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intricate interrelations of the complex factors whichcreated the political culture of the twentieth century

and, above all, World War II. The changingmethods and interpretations nonetheless confirm thecentral role of parliaments in this culture.

See also: Citizenship, Historical Development of;Democracy, History of; Parliamentary Government;Political History (History of Politics); Political Parties,History of; Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History

Bibliography

Adamietz H 1978 Parlamentsgeschichte. Hanschild, LocationBe!langer R, Jones R, Vallie' res M 1994 Les grands deTbatsparlementaires. Publisher, Laval, Quebec

Bisset A 1882 A Short History of English Parliament. Publisher,London

Brooks C 1999 Goernors & Goernment. Political and PublicHistory of Early Modern England 15501850. Arnold, London

Chacon V 1997 HistoTria institucional do Senado. Publisher,Bras!lia

Copeland G W, Patterson S C (eds.) 1994 Parliaments in theModern World: Changing Institutions. University of MichiganPress, Ann Arbor, MI

Das Oqsterreichische Parliament 1984 ViennaFranks C E 1987 The Parliament of Canada. University of

Toronto Press, Toronto, ONFraser A, Mason R H P, Mitchell P 1995 Japans Early

Parliaments 18901905. Routledge, New YorkInternational Commission for the History of Representationand Parliamentary Institutions 1970 Parliaments, Estates andRepresentation. International Commission for the History ofRepresentation and Parliamentary Institutions, Ashgate,London

Interparliamentary Union 1983 Les Parlements dans le monde.Interparliamentary Union, Paris

Kluxen K 1983 Geschichte und Problematik des Parlamentaris-mus. Frankfurt

Ku$hne T 1998a Parlamentsgeschichte in Deutschland:Probleme, Ertra$ge, Perspektiven. (History of Parliament-arianism in Germany) Geschichte und Gesellschaft 24(2):32338

Ku$hne T 1998b Parlamentsgeschichte in Deutschland:Probleme, Ertra$ge, Perspektiven einer Gesamtdarstellung.

Geschichte und Gesellschaft24

(2): 32338Kurian G Th (ed.) 1998 World Encyclopedia of Parliaments andLegislatures . Congressional Quarterly, Washington, DC

Laundy P 1989 Parliaments in the Modern World. Gower,Dartmouth, UK

Loewenberg G, Patterson S C 1988 Comparing Legislatures.University Press of America, Lanham, MD

Olivier-Martin F 1997 Labsolutisme franais; suii de Lesparlements contre labsolutisme traditionnel. Librarie ge!ne!ralede droit et de jurisprudence, Paris

Ritter G A (ed.) 1974 Gesellschaft, Parlament und Regierung: zurGeschichte des Parlamentarismus in Deutschland. Kommissionfu$r Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischenParteien, Du$sseldorf

The History of Parliament 1998 (CD-Rom Edition: House ofCommons). Cambridge, UK

The Journal of Legislatie Studies 1995 Frank Cass, LondonVV. AA. 19631984 Storia del Parlamento Italiano. S . F .Flaccovio, Palermo

E. C. de Rezende Martins

Parsons, Talcott (190279)

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, Talcott Parsonswas the single most influential social theorist in theworld. A developer of what is now popularly calledaction theory, functionalism, and structural-func-tionalism, Parsons spent his entire career at Harvard

University, which helped considerably in institutional-izing his ideas and also in providing him access totalented graduate students. By the 1950s, his publi-cations became a major part of what was literally acommon curriculum for graduate students in allmajor sociology departmentsas well as in many ofthe best political science departments. By being insti-tutionalized in this way, Parsons publications elevatedthe rigor of American graduate training in sociologyinparticular. More than anyone else, he also defined theclassic theoretical tradition for sociology as a disci-pline and then added a more abstract, arguably moreconceptually sophisticated contemporary rival to it.With this, he raised the bar for social theory world-wide, from Germany, France, and Great Britain toJapan and even the former Soviet Union. A strongcase can be made today that every major social theorysince the mid-1960s has been developed in direct orindirect dialogue with Parsons functionalism (seeHabermas 1981 for a related statement).

