienna University treat topics such as sustainable development, colonial continuities, microfinance or the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. Their unorthodox ideas are worth a thought for students who seek more than just the usual „aid or trade“question. „The last 40 years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is to write its obituary… The idea stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Nevertheless, the ruin stands there and still dominates the scenery like a landmark“ (Sachs 1992, 1). Wolfgang Sachs’ famous dictum has become the basis for what was later to be known as the post-development approach. He identified four founding premises that should have led to abandonment of this mainframe, which took hold of us long before Truman’s famous speech on 20 January 1949. First, the planet runs towards its ecological limits and the reproduction of the industrial (or imperial) mode of living is impossible. Secondly, with the end of the Cold war, ‘development’ lost its political impetus. As we may see today the East-West confrontation has disappeared, but ‘development’ lost nothing of its attraction. Thirdly, the ever growing gap between the rich and poor defined in terms of monetary income makes the concept seem less persuasive. One look at the Millennium Development Goals shows how ‘development’ switched from modernization to poverty reduction. The neoliberal economic panacea ruling the world at least since the beginning of the 1980s remains nonetheless. Fourthly, the single ‘development’ track indeed seems to be obsolete in the postmodern age of cultural relativism. Twenty years later, in the preface to the new edition of The Development Dictionary, Sachs did not change too much of his analysis. He admitted that the ‘development’ has been replaced by ‘globalization’ and stressed how the pursuit of ‘development’ has become part of the desire for universal justice. It is the South today that is the staunchest defender of development. Even if the ‘development’ agenda has been changing throughout the last 60 years in an ever accelerating pace, we still may agree with James Ferguson that “[i]t seems to us today almost non-sensical to deny that there is such a thing as ‘development,’ or to dismiss it as a meaningless concept, just as it must have been virtually impossible to reject the concept ‘civilization’ in the nineteenth century, or the concept ‘God’ in the twelfth” (Ferguson 1994, xiii). This “interpretive grid” (ibid) stays with us regardless of whether we speak of emerging markets, good governance or failed states. Ferguson brings one more and much more serious insight into the usual evolutionary thinking of ‘development’ (Ferguson 2006, 176–193). The racist theories that culminated during the Second World War have been discredited by the horrors of Nazism. The cultural centrism that allowed for the colonial constellation of forces to continue after the war made other cultures capable of achieving the same status as those considered ‘developed’. The nodal point of the ‘development’ discourse changed from the white man to the nation of white men. Inferior cultures only needed to work hard enough like those Asians whom supposedly helped the Asian values, but these too were to become a problem as soon as the financial crisis in 1997 set in only to be the source of success for renewed growth. However, we are in a very different situation today than we were in the 1950s. The emerging markets are much unlike the so called fourth world and as globalization picks its enclaves full of resources or people with purchasing power, the rest is abandoned to its own fate of destitution. Culture does not play the role in the broken promise of ‘development’ anymore. We are back to good old racism (which we never really abandoned) with the hierarchical axis of modernity remaining and the temporal axis disappearing from the usual evolutionary diagram. There are people on this planet who are not ‘less developed’ anymore, they are just ‘less’. The difficult connection between racism and cultural centrism easily visible in an everyday practice of ‘development’, but the more difficult to decipher within the reports of the governmental and non-governmental ‘development’ institutions is replaced by an outright racism of the humanitarian zeal for those who naturally cannot catch up if they have not done so until now. ‘Development’ thus not only contains authoritarian implications as Cowen and Shenton have shown for the era long before Truman (Cowen and Shenton 1996), but its lack results in an equally if not more dangerous forms of disdain. What is to be made of this ‘development’ era with all its transformations, (slowly) shifting power relations and human misery? While on the one hand, there are scholars such as David Simon or Stuart Corbridge who caution us against post-structuralist, postmodern and post-colonial disengagement from practising ‘development’ at all, on the other hand there are scholars such as James Ferguson, Lakshman Yapa and Gilbert Rist who do not dismiss any engagement entirely, but try to rethink thoroughly various concepts connected to ‘development’ (Matthews 2008). Ferguson warns that there might be no need for what we do or know. It is strange that Sally Matthews stresses the intellectual work, we ‘the privileged’ can engage in and reserves only one sentence for the change of our consumer practices. But this is a very important part of the misery on a planet that makes our game to be zero-sum. While trying to highlight the importance of our consuming habits I try to engage in the intellectual work praised by Matthews as well. This is the case when I am teaching and this is the case when the students publish their papers. The set of six texts written for the seminar Post-Development Theory and Practice are just a tiny bit of the intellectual solidarity