If we examine the life of a battalion in a barracks, we notice that there are very few differences between what the soldiers do and, one could almost say, who they are. Similarities emerge in some of their most basic personal characteristics. We find that they are all healthy and strong young men of humble origin and, in all probability, with a rural upbringing. All look the same way, eat the same way, and are treated (or abused) in the same way; all have to do the same exercises, complete the same duties, execute the same orders, and even force themselves to eliminate any remaining idiosyncrasies in their manner of walking, talking, and above all, thinking.
If, after observing barracks life, we direct our gaze to the affairs of a public office, two facts would warrant our attention: that we find such a diversity of people there and that each person seems engaged in a different activity; there are young people and seniors, there are men and women; there are some people cleaning and others typing on machines, some asking questions and others giving answers, some sitting alone in closed offices and others passing the time together. Each one seems to go their own way, and it is difficult to find two people who look the same, except in the calm way they do almost everything.
From the perspective of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1893/1964), we would be looking at characteristic examples of two different social systems: one based on individual conformity and work uniformity, and the other on pluralism and social division of labor. In one case, the social bond, the unity of the system, is composed of equivalent elements; the soldiers of the barracks are tied together by a mechanical solidarity which brings them to share interests and tasks, suffering and happiness. In the other case, the social bond emerges precisely from the differences and complementarity of the people who work in the public office; it is the diversity of functions which binds them together with an organic solidarity, which they need to extend from one employee to another in order to complete their tasks.
This example has its limits, which are no less important than they are obvious. The soldiers, besides being bound to their officers organically and not mechanically, have to specialize their work and complete different functions, which become more important and complementary the more effective the army wishes to be. For their part, the different employees would barely get anything done if they did not share a minimum of objectives, values, norms of work, and even shared motivations. Any modern organization requires elements of similarity and differentiation, of mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity between its members. Nevertheless, the fundamental idea of Durkheim’s conception is that, as a human group grows, it produces a larger social differentiation of work, but this division, instead of separating people, makes them more dependent on each other. Like the cells of a living organism, the people within a society need each other more as their own satisfaction depends more on what they each do.
The idea of comparing a society to a living organism is not new. The first to use the metaphor in modern sociology was likely Herbert Spencer, an English sociologist of the 19th century in whose work one finds the most important concepts of contemporary functionalism. According to Spencer (1972), any kind of evolution follows the same evolutionary process of living organisms, which drives chaotic homogeneity to become ordered heterogeneity through increasing differentiation and complexity. In particular, Spencer (1972, p. 57) asserts that there are three ways in which societies resemble living organisms in their evolution:
(1) They start as small groupings and then grow in size; social evolution is actually unleashed by a population's growth;
(2) Societies move from structural simplicity to complexity by means of growth;
(3) “The life and development of a society is independent from and much longer than the life and development of each of its parts.”
Consequently, Spencer does not claim that social reality lays in the sum of the parts which constitute it, but that its essence as a totality is distinct from the characteristics of its components (Spencer, 1972, p. 134-135). The chief point of similarity between society and living organisms lays in that statement, though no organism—animal or vegetable—can be compared with “the social organism” (See Text Two).
The model of the living organism as a system has not only been applied to social reality, but has been proposed as a scientific worldview for understanding all phenomena, which has been given the name “the general theory of systems” (See Buckley, 1967). Modern cybernetics has exerted significant influence over the formulation of this model, especially given its conception of self-monitoring through feedback. According to Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1976), the general theory of systems is characterized by three essential points:
(a) It asserts that the complexity of phenomena cannot be reduced to partial characteristics; phenomena always constitute a totality, and it is the whole which defines the character of the individual elements as its parts;
(b) Whereas traditional scientific frameworks only allow one to study phenomena as a causal relation between two or three variables, the general theory of systems assumes that phenomena are the product of multiple causes, and that the elements of a totality or system are related to each other in a non-linear fashion through interrelated, multi-faceted, and complex causes.
(c) The fundamental character of a system is its organization, and that unitary order tends to maintain itself in spite of partial changes; in this sense, one usually speaks of a tendency toward system equilibrium, which is identified as the maintenance of order or the identity of the whole.
