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The article discusses the book "The Structure of Social Action," by Talcott Parsons. The paper was prepared, at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in 1987, a session held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book and it drew a large and interested audience. The Structure, would at that time have been taken as a founding event in a relatively consensual, proto-scientific discipline. For even as late as the mid 1960, Structure was still seen as parsons had originally presented it: as a framework of accumulated theoretical knowledge, on the basis of which predictions could be made and compared with what social scientists had subsequently discovered about empirical fact. But there are even more important reasons for the continuing contemporary relevance of Parsons' early work. It is not only that there continue to be important discussions about, and in relation to the book earlier concepts. It is also that people can now understand the influence of Structure in a more reflective and more accurate way.

The issue of social order, how and why it is that social orders exists at all, is historically central to sociology. In this paper the focus is on the comparison between Parsons' and Garfinkel's point of view. Parsons regards social order as the outcome of value consensus in society, which ensures that behavior conforms to generally accepted norms. Garfinkel starts out with the assumption that social order is illusory. They believe that social life merely appears to be orderly; in reality it is potentially chaotic. Social order is constructed in the minds of social actors as society confronts the individual as a series of sense impressions and experiences which she or he must somehow organize into a coherent pattern. The differences seem to be less looking at the concept of social order and trust together as a common theoretical outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author takes a look at some aspects of sociologist Talcott Parsons's comparative and evolutionary analysis focusing on the analysis of dynamics of social change, evolution, and of comparative institutions, and above all on the analysis of modernity, of the modern social order, a subject central to his evolutionary analysis--from the point of view of "Multiple Modernities." Such an analysis will also enable one to examine critically some of Parsons's contributions to the problem of the relation between culture and social structure; or of the place of cultural components in the structure of social action. These contributions developed on several levels. The first and most general and crucially important such level was the emphasis that culture does not constitute a distinct "entity" but rather a central analytical component dimension of any action and social interaction. The second level was the analysis of the relations between the cultural and structural dimensions of social action in terms of the major pattern variables espoused above all in the book "Towards a General Theory of Action"--as well as later in "Social System."

The history of sociology is marked by periods of theoretical pluralism and hegemony. Their interplay has resulted in the slow and uneven development of the discipline. Today, however, bodies of theory and practice have become so diverse that many scholars worry that sociology is in a state of disintegration. The theoretical career of Talcott Parsons provides a microcosm in which to explore similar processes. Building on the success of The Structure of Social Action, Parsons led a movement that transformed Harvard's Department of Sociology into the Department of Social Relations. There he attempted a grander, but failed synthesis in Toward A General Theory of Action. His case provides a situation in which to explore features of disciplinary integration and fragmentation, The comparison stimulates one to fashion an informed sense of whether sociology is now facing its latest crisis or may be in the process of decomposition as a corpus of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most influential interpretations of Max Weber's sociology has been that provided by Talcott Parsons, especially in The Structure of Social Action. We contend that the Parsonian interpretation is erroneous both in many of its particulars add hi the general cast that it gives to Weber's theoretical product. The crux of Parsons' misrepresentation is his overweening emphasis on the category of the normative. A confusion of "factual regularities" with "normative validity" - despite Weber's numerous warnings against such - led Parsons to an exaggeration of the importance Weber assigns to normative orientations of social action, legitimacy and collectivity integration, and, correspondingly, to a severe understatement of the importance of nonnormative aspects of social action and structures of dominance. In consequence, Parsons expanded what was but a part of Weber's sociology and made it very nearly the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]