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After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century

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The Russell Sage Foundation both published this volume and financed the conference on which it is based. Russell Sage has been in the forefront of progressive social research in recent decades, which makes its eager support of a tribute to Talcott Parsons on the occasion of the centenary of his birth somewhat surprising. The contributors to this volume were virtually all students and cordial colleagues of Talcott Parsons, and none is among the politically motivated holy chorus that hounded him from the pinnacle virtually to the doghouse of the sociology profession in the 1970's.

This book includes a nice, super-Parsonian essay by Mark Gould, some interesting reminiscences by Neil Smelser, Jeff Alexander, and Robert Bellah, plus pretty terrific introduction to Parsons' work by the editors. But the title is misleading. There is not a single contribution to the book that builds on and goes beyond Parsons. Nor is there a contribution that suggests how Parsons' sociology might be restored to its rightfully central position in sociological theory, or how it might be combined with other aspects of sociological theory to form a substructure of future sociological research.

This book is not a "theory of social action for the twenty-first century." If it were it would have to address and refute Parsons' critics, which it does not even begin to do. Moreover, given the obvious discrepancies and incompatibilities among different parts of the Parsonian opus, the book would have to specify which parts of Parsons' theory must be accepted and which rejected. This it does not do, the authors preferring to treat Parsons' later work as "mature emendations" and "new insights" rather than the dead ends and the insufferably tedious commonplaces that some of them are.

My own view of Parsons' contribution is that his first book, A Theory of Social Action, is his greatest, and the central analytical tool in this book, the "unit-act" is a direct extension of the rational actor of economic theory to a larger sociological framework. The unit-act includes the end, means, and conditions of the rational actor model (which I have called the Beliefs, Preferences, and Constraints model to avoid the value-laden term "rational"), but adds a fourth element, norms. Parsons' unit-act thus corrects a major failing of the standard rational actor model, it silence on questions of morality and ethics, justice and fairness. Parsons' "conditions" in the unit-act are parallel to "beliefs" in the rational actor model, which are in fact generally known as "subjective priors," and include the actor's understanding of the relationship between means and ends; i.e., what are the probabilities that various actions will lead to various ends?

To relate individual behavior to social systems, Parsons developed his so-called "structural-functionalism," which views society as a nexus of "social roles" (teacher, mother, fire fighter, voter, sick person, etc.) that are occupied by "social actors" who behave according to the model of the unit-act. Each role is associated with an incentive system, a set of rule for proper behavior in that role, and a set of norms that the actor is supposed to internalize that guides the actor's personal sacrifices on behalf of role-performance. The failure to behave according to the social norms associated with a social role is, for Parsons, a form of social deviance. According to his theory, then, conforms to a "normative logic" and not merely the materialist economic logic of maximizing material gain. While economists were busy trying (unsuccessfully) to argue that we can run society successfully on the basic of rational self-interest, Parsons spent his life elaborating on the fundamental (Durkheimian) belief that values and norms are what makes social life productive and pleasant.

Parsons probably would have done better not to call his system "structural-functionalist," because sociologists have just as much trouble with the term "functionalist" as they do with the term "rational." I would call his system "social equilibrium theory," because it almost perfectly mirrors the Walrasian general equilibrium model that forms the conceptual basis of neoclassical theory. Supply in general equilibrium theory correspond to roles in social equilibrium theory (in fact, roles include "unpacked" versions of positions in the economic social division of labor), and demand corresponds to the actors who fill these roles. In "social equilibrium" there is a perfect meshing of actors and roles, and all actors conform to their normative role-expectations. But of course social equilibrium, like general market equilibrium, is rarely accomplished, and the disequilibrium dynamics of the social system are of extreme importance.

What seems to be a fly in the ointment of my analogy is that actors in roles appear not to be maximizing actors. But this is just a superficial problem. We have found since Parsons' time that the rational maximizing actor can be quite nicely applied to normative situations if we recognize that there is nothing irrational about behaving ethically and embracing normative goals and prosocial preferences along-side the traditional self-regarding material payoffs. For a leisurely exposition of this view and the experimental evidence on which it is based, see my book The Bounds of Reason (Princeton, 2009).

Combining Parsons' model of the unit-act with an expanded model of the social role as an aspect of the social division of labor in family and in public life in addition to economic life gives a theory which can well serve as a fundamental basis for sociological theory. The most important dimension missing from this theory is that of the nature and transformation of beliefs. Parsons treats beliefs as given by the cultural system, which stands above both the social system and the personality systems of social actors. In this he pretty much follows Durkheim, who deeply understood the role of culture in creating a common set of beliefs and understandings in an otherwise diverse society. However, Parsonian culture is basically detached from and outside the social system, without a true dynamic of its own. This is a lacuna that must be filled by a dynamic concept of culture.