The Emerald Guide to Talcott Parsons by John Scott

Author:John Scott [Scott, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Social Theory, Philosophy, Social, General
ISBN: 9781839826542
Google: 2_L3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Published: 2020-08-27T04:18:17+00:00

The complex argument that Parsons presented in The Social System helped him to develop the theoretical and empirical work that he had undertaken during the 1930s and 1940s. It was widely recognised as providing a fruitful basis for developing sociological research and was used by large numbers of sociologists, becoming the basis of mainstream American sociology. Parsons himself, however, had already begun to look beyond the scheme to its further development.

6

REFINING THE FUNCTIONAL BASIS

Following the very rushed completion of The Social System, which set out a provisional and incomplete account of his structural-functional theory, Parsons returned to the collaborations with colleagues that he saw as likely to lead him beyond this initial statement. He worked particularly closely with psychologist Robert Bales to investigate and clarify the ‘functional problems’ faced by social systems, which he recognised was an important but underdeveloped aspect of his work. The pattern variables were used to produce a more generalised set of functional categories that became the organising principles for all Parsons’s subsequent work. These new ideas were published in provisional working papers with the highly technical titles ‘The Dimensions of Action-Space’ and ‘Phase Movement in Relation to Motivation, Symbol Formation, and Role Structure’. In these papers, Parsons and Bales set out their thoughts as they wrote, demonstrating how rapidly their ideas were developing.

Parsons also recognised a need to present a clearer and more detailed picture of the personality system, hoping to develop his account of motivation through a more thorough reflection on what he had learned in his psychoanalytic training. This led to a provisional statement on ‘The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems’. All three new papers were published just two years after the appearance of The Social System, along with other less important theoretical reflections, in the book Working Papers in the Theory of Action. This book provides a crucial link between the structural functionalism of The Social System and the mature version that he developed through the rest of his life.

The scheme that Parsons had presented in The Social System was largely descriptive, providing a conceptually consistent basis for constructing models of social structures and their parts. It was principally concerned with what in The Structure of Social Action had been called the ‘type units’ of a social system, only his discussion of the pattern variables moving towards analytical theory. Parsons saw his work with Bales as offering the basis on which he could begin to move towards a more analytical version of structural functionalism that he saw as preparing the way for the deductive system that is the ultimate, but perhaps unachievable, goal for social science.

His introduction of psychoanalytic ideas took up, in particular, the issues of ‘expressive symbolism’ that he had outlined in The Social System and that he saw as having been developed in Freudian accounts of dream symbolism and neurotic symptoms. His main concern, however, was to move psychoanalytic theory beyond the analysis of pathologies of personality in order to construct models of normal personality functioning. This

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