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C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination (1959) represents one of the most influential texts of postwar American sociology. The title has become a catchphrase that stands for a style of thought that transcends both theoretical dogma and the constraints of mere methodological rule following. This article sets out to show that Mills' vision of the sociological imagination had more in common with the then dominant lines of scholarship than his broadside against Parsonian grand theory and Lazarsfeldian abstracted empiricism in the main part of the book would suggest. Among the tools that Mills introduced as fostering the sociological imagination were 2 × 2 tables. The article traces the use of such tables over time and across scholarly communities and shows that, contrary to Mills' own estimate, these tables describe a common nexus between his own work and that of Parsons and Lazarsfeld. All three scholars made ample use of this formal tool to construct sociological arguments at central places of their oeuvre. Given its shared use across otherwise divergent schools, the 2 × 2 table is a prime example for what historians of science have called paper tools, i.e. statistical formulas, algorithms, tables, diagrams, graphs, etc., that structure scientific research across different schools of thought and theoretical approaches. Drawing on the notion of paper tools, the article advances a post-Kuhnian perspective on the history of sociology that shifts the research focus from substantive ideas to formal tools and demonstrates elements of commensurability among presumably incommensurable schools of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides insights on the contemporary relevance of Talcott Parsons's writings by analyzing 20 textbooks from Austria, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, published in 1999–2019. Whether having knowledge of Parsons is helpful to today's students and other interested readers, and what knowledge, deserves consideration. Therefore , the paper asks: Which future gains of readers did textbook authors envision when they chose, in their own present, to discuss (or not) sociological writings from long ago? In order to understand what future opportunities authors wanted to create for readers, as well as how they chose to discuss Parsons to this end, the paper draws on Niklas Luhmann's notion of memory. The analysis reveals several key competencies that student and other interested readers might acquire through having knowledge of Parsons' writings and its critiques. These potentials would have gone unnoticed if authors had assessed Parsons's relevance only according to whether he adequately considered conflict or not, as has been done in many debates about his work until today. Moreover, through analyzing how authors remembered Parsons, I distilled two key selective criteria: First, what must be remembered in order to enable readers to acquire those competencies? Second, which memories would be impeding for readers and thus be better left out? These criteria are relevant for research, as well. Looking at the future, it would be desirable that sociologists let Parsons assist them in their research in many different ways, if possible. As a result, we might see a revival of Parsons that enables genuine advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline of interest among sociologists in the works of Talcott Parsons over the last several decades has been driven in substantial respects by a belief that he was personally conservative in his political views and that his theoretical formulations were rigidly tied to a conservative view of social order. The present paper reviews Parsons' major political involvements through the course of his career from his student days through the last decade of his life. The review demonstrates that Parsons was a typical academic liberal of his time and that his liberalism was expressed especially in several major applied essays. In the 1930s, he was an early and active opponent of Nazism. During World War II, he taught professionals to administer occupied territories and nations effectively. After the war, he advocated for government support of the social sciences, citing the important contributions they had made to the war effort. In the 1950s, he wrote a famous critical analysis of the Joseph McCarthy movement in American politics. In the 1960s, he contributed supportive essays to the Civil Rights movement. Later in the decade and in the 1970s, he contributed to the protection of academic freedoms while also proposing accommodations to the demands of the student movement for more "relevant" teaching and greater participation in university governance. Throughout his career, he taught and worked closely with students of various political views and sought to protect their rights of freedom of political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades of his life, Talcott Parsons was often indicted as conservative. More recently, his analyses of contemporary society have been perceived as obsolete. In the present paper, I argue that both these accounts are wrong. Parsons's biographical and intellectual profile is clearly – and rather consistently – that of a New Deal liberal. His "ate" works, moreover, articulate an original view of the integrative processes in modern societies that is still both theoretically compelling and politically relevant. Parsons's view of modernity has made possible the development of a sophisticated theory of societal pluralism, able to deal analytically with the astonishing variety of structural strains (and resources) arising from an increasingly diverse – in racial, religious, ethnic, sexual and moral terms - membership in contemporary societies. His sociological enthusiasm for inclusion has never been blind to the likelihood of backlashes and the strength of discontent such inclusion may bring. His work provides thus some important directions in the current storm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illuminates, in a discussion of my relationship with him, how Talcott Parsons acted out his commitment to the values of cognitive rationality, how he implemented those values when working with students who did not share his liberal politics. I illustrate how students may learn not only from divergences in perspective with one professor, but also from the contradictions between their teachers's work. There are two contentions here. One concerns the importance of professors encouraging students to encounter points-of-view divergent from the professor's viewpoint, and then the significance of supporting them when they do so. This is possible only when the values of cognitive rationality regulate activity within a university setting. I illustrate these contentions in a discussion of my work with the political sociologist, Barrington Moore, Jr., the economic theorist, Kenneth Arrow, and the political philosopher, Judith Shklar, each of whose work diverged greatly from Parsons's theoretical perspective. Lastly, I contend that an understanding of our teachers's work is manifest in our extension of it, not in criticisms of their ideas, their texts. I show how this was the case in my own work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the creation of an intellectual biography of the U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons. The researcher discusses Parsons' doctoral dissertation dealing with capitalism that was analyzed by sociologist Max Weber, and how Parsons' work delivered sociology from social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. The author supports Parsons' work on the basis that he was a thinker and academician who did not use inconsistent analysis. The author utilized Parsons' archives at Harvard University, such as Parsons' paper "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change."