with distant others here at home. The first paper by Katrin Köhler engages with the continuities between the colonial and ‘development’ discourses. It demonstrates how basic colonial concepts prevail despite changes at the rhetorical level. The second paper by Eric Pfeifer deals with the discourse of ‘sustainable development’ and shows how the consumption in the North is excluded from the picture this discourse depicts. Additionally, only those solution that are “imaginable” in Žižekian sense, i.e. those de-politicized ones, are suggested preventing radical post-politics from taking place. The third article by Andrea Visotchnig treats the practice of ‘development’ in the form of microfinance. While it is possible to criticize microfinance on its own merits, as well as from a discursive perspective, it is also possible to consider it to be part of an alternative, post-capitalist, diverse economy. The goal then should not be to call for its complete abolishment but to embed it in non-capitalist relations. Post-development has been fiercely criticized from various perspectives. Christiane Löper tries to define what could be understood under the term and offers answers to the main points of the critique. In her concluding section she offers an interesting insight into her personal view on post-development which she considers to be a “summary of [her] whole study of International Development.” The fifth paper by Josefine Bingemer tries to answer whether the Zapatista movement in Chiapas could be considered a case of post-development. Using secondary sources, concrete practices in politics, education, healthcare, truth and knowledge are analyzed in relation to the post- development body of theory. Lastly, another personal encounter is presented by Alexandra Heis, a young mother, in relation to her study and experience with the vaccination here in Europe. Not part of ‘development’ at first sight, the article shows how the notions of citizenship, trust and knowledge are treated in a very similar way by the proponents and opponents of vaccination. The layman is thus excluded from this particular knowledge-power nexus, just as is so often the case in the ‘development’ practice.These six articles may serve yet another purpose. Their quality puts the seminar papers of students in Brno into a different perspective. I can only hope that the readers of Politics will use the insights offered by these talented young authors to inform their own papers and consumer practices.
Public Policy Approach to Public Administration
We remember reading about the Wilsonian philosophy of public administration and the famous dichotomy of politics and administration. After Wilson, there were many authors like Frank J Goodnow, L D White and F. W. Willoughby who elaborated on the topic and reaffirmed the need to separate the political functions and administrative functions of the government. Willoughby went to the extent of calling public administration as the fourth branch of Government after legislative, executive and judiciary. However, this politic-administration dichotomy theory lost it relevance after the Second World War. The writers, authors, academicians and subject matter experts finally awakened to the fact that administration of a government can never be free of political elements. They started protesting and writing against the separation of politics and administration as they could clearly see that both were horribly intertwined with one another and impossible to separate both in spirit and action. After the Second World War, there was a renewed interest in the aspects of administration because of the practical encounters and alliances formed during the war, creation of international organizations and emergence of the developing countries. Also, after the war, the Government reinvented itself from a peace keeper and provider of services to become a Welfare State. The public expenditure in most parts of the world increased greatly after 1945 as the Governments started taking more and more initiatives for the welfare of the society. A lot of reforms were carried out in areas not just regarding the content of public policy but also the ways in which they were formulated. This new approach gained momentum after 1970s when a lot of analysis started happening around the way the government policies affected the people. The Vietnam War and Watergate scandal in US, the Administrative Reforms Commission established in India in 1966, the initiative to reduce public expenditure in order to reduce direct taxation under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the creation of the Malaysian Administrative and Management Planning Unit in 1977 in Malaysia were to name a few. With changing times, the needs of the society have also changed and so has the role of the government and nature of its policies. The increase in the average age of the population has made the Government to look into the pension policies in the developed countries while the young illiterate population of the developing countries has forced their governments to come up with policies like Right to Education in India. The irony of this public policy approach is that it encompasses many aspects of government functioning. The spectrum has become so broad that; to a student of public administration, it appears confused and spread all over. The other approaches that have clear segregation between the politics and administration were clearly distinguishable and easy to understand. Many readers may also get dissuaded to realize that politics influence the policy making as well as the administration aspects of the way a Government functions. However with increasing number of stakeholders and pressure groups, the politics can be kept in check and the role of politician comes under scanner to dissuade any kind of strategic policy making to benefit only a few.