Sustainability and the Crisis of the Theoretical Functional Model

For some time, the prevailing paradigm in sociology was functionalism—particularly that originating in North America—and was considered an acceptable “sociological theory.” Talcott Parsons’s perspective originated from a mechanistic construction of social systems, using the AGIL model. Its four-part ideal type of organizational functioning served the purpose of optimizing the performance of social units in terms of efficiency. It was considered effectual to assume the existence of a regulating principle as a common and undisputed model that governs society. In this common principle, the dominant values involved considerations of both material and power, two of the prevailing categories of the fifties and sixties eras. Profit and performance were balanced and evaluated. However, the issue of sustainability rendered this scheme and the traditional analytic model of functionalism inadequate; it had to make way for fresh theories of the quality of life based on solidarity, equality, sociability, and other attributes that characterize the social individual. An essential recycling of this theory, starting from its assumptions in Marx’s Critics of the Political Economy, could be used in a prospective theoretical approach to developing principles for a new anthropology.