The link goes to Amazon as usual, but I got this book as a PDF. It’s a classic sociological text, copyright 1951 (my version is the 1964 paperback), and does a lot to lay out the basic idea of solidarity that does so much work in sociology. I’m sure all of the sociologists out there are wondering why it took me so long to get to it – but I was trained in rhetoric and professional communication, and am consequently forever playing catch-up in sociology, anthropology, psychology, management, and the other disciplines and fields from which I draw.
Still, I found much of The Social System to be strangely familiar.
Parsons attempts to describe a scheme for analyzing “the structure and process of social systems” (p.vii), building on Pareto’s orientation toward social systems, but using a structural-functional level of analysis. He uses an “action frame of reference,” examining the orientation of actors (biological organisms) to a situation, including other actors. This frame of reference is thus relational, and the approach analyzes the structure and processes of systems built up by the relations of such units (p.9). He is not interested in internal structure so much as the bearing on the relational system (p.9). A “situation” is oriented toward some sort of object:
social objects include actors: alter, ego, collectivity
physical objects are empirical, do not respond to ego, and can be means or conditions
cultural objects are symbolic elements, including ideas, beliefs, expressive symbols, and value actions (p.4)
Here, “‘Action’ is a process in the actor-situation system which has motivational significance to the individual actor, or, in the case of a collectivity, its component individuals” (p.4). It is only treated in the analysis when it’s considered motivationally relevant (p.4).
Actions take place in a social system, which involves
plural individual actors
interacting with each other
in a situation with a physical/environmental aspect
who are motivated to optimize gratification
whose relations are mediated by a system of culturally structured and shared symbols (p.5)
At this point, I thought, “this sounds a lot like Engestromian activity theory.” The insistence on concrete (material) analysis, the term object and object orientation, the systemic analysis within a specific frame of reference, the attention to actors, motivation, and mediation — the components are in many ways parallel. Bear in mind that while activity theory was a psychological framework in Russia, when Engestrom and others in the West took it up, they began to emphasize sociological elements: Leontiev’s notion of activity was formalized into the activity system, investigations began to expand beyond individuals or dyads, etc. In applying activity theory to political economy, Engestrom ended up applying a lot of social concepts to AT. I wouldn’t be surprised if Parsons’ foundational work in sociology influenced some of the social concepts, although he only mentions Parsons twice in Learning by Expanding (among a pantheon of classical sociologists such as Weber, Lukacs, Adorno, Mead, Durkheim, and Marx).
Whether or not Parsons laid down the tracks for Engestromian AT, it seems to do a lot of the same work — but unlike AT, Parsons is (a) interested in power and (b) uninterested in boiling everything down to economic relations. Social systems are an aspect of “a completely concrete system of social action” (p.6), but they share the stage with two other aspects, personality systems (of individual actors) and cultural systems (built into their actions) (p.6). Parson sees an actor's need-disposition system as itself having two aspects:
Gratificational aspect: what the actor gets out of interaction with world (content)
Orientational aspect: how the actor’s relation to the object world is organized (patterns) (p.7)
The system’s “Orientation to the situation is structured, that is, with reference to its developmental patterns” (p.8). Again sounding like an activity theorist, Parsons adds, “The goal-directedness of action is … a fundamental property of all action-systems” (p.8). And sounding like Vygotsky, he says, we must distinguish this orientation from stimulus-response, which “does not make the orientation to the future development of the situation explicit” (p.8).
A bit farther down, Parsons discusses value-orientation, which involves
cognitive standards
appreciative standards
moral standards (p.13)
And he sees moral standards as most directly important to the sociologist (p.14).
On p.15, he addresses culture, which he says is
transmitted
learned
shared
And thus is both product and determinant (p.15).
