According to structural functionalists, what has happened to the family due to modernization?

Structural-Functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown)

Structural-functionalism's core concepts are, in harness, structure and system. Under the auspices of Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) it emerged as a clear-cut alternative to hybrid Boasian functionalism and successor to Malinowski's particular brand of economism and radical individualism. It derived not from German and British precursors but mainly from Durkheimian French sociology with supplementary insights from the Russian geographer and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921).

Structural-functionalism emphasized the formal ordering of parts and their functional interrelations as contributing to the maintenance needs of a structured social system. The function of any institution (or ‘recurrent social activity’) was the part it played in the maintenance of the larger structural whole. This assumption attributed to social systems an internal integration of parts similar to that found in organisms.

Whereas Malinowskian functionalism was seen to have outworn its usefulness by 1945, and American cultural functionalism remained factionally divided, Radcliffe-Brown's successors, particularly Meyer Fortes (1906–83), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902–73), and Max Gluckman (1911–75), expanded structural-functionalism to address situation, selection, and history while continuing to work implicitly with equilibrium models of processes internal to the sociocultural system. Marxisant anthropological analyses of contradictions in structure and function supplemented structural-functionalism with a compatible, historically oriented, approach to competition, conflict, and change.

2 Differentiation

Structural functionalism holds that human societies tend to evolve toward increased differentiation, in which institutions become increasingly specialized in the functions they perform. Some scholars—most notably Alexander (1981)—have argued that the development of journalism should be seen in this light. This does make considerable sense in societies where commercialization and professionalization are relatively advanced. Journalism in these societies has increasingly become separated from party politics, and has developed norms and routines of its own, a ‘media logic’ distinct from the logic of politics. In other ways, however, the notion that journalism tends to evolve toward differentiation seems doubtful. Most importantly, such a view neglects the tendency for journalism to become integrated into market mechanisms. Professionalization, to be sure, limits this to some degree, but the ‘media logic’ that has emerged in contemporary societies is very much a joint product of professional norms and the pressures of the market, which many argue are growing increasingly strong. Other scholars thus give a very different account of the history of journalism than the structural functionalists. Habermas, for example, decries the ‘colonization’ of the public sphere by the cultural industries, and Bourdieu argues that the journalistic field once heavily influenced by the political field is now heavily influenced by that of the market.

Differentiation

Structural functionalism holds that human societies tend to evolve toward increased differentiation, in which institutions become increasingly specialized in the functions they perform. Some scholars – most notably Alexander (1981) – have argued that the development of journalism should be seen in this light. This does make considerable sense in societies where commercialization and professionalization are relatively advanced. Journalism in these societies has increasingly become separated from party politics, and has developed norms and routines of its own, a ‘media logic’ distinct from the logic of politics. In other ways, however, the notion that journalism tends to evolve toward differentiation seems doubtful. Most importantly, such a view neglects the tendency for journalism to become integrated into market mechanisms. Professionalization, to be sure, limits this to some degree, but the ‘media logic’ that has emerged in contemporary societies is very much a joint product of professional norms and the pressures of the market, which many argue are growing increasingly strong. Other scholars thus give a very different account of the history of journalism than the structural functionalists. Habermas, for example, decries the ‘colonization’ of the public sphere by the cultural industries, and Bourdieu argues that the journalistic field once heavily influenced by the political field is now heavily influenced by that of the market.

Structural Functionalism

The theory of structural functionalism is closely associated with the work of Talcott Parsons. The main question that Parsons addresses in his theory refers to processes of how individuals become members of a given society in order to guarantee the survival and maintenance of the social system (cf Parsons and Bales, 1955). According to Parsons, society is a global social system that is based on an integrated value system. The individual person participates in the social system by interacting with others in accordance with the various roles and positions he or she holds in that system. The global social system itself consists of hierarchically ordered subsystems that are characterized by corresponding institutionalized norms. On the one hand, these norms are supposed to be congruent with society's integrated value system and, on the other hand, they determine the expectations and rules attached to specific positions and roles. These are further specified with respect to a set of pattern variables comprising, for example, particularistic versus universalistic values. In this respect, the family plays a particularly salient role (Parsons and Bales, 1955). Drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Parsons contends that via identification with their same-sex parents boys and girls become socialized into specific male and female role patterns. More precisely, gender-related role specialization is characterized by instrumental or task-oriented roles for males and expressive or person-oriented roles for females. Again, these gender-specific complementary roles are supposed to maintain the equilibrium of the family system as well as the social system as a whole.

