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This article focuses on an article by Hugh Dalziel Duncan, which discussed the uses and misuses of Max Weber's types of legitimationin American sociology. The author of this article said that he delivered a critical paper on the social theory of Talcott Parsons, the substance of which was a rather stern injunction for him to realize that social action was better conceived of as symbolic interaction, and that man's propensity for selection and creativeness made social process out of what he thought was social system. Since the true breadth of Duncan's theoretical perspective may unwittingly have been obscured by a rather heavily developed critique of Parsons, it might be pointed out that at a time when the social organizational and social psychological dimensions of our field are increasingly subject to disparate analysis, Duncan's function has been to mount a campaign for their reintegration through an expanded and improved synmbolic interaction approach.

Sociologist Louis Guttman has conceived of two methods for placing individuals into relative positions along an attitude continuum. One method, that which is conventionally used, makes use of the observed marginals of selected items from an attitude universe to obtain cutting points or scale ranks. The second method and the one with which this study deals, is that of utilizing bending points of the regressions of higher principal components of scalable attitudes to obtain the various cutting points. Of the two methods, the latter, utilizing measures of principal components, is thought to be superior because of its quality of "invariance," that is, the cutting points are not dependent on the sample of items used. This paper reports the findings of a study which proposed to re-examine Guttman's "closure" as an empirical third component of scalable attitudes, and to introduce another psychological variable, suggested by Talcott Parsons, the sensitivity of the human personality to the attitudes of others, and test its empirical fit to the mathematical model of the third component.

This article focuses on the theory of sociology given by sociologist Talcott Parsons. The fate of the functional requisites in Parsonian sociology can be regarded as happy or sad according to one's theoretical predilections. It has been shown that in many respects the development and changes that have taken place in and around the concept have reflected the development and changes in Parson's theory of society. The caveat on theory-building expressed in the book "The Structure of Social Action," has held good over the years as of March 1970. This is especially the case with respect to the universal imperatives. They are not subject to change for they are not empirical realities; they are, however, real in their consequences for social systems and for the structure of social organization in terms of all human societies. Parsons has made and elaborated the important distinction between social and personality systems in such a fashion that old notions of the individual versus the society have been seen to be inadequate. This is particularly relevant here as it paves the way to an understanding of individual and social requisites of human society, though Parsons himself has not taken full advantage of the possibilities in this context.

It has been argued elsewhere that the 1950's witnessed proximate consensus within American sociology over the orthodoxy of a systemic image of the nature of the subject matter and that this in turn was supported by a self-image in which the sociologist identified himself with the value-free stance he associated with the natural scientist. B.F. Skinner's life-long marriage to an austerely natural scientific epistemology is as self-evident as his fathering of an operant behaviorism that focuses immediately upon the change that can be brought about through positive reward. The very anomaly that was the fatal flaw of the "system" presumption - change - becomes operant conditioning's fundamental aim. Skinner's foremost advocate within sociology is, of course, George Homans, strategically placed as he has been of late as chairman of Harvard's Department of Sociology. No one can claim a more "systemic" methodology than the founding chairman of a graduate program specializing in the elicitation of models of complex and ongoing social interaction from sociology's beast of burden, the digital computer.

The article presents critical analysis of the social theories of Talcott Parsons. The action theory of T. Parsons is now in the focus of the interest of social theorists, both in the U.S. and in Western Europe. The Cornell symposium offers a surprisingly clear presentation of Parsons' thought system. Parsons has asserted that the action theory is a common foundation upon which three theories must be built up, theories of the social, cultural and personality systems. Parson's work consists of definitions and substantive propositions. His earlier work consisted mainly of definitions, but since the formulation of the pattern variables it has been developing substantive propositions. Parsons relied on a kind of common sense psychology. As Black states it, the cognitive-cathectic contrast is hardly more than the layman's crude contrast between thinking and feeling while the cognitive sector of human mind becomes evaluation. For Parsons, organizations are collectivities characterized by a primacy of the goal attainment subsystem. They have their own substructures or institutionalized normative units, which contribute to over-all society and related to its functional exigencies.

The problem of change has been of continuing interest to rural sociologists. However, most of the concern for change has been directed toward specific topics such as family living, farm technology, rural institutions, and industrialization. There has been little attempt to relate change in these specific areas to general theories of social change. This has probably been due no less to failings on the part of students of rural life than to the inadequacy of existing theories of change. In a recent article, Wilbert Moore, attempts to show that social change is a respectable topic of concern for sociologists. He would move the chapters on social change from the end to a more central position in textbooks of sociology. Talcott Parsons, after dealing with the structural aspects of society, has become more concerned with its dynamic aspects. He is now teaching a seminar on "Societal Evolution," which is certainly an innovation in the curricula of sociology. These and many other efforts indicate a growing concern for the study of change on the part of sociologists.

