System, Group, and Power: Chapter One, Text Two

Society as a System
Seeing society as a living creature does not imply that we must identify the social equivalents of legs, eyes, ears, and so on, since that is beyond the usefulness of the analogy. What it demonstrates is that we consider society and organism as similar beings, since both confront and somehow resolve the problem of survival.

The living body is a system. It is composed of a number of distinguishable parts, but these parts are interrelated with others; thus, if one part changes, the other parts are also affected, and they will change to respond...These parts are interconnected because each has a role which acts in the organization of the body as a totality.

The body is an open and adaptive system, which takes information, sustenance, energy, and other such things from the external environment and is capable of adapting itself to changes in this environment...The different parts of the body can function to keep the whole organism alive, changing the means by which it adapts and compensates for environmental changes, which can by another means threaten continued survival.

In its simplest form, the functionalist doctrine in sociology tells us to appropriate these ideas from biology and consider society as an open and adaptive system, whose different parts can function to maintain unity and without change.

Peter Worsley, 1979, p. 377-378.