3.3.1 Structural functionalism

The theory of structural functionalism is closely associated with the work of Parsons who has written more than 150 articles and books on this topic. The main question that Parsons addresses in his theory refers to processes of how individuals become members of a given society in order to guarantee the survival and maintenance of the social system (see Parsons and Bales 1955). According to Parsons, society is a global social system which is based on an integrated value system. The individual person participates in the social system by interacting with others in accordance with the various roles and positions he or she holds in that system. The global social system itself consists of hierarchically ordered subsystems which are characterized by corresponding institutionalized norms. On the one hand, these norms are supposed to be congruent with society's integrated value system and, on the other hand, they determine the expectations and rules attached to specific positions and roles. These are further specified with respect to a set of pattern variables comprising, for example, particularistic vs. universalistic values. In this respect, the family plays a particularly salient role (Parsons and Bales 1955). Drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalytic theory Parsons contends that via identification with their same-sex parents boys and girls become socialized into specific male and female role patterns. More precisely, gender-related role specialization is characterized by instrumental or task-oriented roles for males and expressive or person-oriented roles for females. Again, these gender-specific complementary roles are supposed to maintain the equilibrium of the family system as well as the social system as a whole.

Criticism and Declining Influence

Functionalism, and in particular structural functionalism, has been the subject of strong criticism on several fronts. Although structural functionalism attained such a dominant position during the crucial period of development of the social sciences in the aftermath of World War II, it simultaneously attracted significant opposition and widespread criticism from a diversity of theoretical and methodological positions and disciplinary approaches, especially involving anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists. In the United States and Europe, the critics included Marxists, feminists, and representatives of qualitatively-oriented schools like ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and phenomenology featuring, among many others, prominent scholars like Charles W. Mills (1916–62), Alvin W. Gouldner (1920–80), George C. Homans (1910–89), Clifford James Geertz (1926–2006), Norbert Elias (1897–1990), Herbert G. Blumer (1900–87), Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011), Thomas B. Bottomore (1920–92), John Rex (1925–2011), Ralf G. Dahrendorf (1929–2009), and Jürgen Habermas. Since the late 1960s, in Latin America and, to a lesser extent, in Africa and Asia, highly normative intellectual and political projects largely informed by Parsons' structural functionalism, particularly “modernization” and “development” theory and politics, became identified with the promotion and justification of US intervention, and neocolonialism more generally, prompting strong reactions that led to the development of an autonomous body of thought, broadly known as “dependency theory.” These critics included, from diverse perspectives, “structural” economists like Raúl Prebisch (1901–86) and Celso M. Furtado (1920–2004), neo-Marxist economists like Samir Amin (1931–2018), and Marxist and neo-Marxist sociologists like Pablo González Casanova, Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–97), and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, among others. In this connection, it must be remarked that dependency theory, particularly its neo-Marxist strands, would become a significant influence in the early development of critical political ecology since the 1970s.

The criticisms directed to structural functionalism in this stage (1950s–1970s) were wide ranging, both in relation to theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as to what many perceived to be its political and ideological implications. Among other key criticisms, it can be mentioned:

Because of its organismic analogies in the conceptualization of social systems and its emphasis on structural equilibrium and social order, functionalist analysis would be unable to properly account for social change and the role of social conflict in driving it.

For similar reasons, functionalism was criticized as being an intrinsically conservative, for some even reactionary, approach because of its emphasis on system integration, stability, and social consensus that would render unobservable the internal contradictions of social systems and related conflicts.

Functionalists would be unable to account for the causes driving the process of structural and functional differentiation that is at the center of functionalist analysis, and they would have conflated the concepts of “cause” and “function.”

Most functionalist explanations would be either tautological (the existence of a given function is explained as a response to structural needs, while the maintenance of the structure is explained as being the result of the functions) or teleological (the emergence of structures is explained as a response to the ends or needs existing in a given system).

Despite paying lip service to human agency, structural functionalists would play down or even ignore its significance, because of its emphasis on the impact of institutions and other social structures on individual behavior.

