SOC3070 Lecture 6

1
SOC3070 - Lecture 6

• Talcott Parsons

2

• Functional Historical Sociology
• and
• the Convergence Thesis

3

• The historical sociology of Durkheim, Marx, Weber
• History as the way social action and social
  structure create and contain one another
• Historical sociology aims to recognise the
  historical structuring of action

4

• Reaction against contemporary evolutionary
  theories
• Identifying patterns and tendencies without
  falling into teleology (developments are due to
  the purpose that is served by them)
• Interaction of purpose and structure without
  law-like necessity independent of human action

5

• Its a difficult task
• Durkheim the logic of division of labour
• Marx inevitability of socialism
• Weber bureaucratization as fate

6

• Postwar period neo-evolutionism, and debate
  about convergence. The industrial destiny of
  all societies
• Meta-historical laws of development.
• Inevitable destiny of society
• Key figure Talcott Parsons

7

• Parsons
• The evolution of social systems towards ever
  higher level of social organisation
• Change is driven by the logic of development, in
  the form of functional necessities
• Example the family

8

• Modernisation moves towards pluralism,
  decentralisation, individualism
• According to these criteria, the USA are the most
  advanced society

9

• Parsons analysis
• Industrialism is a type of social system that
  emerged from a process of structural
  differentiation
• Structural solutions to functional problems
• Structural change seem divorced from historical
  action
• The ultimate cause of change is not human agency,
  but rather its functionality, its role in the
  process of development

10

• Functional analysis can conceal that history is
  made by people, not functions
• Parsons vision of social evolution seems
  abstracted from the concrete enactment of history
  by historical actors

11

• Parsons on evolution
• The driving force is differentiation in turn it
  increases the adaptive capacity of society
  (i.e. productivity)
• Differentiation raises problems of integration
  and values that must be solved
• From these standards (differentiation,
  productivity) derives the primacy of the USA

12

• Parsons on American history
• American society as associational,
  differentiated and integrated
• Not much empirical evidence for this
• For functionalists like Parsons, function
  explains why things happens. How they did happen
  is less relevant

13

• The debate on convergence of all industrial
  societies towards common forms of organisation
• The convergence thesis, most famously presented
  in Industrialism and the Industrial Man (1960)
• The logic of industrialism overcomes everything
  else (agency, historical variations,) Towards a
  pluralistic industrialism
• Their work lacks historical depth (unlike, for
  example, the work of Marx)
• Inevitability in historical sociology