Assess the usefulness of functionalist approaches

Students explore factors related to why psychoactive substances are used, abused, and misused.

But the theory of government remained an overarching theoretical concept in continental Europe right to the end of the nineteenth century e.

The sciences concerned with the state have been differentiated and specialized. Public law, economics, political science, political sociology, geography, planning, and other academic disciplines have developed their own systems of reference for theory and analysis. To some degree the scientific dialects have become rites of passage, restricting access to the mysteries of special knowledge to the initiated few.

Interdisciplinary discussion has become difficult and is neglected, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. On the one hand it has benefited from compartmentalization. Thus the impressive system of the Viennese doctrine of so-called pure law came into being.

And thus it became possible continuously to hone and refine legal techniques. In continental Europe, lawyers traditionally do not deal with the state as an abstraction only.

They also look at it as a reality. Yet most public law specialists are not interested in empirical studies. They prefer an intuitive approach. Whilst this may be possible where the scholar is thoroughly acquainted with the object of his studies and where he is aware of his ideological biases, both these prerequisites do not always obtain.

But worse still is the habit of deducing normative findings from general principles such as democracy or federalism without having first analysed the extra-legal content of such concepts.

And yet the instruments for such theoretical and empirical analysis are there.

Assess the usefulness of functionalist approaches in explaining crime Essay Sample

They can be adapted from the methodology of political science and, to some extent, of political economy. Even some of the necessary information can be found there.

They all claim that their findings are relevant to policy making. They all want to furnish basic information for political and administrative decision making. But as these findings are only relevant to parts of the problem and as they may very often be interpreted contradictorily, what really happens is that researchers do not furnish basic data for decision making but produce arguments for preconceived ideas.

Obviously, this selective dealing with scientific data by political office-holders can never be and should never be quite eliminated.

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Already the words used - special district and democracy - exemplify the different connotations they have for economists, lawyers and political scientists.

Without mastering the different vocabularies nobody can solve the organizational problem.

The former and still now predominant approach in the humanities emphasized relations of cause and effect. Systems theories -preceded by Gestalt psychology, Pepper's contextualism and Henderson's theory of balance- are different. They look for interrelations within a whole, the system, whose parts must not be treated in isolation.

Systems theories do not build hierarchies. The first influential theoretician was von Bertalanffy in the thirties. At about the same time Parsons introduced systems thinking into social science.

In connection with Wiener's cybernetics systematic study of communications and control in organizations of all kinds: It is able to show and analyse systemic relationships between findings of different scientific disciplines.Richard Bland College of William & Mary is the only two-year residential college in Virginia.

The residence halls were built in and offer apartment-style living with state-of-the-art amenities. A. Introduction. Contents Index End. In their discourses on government, Plato and Aristotle discussed all those problems which were important to an Attic citizen if he were to understand and order his benjaminpohle.com encyclopædic approach was also used in theories of government that were developed in the Middle Ages (Rehm L/).

Assess the usefulness of functionalist approaches in explaining crime Essay Sample. Functionalist approach towards crime & deviance is seen as a top down approach as it looks at society as a whole, stating that criminal behaviour is caused by society itself except from being caused through an individual’s biology & psychology.

Evaluate the usefulness of Functionalist theories to our understanding of crime and deviance (40 marks) A functionalist analysis of crime and deviance begins with society as a whole.

This document has been revised in October-November In the first part of the document I have attempted to summarise some of the main developments in education policy between and but, very unfortunately, even my summary will have to be .

This article reviews the literature on the contingency theory of management accounting since the review by the author. It traces the expansion of this literature and critically outlines some of the major themes explored over this period.