Perhaps the most influential theory regarding social systems today is that of the North-American sociologist Talcott Parsons. His grandiose thinking and elaborate style have aroused furious attacks from some, but an almost religious loyalty from others (See Mills, 1961). His conservative world-view has served as an ideological framework for the social order of contemporary capitalism. It is significant that Parsons, who began developing his system in order to transcend the flawed social-scientific debate between positivism and idealism, ended up articulating a new version of the Hobbesian conception of man, transmuting the Leviathan (the authoritative state conceived by Hobbes, which would prevent individuals from destroying each other) into an omnipotent “social control” internalized in each human being, restricting their tendency to harm themselves and eliminate others (See Dawe, 1978, p. 400-408). Socialization plants a mini-Leviathan into each individual.
Parsons thought that the social system is only one part of the general system of action, that is to say, one aspect of human behavior (Parsons, 1951; 1969; 1977). Action is defined as those structures and processes by which human beings conceive symbolic intentions and try to realize them in particular situations, which are also symbolic. According to Parsons, there are four essential elements which combine into the basic whole of an action: the agent or actor, the ends, a situation, and norms (Parsons, 1968, p. 82). The analysis of human behavior should begin with the agent of the action and the subjective meaning which warrants their act, since all actors orient their behavior toward the attainment of ends or future states. For that reason, agents must control or adapt themselves to the objective conditions in which they find themselves, given that they put limits on them; nevertheless, the situation also offers them opportunities to pursue their ends. Finally, “normative orientation” indicates to them what means should be chosen and how they can utilize them for the realization of their ideal objectives.
All actions take place in some environment. Primarily, these conditions are other systems of action, that is to say, the significant behaviors of other human beings. Each action takes place in the context of what others do. But there are two non-active conditions: the physical-organic world, which includes the non-symbolic aspects of the human body, and “ultimate reality,” a concept with which Parsons refers to the tendency of societies to symbolically handle uncertainties and tragedies which put the human condition and social order under question. Systems of action evolutionarily tend toward their differentiation, that is to say, human behavior tends to exhibit four symbolically organized, distinct aspects: “(1) A search for psychical satisfaction, (2) an interest in decoding symbolic meaning, (3) a need to adapt to the physical-organic environment, and (4) an attempt to relate with other members of the human species” (Toby, 1977, p. 4).
Nearly arriving at total determinism, Parsons makes an effort to emphasize the generative role of the individual. “The human being is an active, creating, evaluating creature” (cited by Dawe, 1978, p. 401) who acts toward reality in order to mold or transform it according to their ideas. Nevertheless, this subject whom Parsons considers active and creative in theory lacks these qualities when analyzing their concrete actions, because, for Parsons, human acts are guided by values and shaped by norms. However, neither values nor norms are things which each individual chooses freely or which indicate what paths of action are possible; on the contrary, individuals have to accept those established values which characterize the social community of which they are a part. Through socialization, individuals enter the common system of values of their society; values are not an outside schema which individuals may freely choose to accept or reject, but are an essential constituent of their own personalities. Ultimately, for Parsons, individuals act according to internalized moral obligation rather than limitations from the outside, and thus he rejects even that critical distance which demarcates those who compel from those who comply. Parsonsian human liberty is, in practice, submission to an established order.
In the general system of action and in the social system, values play a predominant role. Central values, those which constitute the nucleus of a society’s cultural system, are, for Parsons, the ultimate foundation of moral authority. They impose a fundamental meaning of existence and, consequently, an order on the members of that society. These same central values likewise set the norms regulating specific behaviors, which permit the satisfaction of individual or collective needs, along with the forms by which agents have to realize their social functions. Thus, for Parsons, the hierarchy of control in the general system of action is headed by the cultural system, followed by the social system, personality system, and behavioral organism (See Figure 1). This means that the most decisive factor in shaping an action is culture, or the principal symbols and values of a collectivity. It is similarly the subsystem of culture which hierarchically directs the social system’s functioning. Conversely, the hierarchy of behavior (from which limitations and their power emerge) goes in the opposite direction in the general system of action and in the social system, beginning with the demands of the physical-organic environment, or what the environment and the body themselves allow or prevent in action.
There are four aspects which every system must contain: adaptation (A), goal-attainment (G), integration (I), and “latency,” or the maintenance of institutionalized axiological frameworks (L). Thus, to refer to Parsons's systematic conception is to bring the “AGIL” paradigm to mind, which is an ironic acronym, given the density of thought and style used to express it. We shall see these four aspects corresponding to four functions which, according to Parsons, each system must achieve for its survival and reproduction.