The article examines sociologist Talcott Parsons' political sociology by focusing exclusively on "voting." First, "voting" is one of Parsons' rare attempts to relate his theory of social systems to a set of empirical findings and interpretations dealing with contemporary political processes in the United States. Second, a careful perusal of the paper provides enough information from which to illustrate Parsons' general orientation to the study of politics. Third, the paper illuminates the value implications of Parsons' position on such important problems as political stability and change, power, conflict and consensus, leadership, citizenship, and democracy. Fourth, Parsons' later writings in this area tend to support and further elaborate the perspective developed in "voting." For these reasons, "voting" is representative of the bulk of Parsons' work in political sociology. The paper affords a useful inroad toward understanding Parsons' conception of politics in particular and, owing to his pervasive influence, pluralist theory in general.

A response is offer to the article within the issue by American sociologist Professor Talcott Parsons on exchange theory and social institutions. An overview of the impact that social institutions have on the relations between mayors and lobbyists, including regard to social values and social norms involved in the relationship, is provided.

The article presents an account of the research and theories of Harvard University's Department of Social Relations in the years surrounding 1950 under the leadership of Talcott Parsons. Details are given describing the development and major theories of the Carnegie Project undertaken by the department between 1949 and 1951, outlining a general theory of social activity which combined elements of sociology, psychology and anthropology. Details are given noting the establishment and the reception of the institutional attempt to form a unified behavioral science system.

This paper reconstructs the debate between presentists and historicists that has been on-going for over thirty years amongst American sociologists, considering both the historiography of the subject and the sociology of knowledge in order to better analyse the ways in which the history and historical interpretation of Sociology have been, and often still are, conceived. One of the most notable figures amonst the historicists is Charles Camic. His studies, and in particular those devoted to the life and works of Talcott Parsons, have effectively shown the relationship that exists between an intellectual interpretation and theorectical approach on one hand and environmental or -- more correctly -- socio-institutional conditions on the other. Some of the theories elaborated by Camic can be applied to all contexts in which the intellectual history of a discipline or the choices made by an author are examined: the content-fit and reputational models, for example, for a more educated and complete interpretation of the reasons leading a certain author to select or exclude intellectual predecessors: the concept of the newcomer's dilemma, which encompasses the dual and contradictory desire of a new group member to bring forth his own ideas and validate a new train of thought, yet at the same time to be accepted and legitimized by the general opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Talcott Parsons's perspective and understanding of the American value system. The working paper entitled "A Tentative Outline of American Values" is part of a relatively little known yet important aspect of Talcott Parsons's work. Parsons's project on American society took shape in the years following the Second World War, when he took a particular interest not only in the nation's religious traditions and democratic institutions, but also in its complicated and ambivalent adjustment to a role of leadership in the international arena. He was especially concerned to explore the ways in which social science might prove helpful to the nation in making difficult institutional changes during a period of social strain. Parsons's research on American society provided a basis for several occasional essays on various aspects of American culture and institutions during the mid-1950s. Some of these essays, notably, "McCarthyism" and "American Social Tension: A Sociologist's View," better known by the title under which it was later published, "Social Strains in America" and "The Distribution of Power in American Society" were well received at the times of their publication.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on the career, relevance and human side of U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons.

An introduction to a series of articles on the works of U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons is presented.

