Functionalism holds that any cultural phenomenon, whether it is an abstract social phenomenon, such as social system, ideology, customs and habits, or a concrete material phenomenon, such as walking sticks, tools, utensils and so on. It has the function of meeting the needs of human real life, that is, it has certain functions. Each of them is interrelated and interacts with other phenomena, and is an inseparable part of the whole. However, Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown are academically different. Malinowski emphasized the study of human biological needs; Radcliffe-Brown focused on the study of "social structure", so later people used to call Radcliffe-Brown's theory "structure-function theory". Their differences divide the functional school into two different traditions.

In the mid-1930s, some scholars from the Sociology Department of yenching university, China translated and introduced some major works of the Functional School, invited Radcliffe Brown to give lectures and tutor graduate students in China, sent researchers to Britain, and gave lectures directly in Malinowski. They also inspected some ethnic minorities in China with reference to functionalism. They are called China's functional school.

Functional school is opposite to evolutionary school, historical school and communication school. They did a lot of work directly or indirectly to promote the British government's colonial policy, so they got the support of the government.

After World War II, colonial countries became independent one after another. They do not welcome anthropologists who serve the imperialist colonial policy to conduct on-the-spot investigations. Therefore, the functionalist theory with field investigation as the main research method is no longer as fashionable as before. With the changes of the times and the development of science, more and more western anthropologists have realized the limitations of functionalism theory, thus alienating it. The rise of the French structuralist school in 1950s and the internal division of the British functionalist school also contributed to the decline of the influence of the functionalist school.

Over the past 60 years, the British Functionalism School has developed and changed a lot in terms of team, organization and academic viewpoint. Three generations have been formed in the team, namely Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and the students they trained in the 1920s and 1930s. This is the first generation. The second generation entered structural anthropology after World War II. Around 1963, the third generation entered structural anthropology. In terms of institutions, six teaching and research centers have been formed, namely, the Department of Anthropology of London School of Economics and Political Science (mainly based in Marin Noszky), the Department of Anthropology of London University, the Department of Social Anthropology of Institute of Oriental and African Studies, the Department of Social Anthropology of Oxford University (Radcliffe-Brown main base), the Department of Social Anthropology of Cambridge University and the Department of Anthropology of Manchester University. After the second generation 1972 mastered the leadership of this school, there were some divisions in academic views. For example, the new structuralism theory of E.R. Leach, an anthropologist at Cambridge University, is an example.