The highly ambitious enterprise of structural functionalism to provide a fully-comprehensive theory of society would have been grounded on largely speculative theorizing, devoid of meaningful empirical backing.

The structural-functionalist approach to “development” would be unilinear and mechanical. It would also be reductionist and ethnocentric, as it took post–World War II US capitalist society and democracy as the model on which the “universal” features of structural-functionalist “social system” theory and its practical applications were developed, and then promoted worldwide.

These and other long-standing criticisms of functionalism and structural functionalism were restated and further developed since the late 1970s, to a large extent in connection with the diversification and fragmentation of theoretical and methodological approaches experienced by the social sciences in this period. Some commentators even alleged that this process would have led to the demise of functionalism to the point that it would have almost disappeared from the social sciences by the 1980s, which seen in historical perspective seems somewhat overstated. Nevertheless, in addition to the continued restatement of the critiques accumulated since the 1950s, new developments with strong impact in the social sciences informed the emergence of a range of critical and revisionist assessments of core tenets and principles of Western scientific thought, including social theory and functionalist and structural-functionalist theory in particular. In different ways and from diverse perspectives, these developments inspired renewed efforts to transcend the long-standing dichotomic reductionisms and determinisms characterizing Western thought, such as human–nonhuman, mind–body, subject–object, agency–structure, constructivism–realism, component part–totality, cause effect, among others, as well as challenging the notion of universally applicable “social laws,” the persistence of linearity and monocausality in scientific explanations, and the feasibility of developing all-encompassing, integral theories of human society, like Parsons'. It can be argued that, perhaps, the most influential of these developments concern the impact of complexity and systems theories, prompted by major advancements in chemistry, cybernetics, neurobiology, and physics, and the poststructural and postmodernist “turn” led by philosophers.

Advances in the fields of systems and complexity theories associated with the application of the second law of thermodynamics allowed breakthroughs in the understanding of the processes of organization and transformation of physical matter and their relationship with social processes. Perhaps the most influential contributions relevant to our topic are associated with Karl L. von Bertalanffy's (1901–72) general systems theory, Ilya R. Prigogine's (1917–2003) theories of “dissipative structures” and complex systems, and the work of Humberto Maturana, Francisco J. Varela García (1946–2001), and Ricardo B. Uribe on the self-maintaining and self-reproducing capabilities of living beings, which they termed “autopoiesis.” These studies demonstrated that physical systems' responses to changes in their environment, such as states of nonequilibrium produced by critical instabilities, include self-organization, self-restructuring, and self-reordering that follow unpredictable spatial and temporal patterns. The outcome of system instability, nonequilibrium, and disorder is not necessarily chaos and, to the contrary, these critical states can prompt processes of systemic self-organization and self-restructuring leading to the emergence of higher-level orderings. A major contribution of the developments in complexity and systems theories has been the rupture with the classical Western concept of universally linear, mechanical, and monocausal explanations in favor of more advanced understandings of the nonlinearity, multicausality and indeterminacy of the emergence, transformation, structuring, and ordering of phenomena and processes characterizing complex systems. These and other contributions informed the development of more advanced social systems theories, including a major revision and revival of functionalism by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–98), which is briefly discussed later.

The second major impact mentioned earlier is related to the renewed criticism of the foundations and principles of modern science, including functionalism and structural functionalism, by poststructural and postmodernist authors led, among others, by Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930–92), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98). A significant aspect has been the reformulation of the traditional understanding of the relationships between the “components parts” and the “totalities” or “systems” that they compose, which is at the center of functionalist and structural-functionalist thinking. The inspiration for this reformulation has been attributed to the work of Deleuze and Guattari back in the 1980s, particularly their concept of “assemblage,” which has been further developed, among others by Manuel DeLanda. The notion of “assemblage” refers to the “totalities” or “wholes” and is meant to provide an alternative to the conventional organismic understanding of the interactions between “structures” and its component parts or “functions,” as well as transcending other reductionist and deterministic dichotomic oppositions, such as human–nonhuman. The notion of “assemblage” has some commonalities with Actor–Network Theory's concepts of “network constructions,” “quasi objects,” or “collective things,” as formulated by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, as the heterogenous component parts of assemblages would be human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, and characterized by nonfixed, open and changing interactions, forms, and lifetimes of the assemblages.