Having become literally an icon in the discipline inthe first three decades of his career, in the last twodecades he attracted a considerable share of theiconoclasm that more generally characterized thestudent movement and academia of the late 1960s andearly 1970s. Parsons was subject across two decades tofar greater criticism than that directed to any othertheorist of his generation or since. Given the tenor ofthe times, most criticisms were rhetorical, often per-

sonal. Today, they leave a strong impression that fewcritics had bothered to read his works with the caretypically afforded to basic empirical studies, let alonewith the rigor and dispassion that any complicatedsocial theory demands. Yet, the cumulative effect ofthe broadsides he received in the late 1960s and early1970s was to leave the collective memory of thediscipline with an understanding of Parsonian func-tionalism that is difficult to reconcile with often-repeated, explicitly-stated positions in his publi-cations. What Parsons endeavored to accomplish inhis day, providing the social sciences with a commonlanguage, and how he went about accomplishing it,

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developing a conceptual framework comprising ana-lytical distinctions, now eludes the disciplines col-

lective memory.Talcott Parsons was born on December 13, 1902 in

Colorado Springs, the youngest of six children ofEdward S. Parsons, a Congregational minister andcollege administrator, and Mary Augusta IngersollParsons, a housewife and active suffragist (on bio-graphical details, I rely primarily on Nielsen 1991).Both parents were New England WASPs who tracedtheir ancestry to mid-eighteenth century settlers, Maryto theologian Jonathan Edwards. A graduate of YaleDivinity School, Edward Parsons holds fundamen-talist views of Christianity but leftist views in politics,particularly regarding the issue of economic in-equality. He is an active participant in the SocialGospel movement that supported organized labor.

Both parents inculcate into Talcott and his oldersiblings the importance of finding a mission in life andthen pursuing it assiduously. Many observers com-ment later on the mature Talcotts remarkable energyand perseveranceincluding on the final two days ofhis life in Munich in 1979. He published over 150 sole-authored articles and 14 books or collections.

In 1917 the Trustees of Colorado College forceEdward to resign as Dean after he supports twowomen who charged the Colleges President withsexual harassment. The family then moves to NewYork City where Talcott enters Horace Mann HighSchool, a laboratory school for boys operated byTeachers College of Columbia University. Talcottearns an undergraduate degree at Amherst College (ashad his father and two older brothers) from 19204.At the time Amherst was also an experimental,progressive school. Parsons at first focuses on biologyand chemistry but in his junior year becomes con-verted to the social sciences under the influence ofan unorthodox institutional economist, WaltonHamilton.

Parsons graduate training was remarkably brief:one academic year (19245) at the London School ofEconomics as a nondegree candidate, then another(19256) as a degree candidate at Heidelberg Uni-versity. At LSE, Parsons was influenced by MorrisGinsberg, L. T. Hobhouse, and the methodolog-ical functionalism of anthropologist Bronislaw

Malinowskias wellas by fellow-student E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Parsons also met his future wife andmother of three children, Helen Banerott Walker, aBryn Mawr College student studying banking. Herfamily of conservative white- and blue-collar workersconsider Talcott a leftist, a pinky. At Heidelberg,Parsons first learnt of the recently deceased Germansocialtheorist Max Weber and discussed his work withhis wife Marianne, his younger brother Alfred, andAlexander von Schelting. Taking coursework fromEdgar Salin and Emil Lederer (on economics), KarlMannheim (a friend of Georg Lukacs) and KarlJaspers (on Kant), Parsons selected howsociology and

economics differ in portraying capitalism as hisdissertation topic.

During his year at Heidelberg Parsons was offered aone-year teaching appointment at Amherst in theEconomics Department which also allowed him toteach an independent course in sociology. In 1927Parsons was offered an instructorship in economics atHarvard, thus beginning a life-long career there.Harvards Department of Sociology was a relativelate-comer in the discipline, beginning in the fall 1931under the chairmanship of Pitrim Sorokin, a 42-yearold emigre from Russia recruited from University ofMinnesota. Parsons, then 29, was appointed as aninstructor. Disagreements and misunderstandingbetween the two theorists became common knowledgein the Department and across the University. Yet,throughout Parsons career, both critics and pro-

ponents often commented on his low-key demeanorwhen grappling with ideas and interacting with col-leagues and students. It is difficult to find accounts ofhim being particularly effusive, let alone dominating.A short, stocky, already balding young man whosports a moustache and always smokes cigarettes,critics also comment often on his charm when inter-acting with other major national and internationalacademicians at Harvard, in the American govern-ment, and overseas.