(a) Adaptation
Every system must confront the realities of the physical and organic environment in which they are found. The environment contains some essential factors: climate, vegetation, and fauna, for example. In this way, the environment offers possibilities, but it imposes demands and limitations at the same time. In order to survive, people must take into account their environment’s characteristics, since living in Alaska is not the same as living in the Amazon jungle; adaptation requires a search for adequate forms of nutrition and protection from the harshness of the climate in some way.
At the center of a social system, related processes of controlling the environment and adapting the individual to it constitute the economic subsystem. The economy is that aspect of the social system whose function consists of developing technologies which allow individuals and groups to respond to the needs of adaptation. People can play an economic role for they seek training, develop a skill set, and learn certain techniques. Roles lay in the amassing of acts realized by individuals as occupants of diverse positions in the social system with the end of achieving different objectives of adaptation according to the institutional values of the system. However, the setting of those objectives is not related to economic competence, but the subsystem immediately above the economic subsystem: politics.
(b) Goal-Attainment
Although individuals search for their own satisfaction and the realization of their own personal desires, individual objectives should be seen in the larger context of a social effort to execute collective objectives. For Parsons, every system tends to attain some goals which do not mirror simple survival, but instead embody the solidification of the society's values. Undoubtedly, the attainment of common goals demands that the social system develop its capacities, its competence, but also that it coordinate particular forces together and rationalize the use of resources obtained by the economic system. This organization pertains to the political subsystem.
Politics is that aspect of the social system whose function is to make decisions which relate individual ends with collective aims and which orient the members of a society toward the views needed to attain those objectives in the most effective way possible. Politics entails that the social system has control over its members and, consequently, asserts that individual objectives are confluent with collective objectives, hence the necessity of socialization, the means by which members of a system continue to assume different roles which functionally respond to the needs of the system itself. However, the integration of members into the social system corresponds to the level immediately above politics, the “societal community.”
(c) Integration
Every social system requires, according to Parsons, some criteria which establish the membership, position, rights, and obligations of each. In other words, each social system requires a structure of relations in accordance with a normative order which defines who is and who is not a member of the system, what place each should occupy, and consequently, what their rights and obligations are. The societal community is that aspect of the social system whose function consists of the integration of individuals into the system, fostering solidarity between all its members with an essential objective of the collectivity. The structure of integration is constituted by systems of kinship and stratification which differentiate members of the system, separating and uniting them at the same time.
We must emphasize that, according to Parsons’s conception, the norm is the structural component of the societal community. In other words, it is the normative order which defines an individual as a member of the social system. Consequently, norms are the specific regulations which consolidate the values of a society, determining what actions are appropriate and what forms of those actions are acceptable within the social system. Roles are, in every case, no more than a collection of norms about the behavior of a member of the social system in a given position, or “that which the agent does in his relations with others in the context of his functional significance for the social system” (Parsons, 1951, p. 25). The role “is the primary point of direct articulation between the personality of the individual and the structure of the social system” (Parsons, 1967, p. 11). Social systems are not merely the sum of the roles connected within them. Yet, this means that, within the social system, the agent is not quite a person, but the occupant of a social role, and that the roles which are defined through the process of socialization not only refer to conduct, but to the identity of the individuals. Thus, the basic unit of analysis in Parsons’s conception is not, in the final instance, the act, but the role according to position. And which roles and norms exist, therefore, depends on the values of the system (See Text Three).
(d) The Maintenance of Frameworks/Latency
Culture is that aspect of the social system whose principal function consists of preserving values and institutionalized axiological frameworks. It deals with a unity of meanings and their corresponding code, such as the conditions of their use, maintenance, and change. Such meanings are the central values which fundamentally define the identity of a social system and which justify, and thus legitimize, the norms which regulate relations between its members as the roles through which the functions demanded by the system are executed.
Parsons’s fundamental point is that, in the final instance, a social system, that is to say, a determined order of relations between members of a human group, is based on the existence of a common system of shared values, but which persists independently of its human actors. This axiological system precedes each individual, who must be socialized to it before they can act. Values themselves define the ends of action sought, the goals desired, and how one may seek to fulfill them. In other words, values are the expression of what is good and desirable in a social system. Every social system prepares an interpretation of the most important themes for its existence as a system. Thus, any society, from the most primitive to the most advanced, has an interpretation of what the world, human nature, or other crucial aspects of existence such as birth and death, love and war, are. Parsons maintains that the values of a society tend to become more operative the more they are internalized by the members of the society, that is to say, the more they lose their external, constrictive character and become part of the members’ conscience.
