Manifest And Latent Functions Essay

Robert Merton in his piece “Manifest and Latent and Dysfunctions” functions introduced the idea of both manifest and latent functions as social scientific concepts to help be used in a functional analysis. Both these functions effect the social institutions that an average person may interact with in normal daily life. Manifest functions are functions in which people intend to do and have knowledge of the outcome going into the situation. Latent Functions are those functions in which are the unknown functions and are often the unseen consequences of a situation. Everyday institutions such as, family life, school life and religious life are influenced by both manifest and latent functions. Family life is the most basic of the social institutions. In one way or another each individual person has had an interaction with family and therefor has in one way affected them. The family has numerous manifest functions that will affect the individual. One of these
The most obvious of the manifest functions is to educate the future generations. The kids go to school and learn what is taught and hopefully retain this information as the continue on and get their diplomas. The next function is that of socialization. Much like the families function they learn how to interact with society and become their own individual by interacting with different groups of people within their school. One of the latent functions of school life is to find friend and even a romantic partner. School group similar age and generally backgrounds, depending on the school district, and people generally try and fit in within the people they are most similar with. Depending on which school they go to later in life can determine where they can go later in life. If they go to an Ivy league they are more likely to get a better job and be more prominent in society than someone who went to a community