In conventional functionalist thinking, the “parts” are “functions” essential for the existence of the “whole,” and the interactions between “parts” and “whole” would be characterized by “interiority,” that is, the “parts” are inner components of the “whole” that they constitute, which is a totality characterized by its tendency toward integration and equilibrium. In contrast, the notion of “assemblage” postulates that the interactions between “parts” and “whole” would be characterized by “exteriority,” as component “parts” would not have a biunivocal, invariant, exclusive relationship as “functions” of a particular “whole,” but rather can be “parts” of an infinite number of “wholes” simultaneously. Like complexity theory, assemblage theory gives preeminence to emergent properties, which cannot be reduced to the properties of the existing component parts. Rather, emergent properties result from the interactions between an assemblage's component parts and help to explain the processes of transformation including the development of new assemblages. Assemblages theory has informed a wide range of new developments in geography, particularly in sociospatial theory, prompting ongoing debates about its commonalities, strengths, and comparative advantages vis-à-vis Actor–Network Theory, articulation theory, and related approaches.

4 Conclusion: The Disappearance of a Distinctive Conflict Sociology

Now that the great edifices of structural functionalism and Marxism seem finally to have collapsed, the agnostic, non-essentialist approach implied by the idea of conflict as endemic but mundane has probably become the dominant one in Western sociology. Yes, conflict is always likely to be a part of human relations; it can be ‘about’ almost anything; it does not necessarily have to be absorbed and tamed for some kind of social order to survive; it is not a special aspect of social life, but just a part of it. Research and theory based on assumptions of this kind cluster around the bottom right-hand corner of box IV (Fig. 1). Weber, perhaps along with Simmel, is probably the founding father whose approach to conflict appears most comfortable to contemporary sociologists. As heirs to the Marxist tradition seek to salvage something while dropping the dogmatism and historical certainty, they reach similar conclusions.

The more normal that conflict is seen, the more a specific conflict sociology will cease to exist. This becomes particularly true as sociological theory turns increasingly to theories based on models of rational action by calculating actors—approaches which are also found in Weber and Simmel (see Rational Choice Theory in Sociology). In these models actors are always depicted as having interests; and where there are interests, conflicts among them are normal and taken for granted (for example, Knight 1992).

For conflict sociology to continue to exist, the various specialisms of the discipline would need to draw on similar ideas and hypotheses when they come to instances of conflict within their particular area. This does happen to a limited extent. For example, studies of how protest groups engaged in difficult conflicts sustain their morale and endurance can be extended across from ethnic to industrial or environmental movements. Studies of the role of violence and the effect of violence on perpetrators, victims and outsiders may also be able to share knowledge across conflicts concerning very different issues. Beyond this however not much survives.

It has been noted at several points above how sociological approaches to conflict have often reflected developments in the world at large: obsession with society's capacity for upheaval after the first half of the twentieth century; Dahrendorf's concern to treat conflict as normal in the light of the German past; Rex's African concern to study racial conflict. Today's postmodern, post-Cold War world presents a scene in which conflict seems at once endemic but directionless, and sociological theory is reflecting that. Were the heartland of theoretical development to lie, not in the so-called ‘advanced’ societies, but in parts of the world where religious and ethnic struggles are fundamental to social life, the situation would probably be rather different (Ratcliffe 1994, Venkateswarlu 1992). And since it must not be expected that social change in the advanced societies has come to an end, it may well be that after a number of years the emphasis of the above account will appear very dated.

