Talcott Parsons: social action, the social system and AGIL

1. Parsons and analytical functionalism

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) taught at Harvard and was the dominant figure in American sociology from the 1940s to the 1960s. His approach is called analytical functionalism because he built a system of abstract analytical categories (not descriptions of any particular society) to classify all social action. His major works:

• The Structure of Social Action (1937)
• Toward a General Theory of Action (1951, with Edward Shils and others)
• The Social System (1951)
• Working Papers in the Theory of Action (1953, with Robert Bales and Shils), where the AGIL scheme was first set out
• Economy and Society (1956, with Neil Smelser)
• Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971)

2. The Structure of Social Action (1937)

Parsons examined four European thinkers, Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, and argued that, starting from different places, they converged on one voluntaristic theory of action. Action is neither the mechanical result of conditions (as positivists held) nor pure free will (as idealists held): actors choose, but within norms and conditions.

The unit act

The smallest element of action has four components:

1. an actor;
2. an end (a future state the action aims at);
3. a situation, made up of means the actor can control and conditions the actor cannot;
4. a normative orientation: the norms and values that guide the choice of ends and means.

The point of the unit act is that norms are part of action itself. This answered the “Hobbesian problem of order”: why society does not collapse into a war of all against all. Parsons’s answer is shared values internalised by actors.

3. The Social System (1951)

Parsons defined a social system as 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.

The four action systems

The systems are linked by two processes: internalisation (cultural values become part of the personality through socialisation) and institutionalisation (values become embodied in role expectations in the social system). The basic unit of the social system is the status-role.

Pattern variables

Every actor must choose between five pairs of alternatives in defining a situation:

1. Affectivity / affective neutrality (seek immediate gratification or defer it)
2. Self-orientation / collectivity-orientation
3. Particularism / universalism (treat a person by special relationship or by general rules)
4. Ascription / achievement (quality / performance)
5. Diffuseness / specificity (a relationship covering many aspects or one)

The first term in each pair typifies traditional societies and family relations; the second, modern societies and occupational roles. A doctor treating a patient is expected to be neutral, collectivity-oriented, universalistic, achievement-based and specific.

Equilibrium, socialisation and social control

A social system tends towards equilibrium. Deviance is kept within bounds by socialisation (internalising norms) and social control (sanctions). Change is gradual and adaptive.

4. AGIL: the four functional imperatives

Every system of action, to survive, must solve four problems.

At the level of the general action system, adaptation is performed by the behavioural organism, goal attainment by the personality system, integration by the social system and latency by the cultural system. A and G are instrumental and outward-facing; I and L are internal. Law, on this scheme, sits in the integrative subsystem: courts and legal norms resolve conflicts of interest and keep the units of society coordinated.

5. Functional prerequisites

Functional prerequisites are the things any society must do to continue to exist. The best-known list is D.F. Aberle, A.K. Cohen, A.K. Davis, M.J. Levy and F.X. Sutton, “The Functional Prerequisites of a Society” (1950):

1. provision for relationship to the environment and for sexual recruitment;
2. role differentiation and role assignment;
3. communication;
4. shared cognitive orientations;
5. a shared, articulated set of goals;
6. normative regulation of means;
7. regulation of affective expression;
8. socialisation;
9. effective control of disruptive behaviour.

In The Social System Parsons stated the prerequisites at three levels: the system must be compatible with the biological and psychological needs of its members (personality), must secure adequate motivation and control deviance (social), and must be supported by a cultural system. AGIL is his later, compressed version of the same idea.

6. Criticism

• Too abstract: Mills’s charge of “grand theory”.
• Over-socialised view of man (Dennis Wrong, 1961): actors appear as puppets of internalised norms.
• Neglect of conflict, power and change: Dahrendorf compared the model to a utopia, a society where nothing happens (“Out of Utopia”, 1958).
• Conservative: equilibrium and consensus are assumed rather than shown.
• Teleology and tautology: what exists is explained by the needs it meets.

How this is examined

The 10-mark essay is “Explain the social system by Talcott Parsons” (October 2023) or “Explain the theory of social system” (August 2024): definition, four action systems, status-role, pattern variables, equilibrium, AGIL, criticism. “A.G.I.L.” as a six-mark note needs the table and one line on the general action system. “Functional pre-requisites” needs the Aberle list and Parsons’s three levels.