Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902–May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist. Parsons worked at Harvard University. His work was enormously influential through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, particularly in America, but fell gradually out of favor from that time on.

Life

Talcott Parsons was born December 13, 1902 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Parsons' father was a Congregational minister. Parsons father was active in the social reform movement Social Gospel, which is a Protestant Christian movement advocating the belief that the Second Coming could not occur until man rid himself of all social evils, and sought to do so. Religion played a large role in Talcott Parsons' upbringing, he was called 'the last Puritan' by his student, Jesse R. Pitts [1]. Parson's father was also made president of a small college in Ohio, which shows the academic emphasis in Parson's life.

Parsons initially had wanted to be a biologist or doctor. He graduated from Amherst College with majors in biology and philosophy. Parsons first became interested in sociology under Amherst professor Walter Hamilton though he was not originally exposed to the traditional Chicago or European schools of sociology. After Amherst, he entered the London School of Economics, where he was exposed to the work of Harold Laski, Richard Tawney, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Leonard Hobhouse. He then moved to the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, where he received his Ph.D. in sociology and economics in 1927. While still working on his dissertation, Parsons taught economics at Amherst for one year. He joined Harvard as an instructor of economics in 1927, where he worked until 1974. Parsons died in Munich, Germany, of heart failure, in 1979.

Parsons met his wife, Helen Walker, while at the London School of Economics. The two were married until Parsons' death in 1979. Parsons' son, Charles Parsons, is a distinguished figure in philosophy of mathematics.

Work

Parsons served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927-1973. He was a central figure in its Department of Social Relations, the creation of which reflected Parson's vision of an integrated social science. For many years he was one of the best-known sociologists in the world.

Parsons' analysis was largely developed within his major published works:

The Structure of Social Action (1937),
The Social System (1951),
Structure and Process in Modern Societies (1960),
Sociological Theory and Modern Society (1968),
Politics and Social Structure (1969).

Parsons was an advocate of "grand theory," an attempt to integrate all the social sciences into an overarching theoretical framework. His early work—"The Structure of Social Action"—reviewed the output of his predecessors, especially Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, and Émile Durkheim, and attempted to derive from them a single "action theory" based on the assumptions that human action is voluntary, intentional, and symbolic. Later, he became involved in a large range of fields from medical sociology (where he developed the concept of the sick role to psychoanalysis—personally undergoing full training as a lay analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute) to anthropology, to small group dynamics (working extensively with Robert Freed Bales), to race relations and then economics and education.

Functionalism

Parsons produced a general theoretical system for the analysis of society that came to be called structural functionalism in which every group or society tends to fulfill four "functional imperatives.":

adaptation to the physical and social environment;
goal attainment, which is the need to define primary goals and enlist individuals to strive to attain these goals;
integration, the coordination of the society or group as a cohesive whole;
latency, maintaining the motivation of individuals to perform their roles according to social expectations.

Gloss

Parsons used the word "gloss" to describe how the mind constructs reality. Studies have shown that our brains "filter" the data coming from our senses. This "filtering" is largely unconsciously created and determined by biology, cultural constructs including language, personal experience, belief systems, etcetera. Different cultures create different glosses, all called reality. Failure to recognize 'glossing', then, may explain what happens when cultures collide.

Pattern variables

Perhaps the most noteworthy theoretical contributions from Parsons were the formulations of pattern variables, the AGIL Paradigm, and the Unit Act. Parsons asserted that there were two dimensions to societies: instrumental and expressive. By this he meant that there are qualitative differences between kinds of social interaction. Essentially, he observed that people can have personalized and formally detached relationships based on the roles that they play. The characteristics that were associated with each kind of interaction he called the pattern variables.

Some examples of expressive societies would include families, churches, clubs, crowds, and smaller social settings. Examples of instrumental societies would include bureaucracies, aggregates, and markets.

Criticisms

Parsons was criticized by his contemporary, C. Wright Mills, for his grand theory. Mills believed grand theory was not based on enough fact and was the product of sociologists attempting to impose their will upon data.

Parsons could be vague and inconsistent with key terms. For example, he uses pattern maintenance as the primary function of the cultural subsystem of the general system of action, a subsystem of the social system, and a primary function of that same subsystem [2].

Parsons explored the subprocesses of functionalism within three stages of evolution: 1) primitive, 2) archaic and 3) modern (where archaic societies have the knowledge of writing, while modern have the knowledge of law). Parsons viewed Western civilization as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared the United States as the most dynamically developed. For this, he was attacked as an ethnocentrist.

Legacy

Parsons was one of the first iconic figures in American sociology. He was instrumental in developing Harvard University's Sociology (then called Social Relations) Department into one of the top-ranked in the world.

His theory of functionalism is one of the major schools of thought within sociology. Functionalism is often associated with conservative political ideologies and free market capitalism. Parsons' late work focused on a new theoretical synthesis around four functions common to all systems of action—from the behavioral to the cultural, and a set of symbolic media that enable communication across them. His attempt to structure the world of action according to only four concepts was difficult to believe for many American sociologists, who were at that time retreating from the grand pretensions of the 1960s to a more empirical, grounded approach. Parsons' influence waned rapidly in the U.S. after 1970. The most prominent attempt to revive Parsonian thinking, under the rubric "neofunctionalism," has been made by the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, now at Yale University.

Parsons is at least partially responsible for Max Weber's popularity in the English speaking world as he translated and compiled a number of Weber's key ideas.

Following World War II, Parsons wrote essays on pre-Nazi Germany for the American reconstruction efforts [3].

Some of Parsons' notable students at Harvard included Robert K. Merton and Kingsley Davis.

References
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Alexander, J.C. 1982. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Vol. I. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Alexander, J.C. 1984. “The Parsons revival in German sociology”, Pp. 394-412 in R. Collins (ed.). Sociological Theory 1984. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Cohen, I.J. 1996. “Theories of Action and Praxis”, Pp. 111-142 in B.S. Turner (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Connell, R.W. 1997. “Why Is Classical Theory Classical?” American Journal of Sociology 102:1511-1557.
Fararo, Thomas J. 2001. Social Action Systems: Foundation and Synthesis in Sociological Theory. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Grathoff R. (ed.). 1978. The Theory of Social Action: The correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.
Hamilton, Peter. 1983 Readings from Talcott Parsons. London: Tavistock Publications. 33-55.
Haralambos, M. and Holborn, M. 1995. Sociology: Themes & Perspectives. London: Collins Educational.
Lackey, Pat N. 1987 Invitation to Talcott Parsons’ Theory. Houston: Cap and Gown Press. 3-15.
Levine, Donald N. 1991. “Simmel and Parsons Reconsidered.” American Journal of Sociology 96:1097-1116.
Luhmann, Nicklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Parsons, Talcott. [1937] 1967. Structure of Social Action: Vol. II. Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Free Press.
Perdue, William D. 1986. Sociological Theory: Explanation, Paradigm, and Ideology. Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. 112-119.
Rocher, Guy. 1975. Talcott Parsons and American Sociology. New York: Barnes & Nobles.
Sewell, W.H. Jr. 1992 “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98:1-29.
Turner, Jonathan H. 1998. The Structure of Sociological Theory. Cincinnati, OH: Wadsworth.
Wallace, Walter L. 1969 Sociological Theory: An introduction. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations. Free Press.
Zeuner, Lilli 2001. “Social Concepts between Construction and Revision.” Danish National Institute for Social Research. Copenhagen.

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