Life and Works of Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons (1902-1979)
Life and Works of Talcott Parsons
The Theory of Social Action
The Social System
Social Control Concept of Anomie
Functionalism
Parsons’ views on Social Change
Parsons’ views on Social Stratification
Parsons’ Evolutionary Model
Parsons’ views on Social Structure
Conclusion
Life and Works of Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons born in the year 1902. In his boyhood he displayed
a remarkable brilliance of academic merit and was attracted
towards newer development in the field of knowledge. Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) is known for innovative theoretical and Methodological contribution to sociology. Parsons’s analysis of the Development of an of social structure provided a systematic statement of the structural Functional school of thought that dominated sociology during the 1940s and 1950s. Parsons was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on December 13, 1902 in a religious family of Protestants. His father, Rev Edward Parsons was a congregational minister in Colorado (U.S.A.) and was also a college teacher of English. Parsons did his Undergraduate work at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1920.
He was trained in biology at the undergraduate level and his aspiration at that time was to become a biologist although he later wrote a great deal on the medical profession, Parsons was not destined to become a physician. At Amherst, he came under the beneficent influence of two of its most distinguished faculty members, Walton Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Ayers. In the course of interaction with Walton Hamilton, he was interested in economics, especially in political economy. Ayres offered a course on “The Moral Order” in which Parsons was exposed to the works of William Graham Sumner, Charles Horton Cooley and Emile Durkheim. The direction, in fact, he took in Sociology was clearly rooted in biological studies.
Parsons completed his Graduate studies at Amherst in 1924. Thereafter, he went to London School of Economics, with the Financial help provided by an indulgent uncle, where he spent the Academic year 1924-25 and attended the lectures of noted sociologist and anthropologists Leonard Trelawney Hob house, Morris Ginsberg And Brown slaw Malinowski. From London School of Economics He went to Heidelberg Encountered Max Weber’s work for the first time and where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on “The Concept of Capitalism in Recent German Literature”. Parsons played Introducing Weber to America when he translated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) and when he later analysed Weber’s theoretical perspective in what is now volume II of The Structure of Social Action (1937). His doctoral thesis was concerned with the conceptions of capitalism in the German Social Science Literature with special reference to the works of Marx, Weber, and Smart, and received his Dr. Phil. from Heidelberg in 1927. After his Heidelberg stay of a year Parsons returned to take up a teaching post in economics, economics department, at Amherst. The following year, 1927, he moved to the economics Department at Harvard as an instructor and taught there until he was retired as Emeritus Professor in 1973. In the day of Harvard, He influenced by Joseph Schumpeter, from whom he gained a sense of the meaning of a system of theory, and Frank William Tausig, Who emphasised for him the importance of Alfred Marshall, whose Work marked culmination of classical economic theory. From Alfred North whitehead, the philosopher, he learned more about the nature of systems and from Whitehead, the philosopher, he learned more about the nature of systems and from Whitehead also the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. After the retirement as Emeritus Professor from Harvard, he continued to teach as an At the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and California at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, and Cambridge. Indeed, he spent His entire career at Harvard for nine years in the rank of instructor, four of them in economics and five in sociology. Despite Sorokin’s, Chairman in sociology, unsympathetic approach toward his work Parsons enjoyed considerable support in the power structure of The University and was promoted to assistant professor in 1936, Associate professor in 1939, and full professor in 1944.
He served as chairman of the department from 1944 to 1946 and in the later year became chairman of the newly constituted Department of Social Relations, a department that included sociology, cultural Anthropology and social and clinical psychology. He retained the Department chair until 1956. He retired in 1973, having served forty-six Years on the Harvard faculty. Parsons won several honours in the course of his long career
He served as president of the Eastern Sociological Society in 1941- 42 and of the American Sociological Society in 1949-50. He was a Corresponding member of the British Academy, an honorary fellow of the London School of Economics, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the last of which he also served as Honorary degree from Amherst, Cologne, Chicago, Boston, and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In 1927, he married Helen B. Walker, The daughter of an American physician whom he met of the Land on School of Economics and they had three children. He died on May 8, 1979 in Munich.
Works of Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons has tried to provide Forms of social thought. He was able to develop the prevalent concepts in an Original manner. Although his thought process are in a developing stage and The real judgement of his works is still to be assessed, yet he has been able to Influence the contemporary generation of sociologists to a very great extent. His works deal with social thought and are mentioned below :
(1) Translation of Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
(2) The Structure of Social Action-This book published in 1927, Contained Complicated decisions of the theory of social action based on means ends Scheme of social thought. This bears a deep imprint of the thought force of Durkheim, Max Weber, Pareto, and other theoreticians and economists of His time.
(3) Essays in Sociological Theory trained a simpler form of his theoretical work.
(4) The Social System-This book published in 1952, and is recognized as his monumental work containing the system of social action theory prepared in a more modified form. Published. In 1949, which congas
(5) The General Theory of Action was co-authorship of E.A. Shills.
(6) Working Papers in the Theory of Action was With the co-authorship of E. A. Shills and R. Bales.
(7) Family, Socialization and Interaction Process were published along. With the co-authorship of R. Bales; this book contained a theoretical schemata of role-differentiation.
Thus contemporary trends in the sociological knowledge have been to Some extent influenced by Talcott Parsons, although it is difficult to assess his Specific contribution. His work is primarily concerned with the theory of social systems of action and is related to, and in part derived from the orientations of the sociology of knowledge. We may summarize his main ideas as follows:
Society, according to Parsons, may be regarded as the most general term which embraces the entire field of social relationship of man to man. The field of social relationship is complex, indeed, and can systematic analysis. In one of his articles, Parsons presents such a systematic analysis and concludes that “the society may be defined as the total complex of human relationships in so far as they grow out of action in terms of the means-end relationship, intrinsic or symbolic.”
According to such a definition, Parsons states further, “society is but an element in the concrete whole of human social life, which is also affected by the factors of heredity and environment as well as by the element of culture scientific knowledge and techniques, religious, metaphysical and ethical systems of ideas and forms of artistic expression.” In the opinion of Parsons, Society cannot exist apart from these things, they play a part in all its concrete manifestations, but they are not society, which comprise only the complex of social relationships as such.”
Lastly, a social system is a system wherein a plurality of individual actors, for the attainment of gratification, are engaged among themselves in the processes of social interactions within a system of cultural symbols bearing common meanings. To quote Parsons, “A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the “optimization of gratification”, and whose relation to their situations including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.”
It is thus, evident that a social system is only only one part of the entire action system. The social system together with the personality system of the individual actors, and the cultural system completes the structure of a concrete system of social action. These three aspects of action system must be viewed as an independent focus of organization.” They are inter-dependent and inter-pencirating. “Each is indispensable to the other two in the sense that without personalities and culture there would be no social system and so on around the roster of logical possibilities.”