Talcott Parsons
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Talcott Parsons | |
.jpg) Picture by Lois Lord.
|
|
| Born | December 13, 1902 Colorado Springs, Colorado |
|---|---|
| Died | May 8, 1979 (aged 76) |
| Residence | United States |
| Fields | Sociology |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Alma mater | Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg London School of Economics Amherst College |
Talcott Parsons (1902 - 1979) was an American sociologist, who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927–1973. He produced a general theoretical system for the analysis of society, which was called action theory based on the concept on methodological and epistemological principle of "analytical realism" and on the ontological assumption of "voluntaristic action" on behalf of the system-environment correlate of the actor.
As Parsons developed his theory it became increasingly based upon the theoretical principles of cybernetics and system theory, as well on Emerson's concept of "homostasis" and Ernst Mayr's concept of "teleonomic processes." On the meta-theoretical level Parsons' theory attempts to navigate -- and find a balance -- between psychologist phenomenology and idealism on the one hand and pure types of what Parsons called the utilitarian-positivistic complex, on the other hand. The theory includes a general theory of social evolution and a concrete interpretation of the major drives of world-history. In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognititive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as the function of genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution but this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome, but rather it defines the orientational boundaries of the real pathfinder, which is action itself. Parsons' theory reflects a vision of a unified concept of social science and indeed, of living systems in general. Parsons' approach differs in essence from Niklas Luhmann's theory because Parsons rejects the idea that systems can be autopoetic short of the actual action-system of individual actors. Systems have immanent capacities but only as an outcome of the institutionalized processes of action-systems, which in the final analysis consists of the historical effort of individual actors. While Luhmann became caught up in sheer systemic immanence, Parsons insisted that the question of autocatalytic and homeostatic processes on the one hand, and the question about the actor as the ultimate "first mover" on the other, was not mutually exclusive. Homeostatic processes might be necessary if and when they occur but action is necessitating.
It is only within this perspective of the ultimate reference in action that Parsons' dictum that higher order cybernetic systems during the course of history will tend to control social forms organized on the lower levels of the cybernetic hierarchy, should be understood. For Parsons the highest levels of the cybernetic hierarch was of cultural-expressivistic gestalt (the L-G line in the AGIL), especially those forms which he called constitutive, where he stressed the religious element (but where other interpretations are possible). Within this context, culture would have an independent power of transition, not only as factors of actual socio-cultural units (like Western civilization or China) but also in the way original cultural bases would tend to "universalize" through interpenetration and spred over large numbers of social systems as in the case of classical Greece and Israel, where the original social bases had died but where the cultural system has survived as independently "working" cultural pattern, as in the case of Greek philosophy or in the case of Christanity as a modified derivation from its original seed-bed in ancient Israel.
For many years Parsons was the best-known sociologist in the United States, and indeed one of the most influential and most controversial sociologists in the world. His work was very influential well into the 1960s, particularly in the United States, until it met with extensive criticism and was generally dismissed by the 1970s. Currently, interest in Parsons is increasing worldwide. Despite the traditional view that Parsons' theories are unsatisfactory if not inaccessible, prominent attempts to revive Parsonian thinking have been made by neo-Parsonsian sociologists and social scientists like Jeffrey Alexander, Bryan S. Turner, Victor Lidz, Uta Gerhardt, Giuseppe Sciortino, Helmuth Staubmann, David Sciulli, Richard Münch, Kazuyoshi Takagi and Ken'chi Tominaga, the latter a towering figure in Japanese sociology. On the issue of studying Parsons' biographical and historical data scholars such as William Buxton, Uta Gerhardt, Charles Camic, Lawrence T. Nichols, and Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen have been most prominent. The key centers of Parsons interest today beside the US are Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom. [1]
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Talcott Parsons was born 13 December 1902 in Colorado Springs. Parsons was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863-1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863-1949). His father had been a Congregationalist minister but at the time of Parsons' birth he was a professor in English at Colorado College and vice-president of the College. The father would later become the president of Marietta College in Ohio. Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history; his ancestors were some of the first who arrive from England in the first half of the seventeenth century.[2]
As an undergraduate, Parsons studied biology, sociology and philosophy at Amherst College and received his B.A. in 1924. At Amherst Parsons took courses with Walton Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Ayres, both known as "institutional economists." They submitted him to literature by Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Graham Sumner among others. Parsons also took a course with George Brown in the philosophy of Kant. After Amherst, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year, where he was exposed to the work of R. H. Tawney, Bronisław Malinowski, and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse. During his days at LSE he made friends with E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes and Raymonth Firth, who all participated in the Malinowski seminar and in addition, he made a close personal friendship with Arthur and Eveline Burns. While studying at LSE he met a young American girl in the students common room by the name of Helen Bancroft Walker whom he married on April 30, 1927. The couple had three children, Anne, Charles and Susan and eventually four grandchildren.
