The Normative Structure of Sociology (RLE Social Theory) by Hermann Strasser

Author:Hermann Strasser [Strasser, Hermann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317652328
Google: szNHBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-13T05:57:31+00:00

(e) System model and conservative interest of cognition: social change, stratification and power

We have already discussed some of the theoretical consequences (and practical implications) Parsons’s particular vocabulary of social explanation has for dealing with social problems such as deviance and social conflict. In this final section, his system model and guiding interest of cognition will be elaborated upon as they manifest themselves in his theories of social change, power and social stratification, as well as in comments of some of his critics.

Talcott Parsons conceives of social change as continual through differentiation in a process of adaptive upgrading:140

If differentiation is to yield a balanced, more evolved system, each newly differentiated substructure (e.g., the producing organization …) must have increased adaptive capacity for performing its primary function, as compared to the performance of that function in the previous, more diffuse structure. Thus economic production is typically more efficient in factories than in households. We may call this process the adaptive upgrading aspect of the evolutionary change cycle.

The concepts of differentiation and adaptive upgrading must be seen in the context of Parsons’s conception of society as a social system functioning within a general action system that is comprised of sub-systems. As has been mentioned, any system of action performs four essential functions, that is, AGIL, and societies, as they evolve, differentiate first along these AGIL lines and then into sub-systems of each AGIL function.

In locating structures in larger systems and using the concept of stability, the defining characteristic of structure, Parsons is able to single out the points or boundary positions where social change unfolds:141

A system … is stable or (relatively) in equilibrium when the relation between its structure and the processes which go on within it and between it and its environment are such as to maintain those properties and relations, which for the purposes in hand have been called its structure, relatively unchanged. Very generally, always in ‘dynamic’ systems, this maintenance is dependent on continuously varying processes, which ‘neutralize’ either endogenous or exogenous sources of variability which, if they went far enough, would change the structure. A classic example of equilibrium in this sense is the maintenance of nearly constant body temperature by mammals and birds—in the face of continuing variation in environmental temperature and through mechanisms which operate either to produce heat, including slowing up its loss, or to slow down the rate of heat production or accelerate its dissipation. Contrasted then with stability or equilibrating processes are those processes which operate to bring about structural change. That such processes exist and that they are of fundamental scientific importance is nowhere in question.

It seems that Parsons distinguishes between sub-structural change as part and parcel of the processes productive of system stability and those processes productive of structural change. For him, ‘structural change in sub-systems is an inevitable part of the equilibrating process in larger systems.’142 It is therefore important to have in mind the difference between processes of equilibration and processes of structural change, since such a ‘conception of the

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