Talcott Parsons is one of the most famous American sociologists, yet he was trained as an economist. During the nineteen twenties and into the thirties, Parsons concentrated on the concept of modern capitalism and he wrote extensively on the works of Werner Sombart and Max Weber. Unfortunately, Parsons' early writings on modern capitalism have not received the scrutiny they deserve because they reveal that Parsons was a competent economist and could have been regarded as an heir to Weber's economic sociology. However, his increasing interest in society may have prompted his move from economics to the developing discipline of sociology. This essay is an exploration of Parsons' early writings on modern capitalism and it focuses on his Heidelberg dissertation, his two articles derived from that dissertation as well as a number of other shorter works. This essay reveals his conception of modern capitalism through his analyses of Sombart and Weber and shows that the young Parsons had a promising future as an economist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From his 1940–1942 studies of Race, through his 1967 study of an "inter-sexed" person called Agnes, Garfinkel's research was always politically engaged. When Garfinkel was Parsons' PhD student at Harvard (1946–1952) and later during a period of collaboration with Parsons (1958–1964), both theorized culture as a domain of social interaction independent from social structure and resting on its own implicit social contract. This conception of culture grounded their respective "voluntaristic" and "reciprocity" based approaches to specifying assembly processes for making social categories in a way that put the empirical assembly of categories under a microscope and made social justice a scientific concern. Garfinkel emphasized the importance of social contract aspects of Parsons' theory – adapted from Durkheim – and with his studies in ethnomethodology, planned to contribute an empirical foundation for aspects of Parsons' position that were criticized for their abstraction. Nevertheless, important differences remained. Parsons' model required assimilation and consensus, thus inadvertently enforcing existing inequalities. Garfinkel, by contrast, was deeply concerned with "structural problems" like inequality, and treated assimilationist positions as scientifically and ethically unsound. His research documented reciprocity as a pre-requisite for successful interaction, while treating "troubles" generated by inequality as an important key to understanding social order writ large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C. Wright Mills was one of the most important critics of Talcott Parsons who succeeded in establishing the image of Parsons as a conservative "grand theorist" out of touch with the real world and its real problems, as passed on in sociological textbooks. In this essay, it is argued that Mills' "translation of Parsons into English" is a one-sided interpretation based on his own theoretical premises, which he called the sociological imagination. The way Mills conceptualized sociological imagination leans towards an ideological world-view with political ambitions but lacks the necessary theoretical differentiation for an adequate evaluation of Parsons' general theory of action and the conceptualization of the social system in particular. Given Mills' premises, it appeared to him as if Parsons could not deal with social conflict, social change, domination and power relationships, which laid the foundations of a narrative quite distinct from the "real" Parsons. The conceptual deficiencies of Mills' sociological imagination lead into theoretical antinomies and the practical inability to resolve political issues outside of forceful intervention as suggested in the theoretical tradition of Thomas Hobbes. Independent of a political positioning, Parsons' sophistications in his understanding of power as one of several generalized symbolic media of interaction beyond the Hobbesian utilitarian model are necessary to come to terms with the increased complexity of modern society, both in theoretical and in political terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to consideration of "Talcott Parsons and Politics" explores the kind of optimism of sociology's "incurable theorist" that is evident in his mature view of the USA as the world's "New Lead" society. Statements related to optimism can be identified in his extensive writings and this article focuses upon its expression when as an "early career academic" in the late 1920s and 1930s he laid the foundations for his life-long work in sociology. Parsons' sociology developed as the USA's twentieth century contribution unfolded. His "moderate optimism" about the viability of the American experiment shares deeply and intimately in his claim that sociology had finally emerged as an analytical social science oriented by the theory of social action. His mature work considers the "societal community" to be the peculiar focus for sociology's special scientific attention. The USA has taken on this "New Lead" role at the same time that the societal community itself has emerged from within American experience. The discussion here is as much a personal memoire of the author, revisiting efforts to understand how the earliest stages of Parsons's sociology were maintained by him over a long career. Parsons sociological scholarship exhibited American characteristics. As sociology's "incurable theorist" he sought understanding of his own (American) situation, and its context, past and present, seeking to promote a social science that contributed positively to global society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares three great works on higher education, all written in the 1960s and 1970s. Special attention goes to how the authors assessed the impact of federal research funding on the identity of professors and their commitment to teaching. The article reveals a spectrum of perspectives, ranging from Parsons and Platt's justification of the new research complex to Robert Nisbet's denunciation of the decline of solidarity among professors and students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a contribution to the ongoing efforts to interpret the significant contribution to American sociology of Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). The author corrects an implication of his previous article in this journal by drawing attention to the profound impact of evolutionary cosmology upon Parsons' theoretical presuppositions. This ensured an inner and continuing complexity in his theory of the 'social system' from what we can identify as its earliest conceptual beginnings when Parsons was an under-graduate student at Amherst College. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the sick role was introduced into sociology in 1951 and was widely used in medical sociology. A sick person at that time would assume a special social role that permitted him or her to deviate from his or her normal social roles. Historians came to utilise the idea of the sick role as well. It was useful to describe social behaviour and expectations for the mid-century period and centuries before, but at the end of the twentieth century, the actualities of illness and medicine made the concept less applicable to that recent time period. The fact that this standard concept no longer applied signalled the advent of a new epoch in the history of medicine around the turn of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the critical responses to Talcott Parsons' first major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937), and his two subsequent books, Toward a General Theory of Action and The Social System (both 1951). Because Parsons' work was the subject of such virulent debate, we cannot fully understand Parsons' impact on the discipline of sociology without understanding the source and nature of those early criticisms. I trace the responses to Parsons, first through book reviews and private letters and then in the more substantial statements of C. Wright Mills, George Homans, and Alvin Gouldner, from the largely positive but superficial reception of Structure to the polemics that followed Parsons' 1951 works. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Parsons' reputation grew steadily but there remained no careful reception of Structure, fostering resentment toward Parsons in some quarters while precluding a sophisticated understanding of his work. After 1951, a few critics capitalized on that tension, writing sweeping rejections of Parsons' work that spoke to a much broader audience of sociologists. That dynamic, coupled with Parsons' own indifference toward his harshest critics, produced a situation in which many sociologists simply chose not to read Parsons in the 1950s and 1960s, reinforcing a caricature and distorting perceptions of Parsons' place in mid-twentieth-century American sociology. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions of the separation between economics and sociology in the United States highlight the way Talcott Parsons used Vilfredo Pareto's Trattato di Sociologia Generale to propose that economics study logical actions and sociology study nonlogical actions. This article argues instead that in Pareto's treatise: (1) sociology is a synthetic discipline concerned with the study of human society in general; (2) human behavior is nearly always logical from a subjective point of view; and (3) sociology studies both logical and nonlogical behavior judged from an objective viewpoint. Thus, Pareto is an important intellectual ancestor for economic sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weber and his work functioned in two ways: both as a bridge to the new, to the world of capitalist modernity, as well as a road to an acceptable cosmopolitan 'liberal' historical past. It was Weber the cosmopolitan and outsider who could give legitimacy and weight to the intellectual orientations and problems thought to be significant for the community in exile. It was this Weber who could cushion the 'negative shock' of what was often perceived as America's 'intellectual and cultural provincialism' and establish for the emigre scholar and intellectual the historical task of assisting in the development of American intellectual and cultural life. At the same time, the presence of a different Weber in America, already an established interest of several scholars emerging into prominence, such as Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, created difficulties as well as opportunities for the emigre scholars. Because of such variety the field for the transmission, reception, and influence of Weber's work must be approached as a complicated, multilayered, and contested patchwork of disparate and sometimes partially overlapping social and professional networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the statement of sociologist Talcott Parsons about industrial productivity in the U.S. Lesson of scholars interpreting the Cold War; Claim of sociologists on conflation of industrial societies; Benefits of productivity on economic priorities.