Reactions to Structural Functionalism

In Britain and her colonies, the structural functionalism now associated chiefly with Evans-Pritchard and Fortes was under pressure after the war. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard himself repudiated his former views in 1949, arguing that the search for ‘natural laws of society’ had been shown to be futile and that anthropology should fashion itself as a humanities discipline rather than a natural science. Retrospectively, this statement has often been quoted as marking a shift ‘from function to meaning’ in the discipline's priorities; Kroeber expressed similar views in the United States. Others found other paths away from what was increasingly seen as a conceptual straitjacket. Edmund R. Leach, whose Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), suggested a departure from functionalist orthodoxies, notably Radcliffe-Brown's dictum that social systems tend to be in equilibrium and Malinowski's view of myths as integrating ‘social charters,’ would later be a promoter and critic of structuralism in Britain. Leach's contemporary Raymond Firth proposed a distinction between social structure (the statuses in society) and social organization, which he saw as the actual process of social life, whereby choice and individual whims were related to structural constraints. Later in the 1950s and 1960s, several younger social anthropologists, notably F.G. Bailey and Fredrik Barth, followed Firth's lead as well as the theory of games (a recent development in economics) in refining an actor-centered perspective on social life. Max Gluckman, a former student of Radcliffe-Brown and a close associate of Evans-Pritchard, also abandoned the strong holist program of the structural functionalists, reconceptualizing social structure as a loose set of constraints, while emphasizing the importance of individual actors. Gluckman's colleagues included several important Africanists such as A.L. Epstein, J. Clyde Mitchell, and Elizabeth Colson. Working in southern Africa, this group pioneered urban anthropology and ethnicity studies in the 1950s and 1960s.

Criticism, Demise, and Revival of Functionalism

Since the 1970s functionalism, and in particular structural functionalism, became the subject of strong criticism on a number of fronts. First, because of its organismic analogies in the conceptualization of social systems and its emphasis on structural equilibrium and social order functionalist analysis was charged with been unable to account for social change. Second, for similar reasons functionalism was criticized as being an intrinsically conservative approach because of its emphasis on system integration, stability, and social consensus that would render unobservable the internal contradictions of social systems. Third, according to the critics functionalists would be unable to account for the causes driving the process of structural and functional differentiation that is at the center of functionalist analysis and they would have conflated the concepts of cause and function. Moreover, most functionalist explanations would be either tautological (the existence of a given function is explained as a response to structural needs, while the maintenance of the structure is explained as being the result of the functions) or teleological (the emergence of structures is explained as a response to the ends or needs existing in a given system). These and other criticisms of functionalism became increasingly louder during the 1970s, at the same time that the social sciences were experiencing a rapid diversification and fragmentation of theoretical and methodological approaches. According to some commentators this process would have led to the demise of functionalism to the point that it would have almost disappeared from the social sciences by the 1980s.

However, despite its critics functionalism has survived in several areas of scientific analysis and explanation. For instance, the work of functionalist political geographers like Hartshorne has been influential in the development of research on comparative border studies and regional integration (and geopolitical studies at large), a very dynamic interdisciplinary field, particularly in continental Europe. More generally, the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) developed a radical reformulation of Talcott Parsons’ approach aimed at providing a comprehensive theory of society by bringing together elements from cybernetics, neurobiology, and German idealist philosophy that has also influenced developments in human geography. Luhmann proposed a theory of social systems whereby human beings are conceptualized not as part of society but as part of its environment. For this reason Luhmann's theory has been labeled posthumanist, as its main thrust is to de-link the social from the human, breaking away from classical anthropocentrism. In turn, society is defined as a closed communication system, self-referential and reflexive, and the function of the (economic, legal, political, and other) subsystems is that of reducing the increasing complexity of information flows to ensure system stability and survival. He also stressed the centrality of functional equivalence in the maintenance of systemic equilibrium. Luhmann's theory has informed new work in human geography, particularly in Europe and especially in Germany, aimed at developing new theoretical approaches to sociospatial analysis, although these authors do not draw as much inspiration from Luhmann's functionalism as they do from his sophisticated intertwining of systems theory and neurobiology.

While Luhmann's functionalism has clear conservative overtones, Oxford philosopher Gerry Cohen has argued for the application of functionalist analysis within the framework of Marxist theory. For Cohen, although functional analysis could not help to explain the original cause of a certain social structure (i.e., an institution or cultural trait that contributes to the reproduction of the capitalist social order), it helps to explain the permanence of such structure over time. An ongoing debate prompted by Cohen's work focuses on the compatibility of functionalist principles with the Marxist analytical framework. In this connection, some commentators have pointed out the influence of functionalist concepts in the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey, for instance in his explanation of suburbanization processes and their role in contributing toward the stability of the capitalist system by fostering consumption, commodity fetishism, and preempting revolutionary change. However, perhaps the most explicit and comprehensive attempt to revitalize and reformulate functionalist analysis has been carried out by sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Paul Colomy, who have actually termed their approach ‘neofunctionalism’. These authors aim at reinvigorating Talcott Parsons’ ambitions of producing an integrated and multidimensional theory of society by relating it to other theoretical frameworks, preserving and at the same taking critical distance from Parsons’ functionalism. These efforts have encountered significant resistance and prompted and ongoing and open debate about the usefulness and soundness of functionalism for contemporary social science.

