Dysfunction

Dysfunction Definition

Dysfunction refers to any social activity or institution that makes a negative contribution to the maintenance or effective working of a functioning social system. Where a part of the social structure does not positively contribute to society’s maintenance but instead causes disharmony and conflict rather than coherence and integration, it is said to be dysfunctional — as, for example, when teenage anomie disrupts the labor market or the education system.

Merton’s Flexible Functionalism

The term owes its currency to Robert Merton, who used it to produce a more flexible functionalism. Classical functionalism carried a biological metaphor: just as the kidney is understood by the part it plays in keeping the body working, a social institution is understood by its contribution to maintaining the whole society. Speaking of an institution’s “function” — as in “the primary function of the family is to produce and socialize the next generation” — lends a certain grandeur missing from “consequence” or “effect,” and because activities injurious to a society are unlikely to become institutionalized, function came to seem positive almost by definition (the prefix “eu-,” for good functions, died from neglect, while “dys-” survived to describe patterned activity with harmful consequences). Merton’s innovation was to abandon the assumption that everything existing in society must serve a positive function for its maintenance, opening functional analysis to the harmful effects of institutions as well.

Mixed Consequences

An activity has dysfunctions when some of its consequences impede the workings of another social activity or institution — and the same activity may be dysfunctional for one activity, eufunctional (helpful) for another, or a mixture of both for the same one. Bureaucratic rule-following is the classic illustration: beneficial in producing predictable, efficient, and impersonal outcomes, it becomes dysfunctional when pursued too far, as rule-following turns into an end in itself and officials lose sight of the organization’s objectives. Sociologists thus often employ the term to explain how an organizational feature that is generally functional — helping the organization survive — may under certain circumstances become dysfunctional and even pathological for it.