DuringhisearliestyearsatHarvard,Parsonswasim-pressed with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead andhis notion of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.Consistent with Kant, Whitehead held that scientistsapprehend reality or scientific truth only throughanalytical distinctions, not more immediatelywheth-er experientially or directly through empirical findings.A few years later in correspondence with phenomeno-logist Alfred Schutz from 19401, Parsons defendedthe notion of analyticalrealismas opposed to onto-logical realism or empirical realismagainst Schutzsposition that social scientists can somehow gain moredirect access to the life-world of their subjects ofstudy (Grathoff 1978).

By contrast to Schutz and then also to ethno-graphers at University of Chicago and Americanempirical researchers more generally, Parsons en-deavored across his 50-year career to identify the mostirreducible analytical distinctions unique to sociology,

the scientific study of social life. In pursuing thisproject, Parsons arrived at three successive theoreticalsyntheses and along the way trains four remarkablytalented and productive cohorts of graduate students.All three of Parsons theories, which he called frame-works of concepts, involve a functionalist approachto the study of social life. This is an approach muchmaligned today, and yet a basic premise of func-tionalism is hardly controversial. Any social scientistwho poses the following question is operating within afunctionalist approach: What is the relationship, ifany, between the substantive area of social life I amstudying and the direction of social change? Here,

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then, is a common ground shared by critical theoristsand Parsonian functionalists but not by more his-

toricist researchers, those who study particular eventsor periods in isolation and are loathe to identify anydirection of social change.

While exceedingly abstract and complex, there aretwo ways to grasp the significance of Parsons pub-lications across his career. In general,he endeavored toaccount for the place and purpose of norms inmaintaining social order both historically and cross-nationally.Moreparticularly,heendeavoredtoaccountfor the place and larger significance of professions, aunique set of occupations, in contemporary societies.Professions are a pivotal subject for sociologicalinquiry because they are important nongovernmentalbodies in all modern societies. Yet, their prestige orstatus in any society hinges as much on whether they

are valued culturally, supported by generally recog-nized social norms, and centrally situated in a socialstructure as on whether practicing professionals com-pete effectively in self-regulating markets. In all mod-ern societies, professionals are simultaneously drivenby economic pressures to maximize profits, like otherworkers, and also by normative pressures to conformto certain extra-economic standards of conduct thattypically do not bind most other workers. Parsons wasinterested in accounting at a theoretical level for therise, evolution, and institutionalization of these extra-economic restraints on self-interested behavior, andthen also to explore whether and how they contributeto social order.

In his earliest publications, from the 1920s to themid-1940s, Parsons approached professions by firstdistinguishing their behavior from that of economicenterprises, on one side, and religious organizations,on the other. Corporate managers and shareholderstend to act in strictly utilitarian or market-mimickingways as they endeavor to maximize either growth orprofit, a quantitative end that can be recognizedinterpersonally. Clerics and religious believers, how-ever, tend to exhibit ritualistic fidelity to norms astheypresumablyseek spiritual salvation. This is aqualitative end that is transcendental or metaphysical;as such, its attainment is a matter of faith, notsomething that can be recognized interpersonally.Professionals, Parsons held, also exhibit fidelity to

norms, but more voluntaristically. They do not act instrictly market-mimicking ways, but they also do notconform to norms ritualistically with any transcen-dental end in view. Rather, they exhibit fidelity tonorms as a means to attain qualitative ends that areworldly or empirical, and thus capable of beingrecognized interpersonallysuch as their patientsphysical or mental health, or their clients legalinnocence, or scientific truth.

Parsons came to appreciate the significance ofvoluntaristic action after a careful reading of twoeconomic theorists, Alfred Marshall and VilfredoPareto, and two social theorists, Emile Durkheim and

Max Weber. This reading forms the core of TheStructure of Social Action (1937) which, along with

Parsonss 1930 translation of Webers The ProtestantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalism, established Weberand Durkheim as two of the new disciplines classictheorists. During the 1930s, Parsons trained a firstcohort of graduate students in the classics and his owntheory of voluntaristic action, including: RobertMerton, Kingsley Davis, John and Mathilda Riley,Edward Devereuw, Marion Levy, Wilbert Moore, andFlorence Kluckhohn (along with Edward Hartshornewho was killed by a sniper while on active service inpostwar Germany).

