Social functions are the functions that a community of people needs to perform in order to main and develop the social systems. Within any given social system a number of collective functions need to be performed for the system to be maintained and develop over time, these functions might include, basic biological reproduction of the population for which there is the institution of the family or economic functions such as manufacturing products for which there are businesses or political functions such as collective social decision making for which there is the institution of government. All of these are social systems that have to aggregate individuals, assign functional roles to them, with all of these roles being integrated within some overarching process that takes in resources of some kind and performs an operation on them to produce some required output - this is a social function.