Functional Explanation Again

Kelley Walker kelley at interpactinc.com
Wed Mar 21 10:49:14 PST 2001


At 11:19 AM 3/21/01 -0500, Dennis Breslin wrote:


>What is gained here? Identifying an agent whose efforts are oriented to
>particular goals seems to make function little more than a synonym for
>intention. Functional explanations seem to make sense in some kind
>of systems analysis where any reference to intention is metaphor and
>the discretion of agents becomes irrelevant.
>
>DB

a great ethnography that shows why this isn't so: _Forgive and Remember: managing medical failure_ by Charles Bosk. Bosk shows how structural functionalism is best understood in the context of ethnographic accounts of, in this case, surgical training. similarly, the very excellent work of Robert Jackall, _Moral Mazes: The world of corporate managers_ shows something similar wrt upper level managers.

for anyone who wants to understand academia, one need only extend the insights of these two books!

kelley



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