In spring 1944 Parsons was promoted to fullprofessor and the chairmanship. By January 1946, hetransformed the Department of Sociology into theDepartment of Social Relations, with the explicit aim

of linking structural and social psychological ap-proaches in thescientific study of social life. In thesameyear, Parsons also began formal training in psy-choanalysis as a Class C candidate at the BostonPsychoanalytic Institute. He had been lecturing infor-mally on Freud since fall 1938.

As Parsons assumed his leadership role in HarvardsDepartment, his theory went through a brief mid-career change from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s ashe considered findings from Robert Baless study ofsmall groups. Parsons began thinking about pro-fessions (and how to identify norms in social life moregenerally) in terms of six basic decisions that peopleperforming any role or task either make explicitly orhave imposed on them by cultural values, institution-alized norms, or social structures. For example, certainroles (including those performed by professionals)mandate treating others (clients or patients) in univer-salistic ways. By contrast, other roles (including thoseperformed by parents) encourage more particularistictreatment of others (children). Parsons called thesedecisions and requirements pattern variables. By hisaccount, researchers can use six such variable-pairs(a) to distinguish professions from other occupationsand (b) to identify changes in the behavior of pro-fessions both historically and cross-nationally.Parsons major publications during this period are acollection, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure andApplied (1949), and three monographs: The Social

System (1951), Towards a General Theory of Action(1951, with Shils), and Working Papers in the Theoryof Action (1953, with Robert Bales and Edward Shils).

During this period Parsons trained a second cohortof graduate students in the pattern variables, in-cluding: Bernard Barber, Harry Johnson, RobinWilliams, Jr., Jesse Pitts, Harold Garfinkel, FrancisSutton, and Robert Bales. More generally, as part ofthe buoyancy and optimism that pervaded the USafter the war, many sociology departments re-evaluatetheir curricula. The discipline is open collectively toreceiving a new theoretical synthesis, and Parsonsnotion of pattern variables, while preliminary and as it

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turned out fleeting, is a prime candidate. Another isRobert Mertons notion of middle range theory, an

idea he first proposed at the annual meeting of the thenAmerican Sociological Society in 1947 in oppositionto Parsons general theory.

Finally, beginning slowly in the mid-1950s and thenwith more rapid developments from the early 1960s tothe end of his career, Parsons approached professionswithin what he called the AGIL schema. This isParsons single most significant contribution to socialtheory. During his transition from the pattern vari-ables to the AGIL schema, Parsons publications,lectures, and presentations create an unusually kineticintellectual excitement among collaborators andgraduate students. Everyone working in his circleoperated with a palpable sense that social theory is inthe midst of a fundamental breakthrough, a sense that

American sociology has not witnessed since.This transition period to Parsons mature social

theory is marked in particular by Economy and Society(1956, with Neil Smelser), and Parsons trainingof a third cohort of graduate students, including:Albert Cohen, Renee Fox, Joseph Berger, NormanBirnbaum, Neil Smelser, James Olds, Jackson Toby,and Miriam Johnson. In addition, many earliergraduate students whose training had been interruptedby wartime service returned to Harvard. Talentedundergraduates who come into contact with Parsonsduring this period include Robert Bellah and CharlesTilly. Also in transition during this period is theleadership of sociology at Harvard. Parsons resigns aschair of the Department of Social Relations in 1956,and within the next two years learns that he hasdiabetes. Sorokin retires in 1959.

From 1956 to 1961, Lewis Coser and Dennis Wrongin the US, David Lockwood in Great Britain, andRalf Dahrendorf in Germany challenged Parsonsfunctionalism in relatively measured tones, but withuneven rigor. They were also shooting at a movingtarget in that Parsons was developing his mature socialtheory. The high-point of scholarly criticism duringthis period comes with a collection of essays byphilosophers and sociologists edited by Max Black, towhich Parsons responded with a long concludingchapter. In April 1964, Parsons was a central figure ata famoussession of the GermanSociology Association

in Heidelberg devoted to reconsidering Max Weberscontributions. He found himself at odds with Frank-furt School critical theorists, most notably the youngJu$rgen Habermas and the more established MaxHorkeimer and Herbert Marcuse (see Stammer1965\1972 for a collection of these exchanges).