Regarding the relationship between culture and social system, he says:
The crucial point for the present is that the "learning" and the "living" of a system of cultural patterns by the actors in a social system, cannot be understood without the analysis of motivation in relation to concrete situations, not only on the level of personality theory, but on the level of the mechanisms of the social system. (p.17)
He defines personality as “the relational system of a living organism interacting with a situation” (p.17) and society as an empirically self-subsistent social system that persists long-term from within its own resources (p.19). Any system that doesn’t meet the definition of society is considered a “partial” social system (p.19). He declares his primary concern as categorizing the structure of social systems, modes of structural differentiation, and ranges of variability with reference to each structural category between systems (p.21).
In a social system, he says, the most elementary unit is the act (p.25), but a better higher-order unit is the status-role; the system is a network of relationships among actors involved in the interactive process (p.25). A bit later, he adds: “A concrete action system is an integrated structure of action elements in relation to a situation. This means essentially integration of motivational and cultural or symbolic elements,brought together in a certain kind of ordered system” (p.36).
“An institution will be said to be a complex of institutionalized role integrates which is of strategic structural significance in the social system in question. The institution should be considered to bea higher order unit of social structure than the role, and indeed it is made up of a plurality of interdependent role-patterns or components of them. … An institution in this sense should be clearly distinguished from a collectivity. A collectivity is a system of concretely interactive specific roles.” (p.39).
As you can tell, this first chapter is all about definitions and relations. It’s not easy to follow because the systemic analysis Parsons is proposing is fairly intricate. (Again I’m reminded of AT – one complaint about AT is that it has so many components and is hard to get into.) Parsons eventually provides us with an outline of his main categories (pp.57-58) — which is considerate, but not as considerate as it would have been if he had presented this at the very beginning!
Let’s pause here to sum up what we have so far.
Parsons' action theory is in many ways parallel to Engestromian activity theory (at least to my mind).
But it is more focused on the individual personality and on how people construct each others' roles.
Since Parsons’ approach rejects a managerial view, conflicts are seen as more neutral and not necessarily something to resolve.
It also has more focus on personality as a unique refractor (Vygotsky might discuss this in terms of perezhivanie), vs personality emerging from activity.
Parsons’ system makes a place for individual gratification — much more so than Vygotsky and Leontiev did, perhaps since they sought a normative vision in harmony with the New Soviet Man and emerging Soviet society. For Vygotsky and Leontiev, individual gratification is at most a developmental step toward the proper orientation (ex: a schoolchild motivated by a good grade).
On the other hand, Parsons’ system is not primarily concerned with learning and development, as Vygotsky and Leontiev were.
Parsons offers a systems view, but these systems are not self-contained. They are at different levels of scale and fundamentally interconnected.
Engestromian AT probably didn't lift and impose Parsons on Leontiev -- but if it had, it would look pretty similar to the way it does.
Let’s stop here, with the end of a very long Chapter 2. The book has 12 chapters, but they mainly fill in the details of the outline on pp.57-58. Parsons covers topics such as solidarity, cooperation, types of institutions, types of actor-units (he gets positively Aristotelian here in terms of his elaborate taxonomy), equilibrium and deviance in social systems (cf. AT’s contradictions), and role conflicts. It’s all well worth reading, but honestly quite overwhelming.
Should you pick up this book?
If you’re a sociologist, you probably already have a good grasp of the concepts and arguments, and undoubtedly plenty of commentary and critique of it, but it’s always a good idea to look at the source material.
If you’re an activity theorist, particularly in the Engestromian mold, you should definitely skim it at least and see both the parallels and the distinctions.
If you’re neither a sociologist nor an activity theorist, but are interested in conducting qualitative research (case studies, ethnographies, other field studies), yes, look at Parsons’ careful accounting for different material factors.
Me, I plan to review this book at least a few more times. This first time, I focused on the parallels with AT. Next time, I may focus on critiques of what seems like an overly articulated and perhaps brittle system. Parsons’ heavy reliance on taxonomies, tables, and especially 4-fields yields an overly dichotomized structure throughout, and I’ll need some time to get my head around the implications.
(2003).
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