Although it is clear that many of the major contemporary social problems center on the extent to which social institutions do or do not function as they are meant to do, it is still unclear exactly what the function of a social institution is—and thus when this function is undermined. This paper presents and defends a novel theory of social functionalism—presentist social functionalism—to answer these questions. According to this theory, the function of social institutions is grounded in those of their features that, in the current cultural environment, increase their chances to survive or reproduce. To bring out the fruitfulness of this account, the paper analyzes the (still controversial) question of the function of corporations, and shows that present social functionalism (a) points to the kinds of data that would be helpful to determine this function, (b) brings up hitherto overlooked theoretical possibilities, and (c) allows for the clearer assessment and handling of corporate corruption.

尽管很明显，当代许多主要的社会问题都集中在社会制度按其应有的功能发挥或不发挥作用的程度上，但仍不清楚社会制度的确切功能是什么——因此当功能受到破坏。本文提出并捍卫了一种新的社会功能主义理论——呈现主义社会功能主义——来回答这些问题。根据这一理论，社会制度的功能基于它们的特征，在当前的文化环境中，这些特征增加了它们生存或繁殖的机会。为了使这一论述富有成效，本文分析了公司功能的（仍然存在争议的）问题，