American sociologist, Talcott Parsons was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Parsons studied at Amherst College, Mass., London School of Economics and the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD, in 1927, returning to the US to teach economics, eventually becoming Professor of Sociology at Harvard in 1944, where he worked until his retirement in 1973. In line with the then dominant view of economics as expressing the perception and psychological reactions of the economic agents to each other's actions, Parsons sought to merge economic science with sociology. His first major work, The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937, is a comprehensive review of what he called “positivistic sociology” in which he presents criticisms of Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber.

In his 1951 The Social System, he turned his attention to the analysis of large-scale systems and the problems of the social order, integration, and equilibrium and advocated his method of structural-functional analysis, a study of the ways in which the interrelated and interacting units that form the structures of a social system contribute to the development and maintenance of that system in a condition of dynamic equilibrium. The researcher explores : what is the function of each of the institutions to be seen in a given social order, on the understanding that each contributes in some particular way to the maintenance of the stability of the system.

Among Parson’s books are The Structure of Social Action (1937), The Social System (1951), Sociological Theory and Modern Society (1967),  Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966), The Sociological Theory and Modern Sociology (1967), The System of Modern Societies (1971) and The Evolution of Societies (1977)

Intellectual Influences

Parsons’ ideas on social systems and his theory of action or action approach are rooted in the thinking of his predecessors. In his monumental book The Structure of Social Action (1937) Parsons has reviewed the contributions of many social scientists, but gave special emphasis to Pareto, Durkheim and Max Weber. In this work Parsons attempts to highlight the underlying unity in the contributions of most of these thinkers. In his opinion a notion of a theory of action was hidden or was present by implication in the works that he reviewed. In the case of Max Weber, however he found action theory more or less clearly formulated.

Parsons divides earlier contributions into three broad schools of thought, viz., the utilitarian, the positivist, and the idealist. The Utilitarian see social action in a highly individualist fashion. They emphasis utilitarian rational calculation but at the level of the individual. For this reason they are unable to accommodate the fact that social life is collectively cohesive and not a random effect.

The positivists on the other hand believe that social actors have complete knowledge of their social situation. This leaves no room for error on the part of actors or even for variation among actors.

The idealists posit that social action is the realization of the social spirit and the ideas such as, of people, and consequently pay scant attention to real everyday impediments on the ground that obstruct the free realization of ideas.

Parsons emphasized that both the utilitarian and idealist approaches to the study of social systems and social reality were one-sided. The utilitarian approach treated social systems as products of rational impulses of human beings (individuals) to integrate their needs and urges as orderly systems. These systems are based on compatibility of interests through contractual mutuality. An example of contractual mutuality is the system of polity (government and state), which represents organized system of power. The market system which is based on contractual relationships of economic interests is yet another such example of an orderly system.

But the orderly systems as analyzed by utilitarian social scientists, according to Parsons, neglect the role of values. Similarly, in the idealist treatment of social system, democracy is seen simply as the fulfillment of the spirit of a nation. Idealism places too much emphasis on values and ideas and not enough on social practice[1]. Weber too, in a way, belonged to this tradition for he argued that capitalism was aided in its early stages by the Protestant ethic. The difference between Weber and the outright idealists is that Weber never said that the Protestant ethic caused capitalism. But it must be admitted that Weber elaborated at length certain values such as those of ‘rational asceticism’ or ‘inner worldly asceticism’ but neglected the role of needs or search for utilities.

According to Talcott Parsons both the idealist and the utilitarian notions of the social system assume certain characteristics in human impulses in an apriori[2] manner. One such characteristic is rationality in the regulation of needs in the utilitarian approach to the social system, and commitment to ultimate values and ideals in the idealist approach. The utilitarian approach does have the notion of individual actor in the system but only as an abstraction with certain endowed qualities (aprioristic in character). The idealist approach does the same, only prioristically[3]  assumed characteristics are different. The idealists assume that human beings act only to fulfill a grand mental design. The positivists to the other extreme and insist that true human action in born out of full information of the situation. There is thus a finality and inflexibility in their scheme for there is only one way to act: the correct way. Consequently there is no room for values, error and variations in social action.

Thus, while each of these schools of thought, the utilitarian, the idealist and the positivist say something important; it is their exclusivism, which Parsons objects to. The utilitarians only emphasis the individual’s rational choice and miss the collective. The idealists talk of values and miss out the pressures exerted on values by empirical reality. Finally, the positivists emphasis complete knowledge of the situation and overlook the role of values, or of error or of variations.

Keeping the above in mind, Parsons offers an integrative approach to the study of social systems and social actions