After his stay at LSE, Parsons moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in sociology and economics. During his time in Heidelberg, he worked with Alfred Weber (Max Weber's brother), Edgar Salin (who was his dissertation adviser) Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim and in addition he was examined in Immanuel Kant's "Critique of pure Reason" by the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers is crucuial to Parsons' introduction to the ideas of the patient as a social role, scientific concept formation[3], and, of course, to the works of Max Weber, then relatively unknown to American social theorists; he later translated several of Weber's works into English.
In 1927, after a year teaching at Amherst (1926–27), Talcott Parsons entered Harvard as an instructor at the Department of Economics, where he followed F.W. Taussig's lectures on Alfred Marshall and became friend with the economist historian Edwin Gay, who was the founder of Harvard Business School. Parsons also became a close associate of Joseph Schumpeter and followed his course on "General Economics." Parsons was generally at odd with the basic trend in Harvard's Economic department which in those days went in a highly technical, matematical direction, and Parsons looked for other options at Harvard and gave courses in "Social Ethics" and in the "Sociology of Religion." The chance for a swift to sociology came in 1931, when Harvard's first Sociology Department was created under reign of Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin. During this period Parsons established close ties with Lawrence J. Henderson, a brilliant scientist, who took personal interest in Parsons' career at Harvard. Parsons also made strong connections with two other influential intellectuals with whom he corresponded for years; one was economist Frank H. Knight and the other was Chester I. Barnard, one of US's most dynamic business-men at the time. The relationship between Talcott Parsons and Sorokin quickly ran sour. Pattern of personal tensions was aggravated by Sorokin's deep dislike for American civilization, which he regarded as a senate culture in decline. Sorokin attempted to block for Parsons' promotion but through the pressure from Henderson and Edwin Gay Parsons was finally promoted to assistent professor in 1937.
Parsons first achieved significant recognition with the publication of The Structure of Social Action (1937), his first grand synthesis, combining the ideas of Durkheim, Max Weber, and Pareto, among others. Parsons revisted Germany in the summer of 1930 and became a direct eye-wittness to the feverish atmosphere in Weimar Germany through which the Nazi Party rosed to power. In the following period Parsons received constant reports about the rise of Nazism through his friend Edward Y. Hartshone who was travelling in Germany. Parsons began in the late 1930s to warn the American public about the Nazi threat; this was not an easy task since US in those days was predominant isolationist. One of the first articles Parsons wrote in this regard was entitled: "New Dark Age Seen If Nazis should Win." Parsons became one of the key initators to the Harvard Defense committee, an organization aimed at rally the American public against the Nazis. Parsons' voice would sound again and again over Boston's local radio-stations as a part of this campaign. During the War Parsons conducted a special study group at Harvard, which analyzed the causes of Nazism and where leading experts on the topic participated. Also during the War, Parsons became the deputy director of Harvard School of Overseas administration, a school which educated administrators to "run" the occupied terrorites in Germany and the Pacific. On the issue of China, which also was taught at the school, Parsons received fundamental information from Chinese scholar Ai-Li Sung Chin and her husband Robert Chin.