From this point forward, criticisms of Parsonsbecome harsher, more personal and ideological thananalytical and scholarly. Parsons was attacked, par-ticularly in the US, for: his religious background, hisWASP ethnic and cultural heritage, his writing style,his amazing productivity, his putatively strategicrather than scholarly decision to make sociology as

rigorous conceptually as economics, his putativemistranslation of Weber, the putative conservative

nature of his own family life including his putativeresponsibility for his daughters suicide (in June 1964,two weeks after the Heidelberg debate), his putativepolitical conservatism, and his putative general obeis-ance to American capitalism or the establishment.

ParsonsunveiledtheAGILschemaexplicitlyin1963,with major articles on the concepts of power andinfluence, and then in 1964, with his first statementabout evolutionary universals (see the Turner 1999collection for the 1964 article and references to theothers). As fully developed, the AGIL schema isolatesanalytically those aspects of behavior in any role orposition that contribute, respectively, to each of fourgeneral social functions: economic efficiency (ad-aptation), administrative effectiveness (goal-attain-

ment), fidelity to social norms (integration), andfidelity to cultural values or a societys most basicinstitutional arrangements (latency). Parsons alsoproposed that four media of interchange circulatebetween these analytical subsystemsmoney, power,influence, and value commitmentsthereby bringinga certain orderliness or predictability to the whole. Headded notions of systems-theory, pattern mainten-ance, and hierarchy of control to this basic four-function breakdown of social life.

In 1973, Parsons and Platt published what isarguably his most important single work since 1937,The American Uniersity. In this work Parsons re-thinks his approach to professions by incorporatingtwo major points into his social theory. First, heproposes that professions and sites of professionalpractice (such as universities, hospitals, and researchinstitutes) are organized in a collegial form, not in abureaucratic form or a democratic form. Second, heproposes that professions are distinguished from otheroccupations by their members willingness to bearfiduciary responsibilities to clients and the largersociety. These two points provide the foundations foran account of the place and purpose of professions incontemporary societies that differs radically from anyeffort, whether by rational choice theorists or socialcritics on the left, to treat the professions analyticallyas interchangeable with other occupations or othercorporate entities. By 1973, however, the collective

memory of the discipline is so dominated by criticismsof the AGIL schema that this major work, arguablyParsons single most important substantive contri-bution to social theory, goes largely unread by criticsand proponents alike.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Parsons trained afourth and final cohort of graduate students in theAGIL schema and related theoretical developments,including: Victor Lidz, Jan Loubser, Leon Mayhew,Rainer Baum, Dean Gerstein, John Akula, and WillyDeCramer. Parsons also influences undergraduateJeffrey Alexander. Only in the mid-1970s, a few yearsbefore his death, did Parsons begin methodically to

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respond to at least a few criticisms of his work, mostnotably the informed analyses of Bershady (1973) and

Warner (1978). Bershadys Ideology and Social Knowl-edge in particular marks a major sea change incommentary on Parsons works. Bershady is the firstto draw attention to Parsons effort to ground thesocial sciences against relativism with analytical con-cepts. More than anyone else Bershady appreciatesthat Parsons pitched his social theory at an unusuallyabstract level of analysis because he sought literally acommon language for the social sciences. Prior toBershady both proponents and critics generally failedto convey the power and sweep of Parsons socialtheory in form, its aspiration to unite the socialsciences. Parsons project was essentially to give struc-turalists and symbolic interactionists the means, thecommon language, by which to demonstrate to each

other the central import of their respective findings.Parsons demonstrated his capacity to translate

others findings and ideas in his own scholarship. Heco-authored, team-taught, or otherwise collaboratedclosely with a remarkable range of theorists andresearchers across disciplines, including: Edward Shils,Joseph Schumpeter, Samuel Stouffer, Florence Kluck-hohn, Robert F. Bales, James Olds, Morris Zelditch,Philip Slater, Neil Smelser, Lon Fuller, Kaspar Naeg-ele, Jesse Pitts, Winston White, S. N. Eisenstadt,Robert Bellah, Victor Lidz, Gerald Platt, EdwardLaumann, Erwin Scheuch, Andrew Effrat, MarkGould, and Dean Gerstein. In addition, he engaged inprivate and public correspondence and debates withFrank Knight, Crane Brinton, Robert Bierstedt,Albert Blumenthal, Alfred Schutz, Chester Barnard,Philip Selznick, Eric Voegelin, Robert Merton, Kenn-eth Boulding, C. Wright Mills, Robert Bellah, BennettBerger, David Riesman, Jurgen Habermas, HerbertMarcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Ernest Mayr. Finally,an impressive set of scholars was influenced heavily byParsons himself, his students, or his theory (some ofwhom also influence Parsons and his students): NiklasLuhmann, Seymour Martin Lipset, Amitai Etzioni,Robert Marsh, Daniel Bell, Joseph Ben-David, Ben-

jamin Nelson, Gabriel Almond, James S. Coleman,Karl Deutsch, David Apter, Lucian Pye, SidneyVerba, Chalmers Johnson, S. N. Eisenstadt, KenichiTominaga (Japans leading postwar sociologist),