Since the impetus and design of research inevitably derive from a set of assumptions, whether explicit or not, the nature of fact—the categories in which something is captured out of the Deal world"—is dependent upon these assumptions. It is reason enough to suggest that in efforts to advance sociological knowledge at least as much care should be given to explicating the linkages of ideas as to empirical operations. The positivist traditions of sociology have, however, often meant that high-level, "general" or even "middle range" theorizing has been more of an avocation than a vocation for most sociologists, and that much more rigor, energy, and professional skill have in recent decades gone into the empirical aspect of research than into the theoretical. Though the bearings of theory and research upon each other have been usefully discussed and have, in fact, become a kind of credo, almost any published discussion lacking in figures and tables and involving some commentary beyond sheer description has been capable of definition as "theory." Where so little has been expected, relatively little by way of intellectual and other resources has been invested. Consequently, the returns have been small. Even when serious theoretical work has been attempted, it has often received something less than systematic consideration. Such work—some examples undoubtedly more scholarly and sophisticated than others—has been given more or less favorable receptions largely in accord with semantic preferences, generally unspecific "orientations," and degrees of sympathy for speculation as, hopefully and somehow, relevant to real research. Other than to note particular historical events and to cite research findings considered pertinent to some statement or other contained in a discussion, the supporters, sympathizers, and opponents of theorizing have rarely spelled out the criteria by which judgment was delivered. In short, the problems of theory construction have been neglected in favor of the more obviously empirical problems of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a revision of the article titled "Principia Sociologica," which appeared in the third volume of "The British Journal of Sociology," which discusses theories of sociologist Talcott Parsons. In the pre-Bales era we have the action systems and the pattern variables. There has been some modification of both these sets of concepts. An action is a constituent of three systems: as a physical act it is a constituent of the organic system, as a purposeful piece of behavior it is a constituent of a personality system and if it is directed towards another person or set of persons it is a constituent of a social system. The pattern variables, are concerned with the way we apprehend the objects towards which we act and the way we orient ourselves towards them. An object may be apprehended as a member of a class or in its own right as having something of particular significance to the actor. In addition an object may be appraised for what it is or for what it does.

This article examines a sociological theory of economic administration. Talcott Parsons and Neil J. Smelser attempted to prove that economic theory is only a special case of the general theory of social systems. However, they have ignored the most highly formalized branch of economic analysis. They have concentrated on the less abstract area of applied theories which have a bearing, often remotely, on economic policy. The true achievement of the authors is that they showed how much phenomena can be treated as socially determined factors which are well inside the range of sociological theory. Nevertheless, the connection between economic administration and socialization is vague.

This article considers the propositions put forward in The Social System, by Talcott Parsons, which illustrate Parsons' analysis of social dynamics. For Parsons, the social system is a system of action. It is made up of the interactions of individuals. Of special concern to sociology is the fact that such interactions are not random but mediated by common standards of evaluation. Most important among these are moral standards, which may be called norms. Such norms structure action. Because individuals share the same definition of the situation in terms of such norms, their behaviour can be intermeshed to produce a social structure. That sociology should deal with a particular set of problems within the theory of social systems is the position taken by Parsons in his discussion of the division of labour between the social sciences. Here sociology is defined as having to do with the process of institutionalization of normative patterns : that aspect of the theory of social systems which is concerned with the phenomena of institutionalization of patterns of value-orientation in the social system, and of changes in the patterns, with conditions of conformity with and deviance from a set of such patterns, and with motivational processes in so far as they are involved in all of these. Parsons' concern with the normative and his definition of sociology as a discipline exploring the dynamics of the normative, is in one way an attempt, whether intentional or unintentional, to make the status of sociology less ambiguous by making it a special social science. But this confinement, which has a definite conceptual expression, seems to break down, both on a theoretical and an empirical level, when the problems of social stability and change are tackled.

This article discusses the sociology of religion based on the work of U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons. Sociology was the product of two main currents of thought. The first was the growing ability to see social relations as objective structures and social movements as objective trends. In short, to see the uniformities of social processes as an objective of investigation. The second was the positivism of the nineteenth century, which elevated the methodological rules of the natural sciences into an anti-metaphysical metaphysic. These two currents met in Auguste Comte, the father of both sociology and nineteenth century positivism. The influence of this unbalanced genius and of others whose views were similar, especially Herbert Spencer, was considerable in early American sociology. Parsons constructs his sociology of religion on the basis of the work of four men: Pareto, Malinowski, Durkheim and Weber. Parsons starts with what he calls the rationalistic variation of positivism, the tendency to treat the actor as if he were a rational scientific investigator acting reasonably in the light of the knowledge available to him. From this point of view religion is a matter of superstition and ignorance, a survival of a more primitive past. Parsons is fully aware of the painful inadequacy of this view and has drawn extensively on his European predecessors to broaden it.

This article focuses on professor Talcott Parsons' literary works on systematic sociology. According to the author, Talcott Parsons and his followers are pioneers in this recent theory in sociology and have won considerable recognition. Parsons' theoretical system comprises a series of postulates, concepts, and methodological formulations, which are mutually interdependent. The purpose of such a scheme is to develop sociology as a distinctive science with an appropriate conceptual scheme. According to the author, systematic theory is synonymous with scientific theory and is defined as "a body of logically interdependent generalized concepts of empirical reference" tending toward logical closure. Insofar as a body of theory is logically closed, it is systematic in fully explaining the relations between phenomena within a given frame of reference. If the explicit propositions of a systematic theory are not logically closed, it may be reasonably inferred that unstated assumptions or variables are involved in that system.