attainment– the need to be organized so as to achieve collective objectives
such as waging war. Thirdly, there is the function of integrationor main-
taining social support for the system. Fourthly, Parsons identifies the func-
tion of pattern maintenance, or the need for stability and continuity.
However different societies might be in other respects, they all have to
develop ways of performing these essential functions if they are to survive.
Social structures have to exist in order to perform functions. The task of the
social scientist is to identify and classify the structures that are developed in
different societies for this purpose.
Adaptation was thought to be particularly important. If that could be
achieved then societies could change in response to changes in the environ-
ment. This modifies the idea of maintaining stability and continuity. In the
natural world biological organisms can adapt to a changing environment,
albeit over very long periods of time. They can cope with change and sur-
vive. Societies and political systems, it was argued, have to do the same.
The application of modernization theory to politics was combined with a
particular approach to social anthropology to produce a functionalistinter-
pretation of political change. It had a major impact on the comparative study
of politics when it appeared that the existing tools of political analysis were
inappropriate for the task of including within a comparative analytical
framework the new states appearing in the international political arena after
the Second World War.
The organic metaphor
The very term ‘function’ suggests among other things an analogy between
a society and a biological organism. In biology ‘function’ refers to the con-
tribution which different parts of an organism make to its maintenance. This
biological analogy is useful to remember in order to get a grip on the
presuppositions that were articulated about politics and government by this
school of thought. Organizations such as political parties or administrative
agencies were deemed to have little meaning until it was known what
purposes they serve for the functioning of the organism as a whole
(Almond, 1965, p. 184).
Political development theory borrowed two other key ideas from biology:
interdependenceandequilibrium. Interdependence means that when one
component of an organism changes, the organism as a whole is affected. For
example, the emergence of mass political parties or the mass media
‘changes the performance of all the other structures of the political system,
50 Understanding Third World Politics