Lawrence Brownstein, Martin Martel, Adrian Hayes,and Frank Lechner.Parsons and Helen travelled frequently in the 1970s,

including three separate trips to Japan. In early May1979 they returned to Heidelberg, then proceeded toMunich, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary ofTalcotts degree from Heidelberg. After Parsonstypical full day of presentations and scholarly ex-changes, including a lecture on The Declining Sig-nificance of Social Class attended by host Horst Helleas well as Jurgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann,Richard Munch, and Wolfgang Schluchter, Parsonsdied of a stroke in the early hours of May 8. At a

memorial service 10 days later in Harvard Chapel,Victor Lidz notes in eulogy: No sociologist of recent

times has had to endure more bitter criticism thanTalcott. Although a passionate man, Talcott borecriticism with equanimity as well as courage. Notdaunted by even sweeping attack, he held to his ownprogram of research and writing. Moreover, adheringto principles of value-freedom, he declined to re-ciprocate ideological criticism. He dealt with criti-cisms, always, as technical matters within the domainof social scientific theory (Nielsen 1991).

Parsons critics inadvertently encouraged the frag-mentation of research and theory in sociology and thesocial sciences that Parsons endeavored to prevent.Today, in the absence of any shared framework ofanalytical concepts, social scientists routinely talk pasteach other, as opposed to revealing to each other the

general importance of their research findings andtheoretical developments. Parsonss general theoryhas given way not to a finite set of readily identifiabletheories of the middle range, as Robert Mertonanticipated in 1949, but rather to an ever more finelygrained cacophony of research specialties. This trendis then recapitulated, and accelerated, by ongoingchanges in graduate training. Graduate students aretrained more and more narrowly, and their requiredsurvey courses in social theory hardly encourage themto move beyond any research specialty. If there is anycommon language in the social sciences today, it isthat of research methods. But even here there is moreinternal division among methodologists than theyoften wish to acknowledge.

In support of Habermas point that we can expectany new theoretical development in the social sciencesto respond directly or indirectly to Parsons function-alism, French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu in manyregards today recapitulates Parsons AGIL schema.He identifies two poles within what he calls fields ofpowerthe economic field and the field of culturalproductionand then distinguishes four fields inbetween: politics, the higher civil service, the pro-fessions, and the university (Bourdieu 1989\1996).The major difference with Parsons is that the Frenchtheorists categories are more directly descriptive, lessanalytically rigorous. As a result, it is not clear onwhat basis he is distinguishing fields, why there are six

fields of power rather than four or eight, or on whatbasis researchers may categorize particular groups oractivities as components of one field or another.

By the early 1980s, a new generation of socialtheorists, including members of Parsons last cohort ofgraduate and undergraduate students at Harvard,initiated the effort to have Parsons publicationsreconsidered on scholarly grounds. Led initially byMunch (1981) in Germany andAlexander (1983, 1985)in the US, todays neofunctionalism finds supportfrom theorists whose political positions range fromradical left to liberal reformist to conservative re-publican (see the collections edited by Hamilton 1992

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and Colomy 1990). What they share, with Parsonshimself, are two general principles (which Alexander

1988 now explicitly rejects). One is that it is vitallyimportant to the social sciences to continue Parsonseffort to ground social theory on the basic analyticaldistinctions of the AGIL schema rather than to relymore directly on descriptive concepts (whether em-pirical generalizations or ideal types). The otherprinciple is that it is incumbent today to demonstratethe empirical potential of Parsonian functionalism, toidentify lines of empirical inquiry that this socialtheory uniquely presents to view (Sciulli 1992). Astrong case can be made that Parsons social theoryhas been mined only superficially(Takagi in press). Anequally strong case can be made that theorists andresearchers today can draw fruitfully on Parsonsbasic AGIL schema, and then the first set of sub-

divisions he drew within each function, but that theyneed not follow Parsons effort to draw furtherdistinctions within each subdivision (Mouzelis 1995).

