Founding Sociology? Talcott Parsons and the Idea of General Theory. by John Holmwood

Author:John Holmwood [Holmwood, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317887539
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Integration and the ‘Displacement’ of Action

The identification of the requirements of a developed theory of action are not unique to Parsons – though he was the first to identify them – and similar conceptions are to be found in the arguments of even his most hostile critics. For example, Habermas writes, “every society has to face the basic problem of coordinating action: how does ego get alter to continue interaction in the desired way? How does he avoid conflicts that interrupt the sequence of action?”69 Similarly, Giddens attacks Parsons’s arguments only to suggest that there is a ‘true’ problem of order, apparently to be distinguished from Parsons’s ‘untrue’ version, but, in fact, remarkably similar to it. For example, Giddens writes that, “the true locus of the ‘problem of order’ is the problem of how the duality of structure operates in social life: of how continuity of form is achieved in the day-to-day conduct of social activity”.70 He writes further that, “systems of social action, reproduced through the duality of structure in the context of bounded conditions of the rationalisation of action, are constituted through the interdependence of actors or groups”.71 Any problems attributed to ‘structural-functionalism’, including, for example, an apparent problem of agency, would seem to be intrinsic to the concept of action in any general frame of reference.

Although Parsons’s analysis is more subtle than his critics usually allow, and, in some cases, is even the same as that which they offer as an alternative to it, it is far from adequate. We have reached the point where the problems intrinsic to the scheme are beginning to become evident. Parsons has defined voluntaristic action in terms of an actor’s freedom to form and choose ends. However, if the voluntaristic aspect of action requires that an actor ‘could do otherwise’, the coherence of the system, upon which the rationality of particular choices depends, seems to derive from other actors not doing other than whatever is consistent with the realization of a given actor’s ends. But what is true of other actors from the perspective of any given actor is true of that actor when his or her actions are considered from the perspective of other actors as means and conditions of the realization of their ends. In any stable system of interaction, the values, preferences, and other considerations which organize any individual actor’s choice of ends must be consistent with those of other actors in the same system. The coherence of action, it seems, depends upon the predictability of purposes. Parsons began his analysis of ‘unit acts’ with a commitment to the ‘openness’ of human action, but this position cannot be maintained once the requirements of the ‘total system of action’ are addressed. Action is organized in relation to processes of the system where ends are mutually consistent. Thus, in systems which are integrated, the individual appears as the expression of structures, despite the initial perception that structures should be seen as a product of action.

Parsons’s scheme fails in its own terms.

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