For the functionalist lens of systems, axiological consensus and the ensuing stability of the normative order are the normal state of a social system. Conflict is an abnormal situation which implies the social order’s dysfunction. “Stability” does not quite mean “immobility.” In fact, social systems are considered in permanent change, since they deal with living organisms. Changes are produced by a growth of internal forces or by alterations to the environment, which oblige the system to shift toward adaptation in order to survive. Parsons has developed the concept of “social progressive differentiation,” which supposes a growing functional specialization of societies: each one of the subsystems becomes more complex and differentiates into specialized parts, each attending to a distinct function. Therefore, change can be a process of gradual evolution. Nevertheless, differentiation can result in temporary breakdowns at certain times, fostering tensions, disturbances, and social conflicts.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that the majority of social systems are not societies, but subsystems of a society. For Parsons, society is a special type of social system, but it is characterized by a higher level of self-sufficiency with respect to its surroundings (See Toby, 1977, p. 6-8). A school, a sports club, inhabitants of an urban colony, a family, a barracks, or passengers on a plane are social systems, but not societies (See Anderson and Carter, 1974).
In a study conducted in 1978 with Aída Herrera, I studied a Salvadoran lodging house as a social system (Herrera and Martín-Baró, 1978). Our objective was to understand the habitational micro-world of the lodging house more deeply, so that we could elucidate those factors which hampered or facilitated its gradual transformation, in particular, the shift from tenement housing to a condominial arrangement. The lodging house is a form of collective living without individual services. It is often associated with the old centers of El Salvador’s major cities. When the well-off families uprooted themselves from their luxurious colonial properties, they converted their old mansions into multi-family houses from which they extracted very generous profits. Today, the lodging house usually contains “one or two rooms per family, oriented around a central patio for different functions and/or a corridor, which gives access to the living spaces and serves as a social and service area for each house” (Murillo, 1974, p. 381).
Upon examining the roles within the system of the lodging house, we were not surprised that the essential ones were those of the mesonera, or administrator of the lodging house, and the tenant. The principal norms established the rights and duties of the lodging house's tenants, from the payment of the lease, to visitation policies, to the use of common services. These norms established a clear hierarchy, whose head was functionally identified with the mesonera. Submission to the mesonera was a necessary condition for obtaining membership into the lodging house. The norms, demanding a more than slightly crowded living arrangement, were justified and legitimized by the tenants' need to keep living in their room within the lodging house, which they once considered a “place of transition” toward a stable living situation and, in this sense, a provisional step toward the future attainment of a life they wanted.
From the systems perspective, the same categories used for the analysis of the lodging house should be used to examine the entire society of El Salvador. By identifying the most important roles for the life of the Salvadoran social system, one could define its principal agents: landowners and industrialists, merchants and professionals, soldiers, workers, and peasants. These roles have been governed by norms which have built a rigid structure of social relations, one so severely stratified, that the rights and duties granted to different social positions have begun to vary drastically: while landowners are given all kinds of liberties, the Constitution in place until 1982 forbade campesinos from unionizing; and while it was seen as normal that the industrialist could enjoy the best medical services or leave to another country for an annual vacation, the right of the worker to demand more hygienic labor conditions was questioned, and the campesino who asked for paid leave was branded as subversive. This unequal system of rights and duties was consecrated by a system of values, at the head of which was the Salvadoran ideal of “industry-productivity” (See Martín-Baró, 1988a), which came to imply that wealth (in terms of private property) was the result of each individual's or family group’s merits.
The basic problem of the functionalist lens regarding systems lays in its own starting point, that is to say, in its initial metaphor of the social system as a cell or living organism. Assuming that a social system can be understood as an organism implies the existence of a unitary order and a coherence among all the parts which compose that social system. In fact, this framework forces one to see all society as a coherent totality, without any significant divisions beyond functional specialization, or splits beyond those produced by the progressive differentiation of subsystems which, when demanding new adjustments of the social whole, provoke evolution and progress. According to this view, if one is talking about a social system, it is because a coherent unity is involved; thus, unity is the essential assumption which allows one to speak of a system. And given this unity, this order of the system, it is logical to assume that it must have at least a modicum of harmony between the different elements or constitutive parts, and that this harmony comes from the systemic complementarity of their respective functions. Therefore, the key factor for the existence of a social system is an axiological agreement between its members, a collective acceptance of similar values and common norms of coexistence. However, to understand a society from its normative structure, in practice, to grasp the system from its institutional character, is a positivist vision which identifies a society with the social form it has at a particular moment. All that is not institutional or “institutionalizable” (able to be assimilated by the system) is dysfunctional, negative; it implies a maladjustment which must be transcended or eliminated. Hence, we see the conservative character of law, which consecrates the established order; in the case of our countries, this is an order which benefits a few at the cost of many. But from the positivist angle of Parsonsian functionalism, this is deemed normal, “natural.”