Parsons became a member of the Executive Committee of the newly established Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1948, which had Parsons' close friend and colleague, Clyde Kluckhohn, as its director. Parsons went to occupied Germany in the summer of 1948 where he functioned as a contact person on behalf of RRC who was interested in the Russian refugees which had stranded in Germany. Among the people Parsons happend to interview while in Germany were a few members of the Vlasov movement, which was an anti-Stalinist Russian Liberation Movement who had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The movement was named after Andrey Vlasov who was a brilliant Russian general captured by the Germans in June 1942. The Vlasov movement's ideology was a hybrid of elements but has been called "communism without Stalin." While in Germany that summer of 1948 Parsons wrote several letters to Kluckhohn reporting on his intelligence-investigations.
At Harvard, Parsons was instrumental in forming the Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary venture among sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The new department was officially created in January 1946 with Talcott Parsons as the chairman and with prominent figures at the faculty such as Samuel Stouffer, Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry Murray and Gordon Allport. An appointment for Hartshorne was considered but came to a bloody end, when Hartshorne was killed in Germany by an unknown gunman while driving on the highway. His position went in stead to George C. Homans. The new department was galvanized by Parsons' idea of creating a theoretical and institutional base for an unified social science. During this period Parsons also became strongly interested in systems theory and cybernetics and began to adopt their basic ideas and concepts to the realm of social science, especially the work of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) had his attention.
According to Talcott Parsons' own account, it was during his conversations with Elton Mayo (1880-1949)that he realized it was necessary for him to take a serious look at the work of Freud. In the fall of 1938 Parsons began to offer a series of non-credit evening courses on Freud, in which, among others, Robin Williams participated. William recalls, "Parsons was powerfully impressed with Freud, who he particularly discussed in relation to the work of Bronislaw Malinowski." As time passed, Parsons developed a strong interest in psychoanalysis. He volunteered to participate in non-therapeutic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, where he began a didactic analysis with Dr. Grete Bibring in September 1946. Insight into psychoanalysis is significantly reflected in his later work, as well as being apparent in his empirical analysis of fascism during the war, where he interpreted the German national character as standing in a conflictual tension between romantic patterns on the one hand and Prussian rationalized formalism, on the other.
Parsons spent the year 1957/58 at the center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto in California where he, for the first time in his life, met Kenneth Burke whose flamboyant, explosive temperament made a great impression on Parsons. The two men became close friends. Parsons explained in a letter the impression Burke had left on him: "The big thing to me is that Burke more than anyone else has helped me to fill a major gap in my own theoretical interests, in the field of the analysis of expressive symbolism." At Palo Alto Parsons also had extensive discussions with Milton Friedman as well as fruitful conversations with a group of historians of which he found David S. Landes the most impressive.
Nationally, Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion within American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as secretary from 1960–1965.
He retired from Harvard in 1973, but continued teaching (at a number of other universities as a visiting professor) and writing until his death in May 8 1979, while on a trip to Germany.[4]
His son Charles Parsons is a distinguished figure in philosophy of mathematics. His daughter Anne Parsons committed suicide in June 1964 at the age of 33.
[edit] Work
Parsons was an advocate of "grand theory," an attempt to integrate all the social sciences (except anthropology) into an overarching theoretical framework.
His early work on the Structure of Social Action, he reviewed the output of his great predecessors, especially Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, and Émile Durkheim. Parsons attempted to derive from them a single "action theory" based on the assumptions that human action is voluntary, intentional, and symbolic.
Later, he became intrigued with, and involved in, a broad 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), to anthropology, to small group dynamics, working extensively with Robert Freed Bales, to race relations and then economics and education.
[edit] Systems theory and cybernetics
Parsons developed his ideas during a period when systems theory and cybernetics were very much on the front burner of social and behavioral science. In using systems thinking, he postulated that the relevant systems treated in social and behavioral science were "open," meaning that they were embedded in an environment consisting of other systems. For social and behavioral science, the largest system is "the action system," consisting of interrelated behaviors of human beings, embedded in a physical-organic environment.[5]
Parsons had a seminal influence and early mentorship of many American and international scholars among them Uta Gerhardt, Ralf Dahrendorf or Niklas Luhmann.
[edit] AGIL paradigm
The heuristic scheme he used to analyze systems and subsystems is called the "AGIL Paradigm", "AGIL scheme" [6]. To survive or maintain equilibrium with respect to its environment, any system must to some degree adapt to that environment (Adaptation), attain its goals (Goal Attainment), integrate its components (Integration), and maintain its latent pattern (Latency Pattern Maintenance), a sort of cultural template. These are called the system's functional imperatives.
