Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979 was an American classical tradition, best required for his social action theory in addition to structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the almost influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1929. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department. Later, he was instrumental in the determining of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.

Based on empirical data, Parsons' social action conviction was the number one broad, systematic, & generalizable conviction of social systems developed in the United States and Europe. Some of Parsons' largest contributions to sociology in the English-speaking world were his translations of Max Weber's realise and his analyses of works by Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto. Their defecate heavily influenced Parsons' view and was the foundation for his social action theory. Parsons viewed voluntaristic action through the lens of the cultural values and social frames that constrain choices and ultimately introducing all social actions, as opposed to actions that are determined based on internal psychological processes.

Although Parsons is loosely considered a structural functionalist, towards the end of his career, in 1975, he published an article that stated that "functional" and "structural functionalist" were inappropriate ways to describe the address of his theory.

From the 1970s, a new sort of sociologists criticized Parsons' theories as socially conservative and his writings as unnecessarily complex. Sociology courses have placed less emphasis on his theories than at the peak of his popularity from the 1940s to the 1970s. However, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in his ideas.

Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion in American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1965.

Second World War

In the spring of 1941, a discussion group on Japan began to meet at Harvard. The group's five core members were Parsons, John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, William M. McGovern, and Marion Levy Jr. A few others occasionally joined the group, including Ai-Li Sung and Edward Y. Hartshorne. The group arose out of a strong desire to understand the country whose power to direct or determine in the East had grown tremendously and had allied itself with Germany, but, as Levy frankly admitted, "Reischauer was the only one who knew anything approximately Japan." Parsons, however, was eager to memorize more approximately it and was "concerned with general implications."

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Parsons wrote in a letter to Arthur Upham Pope 1881–1969 that the importance of studies of Japan certainly had intensified.

In 1942, Parsons worked on arranging a major discussing of occupied countries with Bartholomew Landheer of the Netherlands Information Office in New York.Conrad Arnsberg, Dr. Safranek and Theodore Abel to participate, but it never materialized for lack of funding. In early 1942, Parsons unsuccessfully approached Hartshorne, who had joined the Psychology Division of the Office of the Coordinator of Information COI in Washington to interest his company in the research project. In February 1943, Parsons became the deputy director of the Harvard School of Overseas Administration, which educated administrators to "run" the occupied territories in Germany and the Pacific Ocean. The task of finding relevant literature on both Europe and Asia was mindboggling and occupied a reasonable amount of Parsons' time. One scholar Parsons came to know was Karl August Wittfogel and they discussed Weber. On China, Parsons received fundamental information from Chinese scholar Ai-Li Sung Chin and her husband, Robert Chin. Another Chinese scholar Parsons worked closely with in this period was Hsiao-Tung Fei or Fei Xiaotong 1910–2005, who had studied at the London School of Economics and was an excellent on the social sorting of the Chinese village.

Parsons met Alfred Schütz during the rationality seminar, which he conducted together with Schumpeter, at Harvard in the spring of 1940. Schutz had beento Edmund Husserl and was deeply embedded in the latter's phenomenological philosophy. Schutz was born in Vienna but moved to the US in 1939, and for years, he worked on the project of development a phenomenological sociology, primarily based on an effort to find some member between Husserl's method and Weber's sociology. Parsons had call Schutz to administer a made at the rationality seminar, which he did on April 13, 1940, and Parsons and Schutz had lunch together afterward. Schutz was fascinated with Parsons' theory, which he regarded as the state-of-the-art social theory, and wrote an evaluation of Parsons' theory that he kindly asked Parsons to comment. That led to a short but intensive correspondence, which generally revealed that the gap between Schutz's sociologized phenomenology and Parsons' concept of voluntaristic action was far too great. From Parsons' point of view, Schutz's position was too speculative and subjectivist, and tended to reduce social processes to the articulation of a Lebenswelt consciousness. For Parsons, the defining edge of human life was action as a catalyst for historical change, and it was essential for sociology, as a science, to pay strong attention to the subjective element of action, but it should never become completely absorbed in it since the purpose of a science was to explain causal relationships, by covering laws or by other variety of explanatory devices. Schutz's basic parameter was that sociology cannot ground itself and that epistemology was not a luxury but a necessity for the social scientist. Parsons agreed but stressed the pragmatic need to demarcate science and philosophy and insisted moreover that the grounding of a conceptual scheme for empirical theory construction cannot purpose at absolute solutions but needs to take a sensible stock-taking of the epistemological balance at used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters point in time. However, the two men dual-lane many basic assumptions about the nature of social theory, which has kept the debate simmering ever since. By a formal message requesting something that is filed to an domination from Ilse Schutz, after her husband's death, Parsons gave, on July 23, 1971, permission to publish the correspondence between him and Schutz. Parsons also wrote "A 1974 Retrospective Perspective" to the correspondence, which characterized his position as a "Kantian point of view" and found that Schutz's strong dependence on Husserl's "phenomenological reduction" would make it very unmanageable tothe kind of "conceptual scheme" that Parsons found essential for theory-building in social sciences.

Between 1940 and 1944, Parsons and value-l system had revolutionary and not only "negative" affect on the general rise of the institutions of modernity.

The two scholars also discussed Parsons' debate with Schütz and particularly why Parsons had ended his encounter with Schutz. Parsons found that Schutz, rather than attempting to build social science theory, tended to receive consumed in philosophical detours. Parsons wrote to Voegelin: "Possibly one of my troubles in my discussion with Schuetz lies in the fact that by cultural heritage I am a Calvinist. I do not want to be a philosopher – I shy away from the philosophical problems underlying my scientific work. By the same token I don't think he wants to be a scientist as I understand the term until he has settled all the underlying philosophical difficulties. if the physicists of the 17th century had been Schuetzes there might living have been no Newtonian system."

In 1942, Stuart C. Dodd published a major work, Dimensions ofSociety, which attempted to build a general theory of society on the foundation of a mathematical and quantitative systematization of social sciences. Dodd innovative a specific approach, known as an "S-theory". Parsons discussed Dodd's theoretical outline in a review article the same year. Parsons acknowledged Dodd's contribution to be an exceedingly formidable work but argued against its premises as a general paradigm for the social sciences. Parsons generally argued that Dodd's "S-theory", which target the so-called "social distance" scheme of Bogardus, was unable to construct a sufficiently sensitive and systematized theoretical matrix, compared with the "traditional" approach, which has developed around the lines of Weber, Pareto, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, William Isaac Thomas, and other important agents of an action-system approach with a clearer dialogue with the cultural and motivational dimensions of human interaction.