This lens also tends to assume that the factual existence of roles is a socially-necessary existence: if there exists a role which responds to a need, it is because the society itself has that need. With that in mind, the immediate connection between roles and social needs is assumed (the assumption of systemic coherence), as if the existence of a social demand was in fact more or less identical to a “natural” or “essential” need of the social system, attributing to the social whole what is perhaps no more than the demand of a social sector (for example, the dominant class), and thus ignoring the part played by processes of interpersonal and, above all, inter-group power. If lands belong to a proprietor, it is because that is the best (functional) way to legally distribute property; and if in a business, the owner, who is also the director, makes all crucial decisions, it is because that is the best (functional) way to organize a business.
In all this, this framework of systems interprets reality from the idealistic position of the normative, but it deduces reality from existing norms of social behaviors. A bit of soccer could be explained by the rules which normalize the game, but the existence of those rules could only be known by the existence of a game as it is played in a given moment. In lieu of eluding idealism and positivism, this framework commits the double error of identifying all reality with what exists (positivism), and what actually exists with what ought to be the case and how (idealism).
Comparing this theoretical model with the lodging house of our study or with Salvadoran society demonstrates the serious deficiencies of the systems framework. The dominant order in the lodging house is oppressive, depending not on the acceptance of a common normative orientation, but an exercise of social power which the mesonera or multiple tenants may initiate. Yet, the power of the mesonera does not emerge from the reality of the lodging house as a social system, but from a dependence on external power, the authority of property owners, or connections with police forces. Thus, the functioning of the lodging house does not fundamentally depend on its “demands” as a social system, but on outside demands like the tenants' jobs and, more deeply, on the conditions of the economic structure, which generate an abundant labor force that is both disposable and cheap. The value of the lodging house as a “place of transition” is shown as an ideological falsity, since the most people living there will never attain more dignified living quarters. But the illusion of being there “for just a while” keeps people under the thumb of an exploitative and oppressive order. The lodging house is thus “a site which allows a widespread population to be integrated into the process of production…, keeping it at the margins of the system at a minimal cost—prostrated, dependent, and unconscious about its own situation” (Herrera and Martín-Baró, 1978, p. 826). Theoretically speaking, it is not the case that there is harmony between the members of the lodging house as a social system: there is an objective conflict between the tenants and the mesonera—not such with the mesonera as a person, but as a representative of a power outside the system; neither is there something such as an axiological and normative “mini-subculture” held in common, but an order imposed by external demands and broader forces. The role of the mesonera is not so functional for the system of living, let alone for this particular instance of the lodging house, as much as for the benefit of its owners and of capitalists' labor demands in the cities of El Salvador.
The critique is even more scathing when we compare the reality of the Salvadoran social system with the image offered by the functionalist model. Discussing “harmony,” shared values, or common cultural patterns casts an almost sarcastic light on the facts. This is not because the war from 1980 has broken the existing social order; but because the existing “order of disorder” in El Salvador resulted in a civil war whose gravity can be measured by the fact that still, in 1988, there are neither signs of rest nor prospects for a resolution. So one cannot pretend that a common culture exists when there is a gap which so profoundly separates the members of a society, putting some alone at the service of others and creating ways of life for them, and consequently, conflicting values; nor can one speak of a normative consensus in the face of discriminatory rules regarding the rights and duties of individuals belonging to different social classes, which make some “more equal” than others. Neither can one assume that economic roles such as those presented are functional: in the case of marginal sectors, they are not even substantially incorporated into the economic system; in the case of the dominant sectors, there is a certain inefficiency suggesting the employment of the same people in managerial roles for different organizations and businesses, roles which are assigned to them not because of their personal talents as much as their membership to a class or social background (they are property owners or the sons thereof).
The consistency of a social system like that of El Salvador, which is adapted “functionally” to persist while maintaining its exploitative, marginalizing, and oppressive yoke on the vast majority of the population, shows the grave limitations of the functionalist model, which necessarily understands the social system from the perspective of the established order, along with the bias of taking historically dominant values as necessary values, or understanding current norms and roles in terms of their functionality for a social unity imposed by force and power.
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