Previous research contends that when Talcott Parsons developed the substantive argument of The Structure of Social Action, he turned away from the theoretical emptiness of American social science and drew on the ideas of four European social thinkers -- Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Marshall. Such research exemplifies the "content-fit model" of predecessor selection, which assumes that intellectual predecessors are chosen on the basis of a fit between their ideas and the project of the thinker who engages them. This model fails to explain Parsons's exclusion of the American institutionalists, most notably his Amherst teachers Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayres, whose work fit directly with the argument of The Structure of Social Action. Institutionalist work was also characterized, however, by its negative reputation, particularly at Harvard University in the 1920s and 1930s, where Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber were thinkers of growing reputational standing. Examination of Parsons's involvement in the local Harvard network indicates that contemporary reputational judgments decisively affected his choice of intellectual predecessors. This analysis also brings to light the organizational and institutional conditions under which a "reputational model" is required to understand the process of predecessor selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of values in England and the U.S. In his studies of cultural evolution, U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons suggested that, in the modern era, core Western values were essentially unified and stable. The evidence Parsons used to substantiate his claims was selective and the empirical literature comparing values in England and the U.S. disagrees as to whether value similarities or differences are predominant. Consequently, hypotheses concerning the unity, diversity, and stability of value patterns in these two countries are explored using three distinct cross-national data sets. Although a direct comparison of the data sets is impossible because the value concepts and operational definitions used by each method differed, the data lead to remarkably consistent and unambiguous conclusions. On the level of general value patterning, England and America do seem to have significant value unity. Strong cross-national agreement in value priorities in general was indicated in all data sets considered--the adult interview data on personal values, the student questionnaire data on social values, and the content analysis data on value themes in dominant culture magazines.