Strategic Ignorance as an Organizational Source

When Schneider (1962) has particularly drawn attention on structural functionalism's usefulness for analyzing the functions of ignorance in institutional contexts, he did so by developing what Abbott (2010: p. 186) later has called a ‘liberating’ view on ignorance: aiming at specifying those conditions where ignorance might lead to positive, more democratic results. Apart from taking ignorance's protective function exercised in the context of immediate interaction, or its consequences for specific persons in a situational interaction context into account, like in parent–child interaction or a physician–patient relationship, Schneider thought of more institutionalized examples of ignorance's consequences for a wider social structure. Thus, he mentioned Burton Clark's (1960) discovery of the ‘cooling out function’ of higher education institutions, as informal practices of discouraging and ‘adjusting’ students' expectations toward aspiring less ambitious goals, and Peter Blau's (1955) study on social dynamics in bureaucratic institutions, in which ‘gain through indirection’, as one form of ignorance, is often an implicit practice of concern. In his study, Blau outlined how institutional requirements can be reached by bureaucratic mechanisms neutralizing possible bias of actors that, unwittingly or not, might influence decision-making practices by prejudices against minorities. “In functional terms, a social pattern with the latent function of impartiality, statistical records, was more effective than a different pattern with the same manifest function, antidiscrimination rules. Since latent function is defined as an unintended consequence, the concept implies that the social behavior involved is motivated by factors other than the function under consideration” (Blau, 1955: p. 81). To this insight Schneider added the relevance of ignorance involved, conditioning more effective, nondiscriminatory placements, when bureaucratic actors “simply did not know that their action was bringing those things about” (Schneider, 1962: p. 501).

In the sociological study of organizations, ignorance has been considered as fundamental resource of any bargaining relationship between strategic actors, characterizing social power as their structural capacity to act by controlling ‘zones of uncertainty’ (Crozier and Friedberg, 1977). James March and Herbert Simon identified organizational norms for dealing with ignorance and uncertainties, anomalies, and risk, in constructing a self-confirming environment by ‘absorbing’ particular questions, inquiries, or communications about these (March and Simon, 1958). Taking the ‘organized anarchy’ of decision making at the university as an empirical example, Michael Cohen et al. (1972) formulated their ‘garbage can model of organizational choice’. The authors underlined that under conditions of uncertainty, indicated by unclear technology, fluid participation, and problematic preferences, decision-making practices in organizations are more complex than suggested by classical analyses of rational action in these structural contexts. Rather, they suggested conceiving these as contingent outcomes of four intersecting variables: a stream of choice, of problems, of energy from participants, and a rate of flow of solutions. Although Smithson's attempt to reconcile formal with social and behavioral sciences sometimes appear as rather abstract analysis, those interested in further research on ignorance in organizational research may find useful hints there (Smithson, 1989: pp. 239ff.).

Similar to these early findings in the sociology of organizations, recent science and technology studies have attempted to identify organizational strategies for constructing ignorance by the denial, dismissal, diversion, and displacement of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ (Rayner, 2012) in tension or outright contradiction with self-consistent institutional definitions of situations. Linsey McGoey (2012) has investigated the strategic use of ignorance as part of organizational pressures where organizations' members seek to preserve and cultivate ignorance rather than to dispel it. She has analyzed strategies how members mobilize strategic unknowns of a situation as a tool of social control, command of resources, denial of liability, and assertion of expert control in the face of unpredictable outcomes. In contrast to Abbott's (2010) emphasis on different qualities of ignorance, and complementary to his remark that scholarly practices of articulating knowledge claims are accompanied by those of acknowledging ignorance, McGoey underscored the need to take scales of ignorance into account in order to recognize its value as an organizational resource: “(S)trategic ignorance is often more institutionally advantageous the more widely it is individually mobilized … because of the shared willingness of individuals to band together in dismissing unsettling knowledge” (McGoey, 2012: p. 570).