Social theorists outside the US today who supportthe Parsonian tradition, even if critical of certainparts of it, include: Munch, Hans Joas, Uta Gerhardt,Horst Helle, and Harald Wenzel in Germany; HelmutStaubmann in Austria; Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen inDenmark; Pierpaolo Donati, Andrea Maccarini,Matteo Bortolini, and Riccardo Prandini in Italy;Kenichi Tominaga, Kiyomitsu Yui, and KazuyoshiTakagi in Japan; and Nicos Mouzelis, Bryan Turner,and Jeremy Tanner in Great Britain.

See also: Action Theory: Psychological; Action, Theo-ries of Social; Control: Social; Conventions andNorms: Philosophical Aspects; Durkheim, Emile(18581917); Educational Institutions and Society;Emergent Properties; Functionalism, History of;Functionalism in Sociology; Influence: Social; Insti-tutions; Norms; Political Economy, History of; Pro-fessions in Organizations; Professions, Sociology of;Realism\Neorealism; Realisms and their Opponents:Philosophical Aspects; Shared Belief; Social Change:Types; Sociology, History of; Status and Role: Struc-tural Aspects; Structuralism, Theories of; Structure:Social; Symbolic Interaction: Methodology; System:Social; Theory: Conceptions in the Social Sciences;Theory: Sociological; Value Pluralism; Values, Socio-logy of; Weber, Max (18641920)

Bibliography

Alexander J C 1983 Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Vol. 4: TheReconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Uni-versity of California Press, Berkeley, CA

Alexander J C (ed.) 1985 Neofunctionalism. Sage, Beverly Hills,CA

Alexander J C 1988 Neofunctionalism and After. Blackwell,Malden, MA

Bershady H J 1973 Ideology and Social Knowledge. Wiley, NewYork

Black M (ed.) 1961 The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons.Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJBourdieu P 1989\1996 The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the

Field of Power. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CAColomy P (ed.) 1990 Neofunctionalist Sociology. Elgar,

Aldershot, UKGrathoff R (ed.) 1978 The Theory of Social Action: The

Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. IndianaUniversity Press, Bloomington, IN

Habermas J 1981\1987 Theory of Communicatie Action, Vol. 2.Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason.Beacon Press, Boston

Hamilton P (ed.) 1992 Talcott Parsons: Critical Assessments, 4vols. Routledge, London

Mouzelis N 1995 Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong?Diagnosis and Remedies. Routledge, London

Munch R 1981 Talcott Parsons and the theory of action, I: The

Structure of the Kantian core. American Journal of Sociology86: 70939

Nielsen J K 1991 Talcott Parsons Life, Theory and PoliticalOrientation. Unpublished Manuscript, 5 vols.

Parsons T 1937\1968 The Structure of Social Action, 2 vols.Free Press, New York

Parsons T, Platt G W 1973 The American Uniersity. HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA

Sciulli D 1992 Theory of Societal Constitutionalism: Foundationsof a Non-Marxist Critical Theory. Cambridge UniversityPress, New York

Stammer O (ed.) 1965\1972 Max Weber and Sociology Today.Harper and Row, New York

Takagi K in press Talcott Parsons and American IntellectualSociety. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

Turner B S (ed.) 1999 The Talcott Parsons Reader. Blackwell,

Malden, MAWarner R S 1978 Toward a redefinition of action theory:Paying the cognitive element its due. American Journal ofSociology 83: 131749

D. Sciulli

Partial Orders

The idea of ordering captures a basic faculty of thehuman mind: to decide for two given elements from aset of objects which one dominates the other withrespect to an attribute of interest, or, alternatively,

which one is preferred to the other.Formally, a partially ordered set (a poset for short)consists of a pair (P,) where Pis a nonempty set and a binary relation on Psatisfying for all x, y, z ?P:

(a) reflexivity: xx,(b) asymmetry: xy and yx implies xly,(c) transitivity: xy and y z implies x z.Transitivity is, in a sense, the most important

property; it is shared by all variants of order relations,though it might be a consequence of other conditions.However, asymmetry also contributes in an essentialway to the meaning of a partial order. Reflexivity, onthe contrary, is merely a matter of taste or con-

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