In the case of the analysis of a social action system, the AGIL Paradigm, according to Parsons, yields four interrelated and interpenetrating subsystems: the behavioral systems of its members (A), the personality systems of those members (G), the society as a system of social organization (I) and the cultural system of that society (L). To analyze a society as a social system (the I subsystem of action), people are posited to enact roles associated with positions. These positions and roles become differentiated to some extent and in a modern society are associated with things such as occupational, political, judicial and educational roles.
Considering the interrelation of these specialized roles, as well as functionally differentiated collectivities (e.g., firms, political parties), the society can be analyzed as a complex system of interrelated functional subsystems, namely:
- The economy -- social adaptation to its action and non-action environmental systems
- The polity -- social goal attainment
- The social community -- the integration of its diverse social components
- The fiduciary system -- processes and units that function to reproduce social culture
Parsons elaborated upon the idea that each of these systems also developed some specialized symbolic mechanisms of interaction analogous to money in the economy, e.g.., influence in the social community. Various processes of "interchange" among the subsystems of the social system were postulated.
The most elaborate of Parsons's use of functional systems analysis with the AGIL scheme appear in two collaborative books, Economy and Society (with N. Smelser, 1956) and The American University (with G. Platt, 1973).
[edit] Social evolutionism
Parsons contributed to the field of social evolutionism and neoevolutionism. He divided evolution into four subprocesses:
- differentiation, which creates functional subsystems of the main system, as discussed above;
- adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions;
- inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and
- generalization of values, increasing the legitimization of the increasingly complex system.
Furthermore, Parsons explored these subprocesses within three stages of evolution:
- primitive,
- archaic and
- modern
Parsons viewed Western civilisation as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared the United States as the most dynamically developed.
Parsons' late work focused on a new theoretical synthesis around four functions common (he claimed) 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 a scheme that focused on order was unacceptabel for American sociologists, who were at that time retreating from the grand pretensions of the 1960s to a more empirical, grounded approach. Hence, Parsons' influence waned in the U.S. after 1970, although many of the great names of contemporary sociology either confess to be "transmuted Parsonians" or his influence can be found in their work.
[edit] Pattern variables
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.
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.
[edit] Publications
- 1937, The Structure of Social Action
- 1951, The Social System
- 1951, Toward a General Theory of Action - with Shils and Kluckhohn
- 1956, Economy and Society - with N. Smelser
- 1960, Structure and Process in Modern Societies
- 1961, Theories of Society - with Edward Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele and Jesse R. Pitts
- 1966, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives
- 1967, Sociological Theory and Modern Society
- 1969, Politics and Social Structure
- 1973, The American University - with G. Platt
- 1977, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory
- 1978, Action Theory and the Human Condition
- 2007, American Society: Toward a Theory of Societal Community. Edited by Giuseppe Sciortino. Paradigm ISBN 978-1-59451-227-8.
[edit] Works on Parsons
- Uta Gerhardt: Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-81022-1
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ John Holmwood (1996). Founding Sociology? Talcott Parsons and the idea of general theory. London, England: Longman Group Ltd
- ^ Charles Parsons (2004). "Some remarks on Talcott Parsons’s family". In: Journal The American Sociologist. Vol 35, Nr 3, Sept 2004. pp. 4-22.
- ^ Alexander Stingl (2009) The biological Vernacular from Kant to James, Weber, and Parsons. Lampeter: Mellen Press.
- ^ Mayhew, Leonard (1982) "Talcott Parsons, 1902–79: a biographical note" in Talcott Parsons, Talcott Parsons on institutions and social evolution, Pp: xi-xii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- ^ A good summary of the "action frame of reference" as it developed over time is found in Leonard Mayhew's introduction to his anthology of Parsons' major essays: Mayhew, Leonard (1982) "Introduction" in Talcott Parsons, Talcott Parsons on institutions and social evolution, Pp: 1-62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- ^ P. McNeill, C. Townley, Fundamentals of Sociology,(Hutchinson Educational, 1981)
[edit] External links
|
||||||||||||||
