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This article focuses on the relative neglect in the sociological study of law and legal systems. The emphasis on individualism and its negative effect on community appears in a variety of formulas, but they all have to do with the prominence of economic concerns, often of the "capitalistic" order, and with the "utilitarian" pursuit of self-interest. The general tone is pronounced pessimism about the prospects of the kind of society in which these characteristics are prominent. This is where law comes in. From a sociological point of view, law is significant, above all, as an institutional instrumentality of "social control." In the analytical sense, law is a phenomenon of the social system. The four trends of thought that will be discussed are concerned with four different primary aspects of the society as a whole. These aspects are, first, economic problems and structure; second, political; third, integrative aspects, which have to do with the "societal community" and, fourth, the problems of the fiduciary system, which focus to a certain extent on morality.

This article presents a commentary regarding the depiction of Professor J. H. Turner of the symbolic interactionist position of Talcot Parsons. In his paper, Turner advances two simple and straight forward contentions, Parsons is a symbolic interactionist in the way in which he sees human society but for reasons of methodological strategy Parsons proposes to study human society differently than is done by symbolic interactionists. Turner endeavors to support the first contention by arguing that there are basic similarities between Parsons' view and the symbolic interactionist analysis suffers from several forms of theoretical weakness. This article, discusses these two contentions in the light of the symbolic intearactionist position of George Herbert Mead.

This paper analyzes the nature of value-commitments, conceived as a generalized symbolic medium of interchange in the processes of social interaction, in this respect paralleling money, power, and influence. Commitments constitute moral obligations of units of a system of social interaction to maintain the integrity of a value-pattern and to strive toward its implementation in action through combination with non-value factors. Stability of commitments is a basic condition of the compatibility of wide moral freedom with the exigencies of social functioning. Like the other three media, commitments are not bound by a zero-sum condition, but can be expanded, especially through charismatic movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion on culture and social systems. Actions of individual persons in their capacities as members of a social system must be oriented in terms of the meanings of cultural symbol systems, of what is sometimes called patterns of culture. Furthermore, the society itself and various other social systems as object of orientation must also have meanings defined in cultural terms. Moreover, the two sets of meanings, that is, from the point of view of actors as components of their orientation patterns and of the objects to which they are oriented, must to some degree be integrated with each other at the cultural level. Cultural systems, however, are by no means fully integrated but may be regarded as varying from a pole of virtually complete integration to one of a nearly random assortment of meaning components. Furthermore, the actual behavior of individuals, their symbolically oriented action, may be to a widely varying degree congruent with the meanings of the cultural system.