Create question and response with text below: There is always a tendency to overestimate the internal consistency of a social theorist's work, and this is no less true of Parsons than anyone else.
Create question and response with text below:
There is always a tendency to overestimate the internal consistency of a social theorist's work, and this is no less true of Parsons than anyone else. His sociological endeavour shifted around in many of its interests and emphases as he encountered new issues, or was confronted with intellectual challenges and social changes that appeared to challenge aspects of his previous thinking. For all of this, we may say that Parsons' work was concerned with two core theoretical issues above all else. These may be labelled the problem of social action, and the problem of social order (Alexander, 1983). The problem of social action asks why human actors act in the way that they do, how far their actions are structured by influences outside their control, and what consequences, intentional or unintended, follow. The problem of social order asks how it is possible for a multiplicity of social actions to produce some kind of coordinated social patterning, and how far such patterning depends on force or compulsion, as against consensus.
These two problems come together, under modern conditions and within Western liberal traditions, around the issues of self-interest and rationality in social life. If the rational pursuit of self-interest is advanced as an answer to the problem of social action, there remains the difficulty of explaining how it is that self-interest can generate social order. If social action is explained, on the other hand, in terms of the determining influence of structures beyond individual control, then what place is left for human autonomy and rationality, perception and judgement in social life? These issues had, of course, been around for a long time. Parsons' virtuoso strategy for dealing with their seeming intractability was to try to reconcile structure and agency, the ‘macro’ institutions and rules underlying social order, with the ‘micro’ personality or self, within some kind of new theoretical synthesis.
In the early part of his career Parsons account of social action was developed through a critique of the utilitarian assumptions which lay at the heart of neoclassical economics. Social action involves both ‘ends’ and ‘means’, but how were they connected? Economic theory typically took the ends of action as given and probably unknowable. It was concerned rather with the logic whereby actors select and implement those means that will achieve given ends in the most efficient or rational ways. This approach was defective, according to Parsons, for two main reasons. First, it excluded enquiry into the social origins of ends, including questions such as the part played by social values and meaning in determining ends. Secondly, it failed to account for social order, relying on the dubious assumption that the pursuit of self-interest by a mass of individuals would somehow create order in a spontaneous fashion, as in Adam Smith's celebrated metaphor of the invisible hand guiding market transactions.
There had been many critics of economic theory before Parsons who had identified the same set of problems. His response differed, however, from many of his predecessors
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