1 - A kindly critique of Kingsley Davis

Summary

In his influential presidential address before the American Sociological Association, Kingsley Davis (1959) argued that because no important differences exist between functional analysis and sociological analysis generally, we should no longer speak of functional analysis as a special method unique among forms of sociological analysis. In essence, Davis claimed that every sociologist who is part of the mainstream of his or her discipline is doing the same sort of analysis that functionalists do and, therefore, that any distinction is unreal, a mere matter of semantics. He implied that if one were to select a number of social scientists who call themselves functionalists and compare them with a number who call themselves something other than functionalists, one would find no important distinctions between the two groups in methodology or in approaches to theory construction.

This chapter will show that Davis's famous presidential preachment, despite its apparently large impact on the field and wide acceptance among those who think and write about theory construction (Friedrichs, 1970:294; Gibbs, 1972:71; Hage, 1972:192, 197; Ritzer, 1983: 221; Wallace, 1969:26; but cf. Martindale, 1960: 446–47), is untenable in all its essential points: It does not show that functionalism lacks uniqueness; it does not demonstrate an inexorable lapse into teleology; it does not persuade us of the presumed methodological weakness of functional analysis (cf. Turner and Maryanski, 1979:95–96).