From Talcott Parsons, The System of
Modern Societies.
We
consider social systems to be constituents of the more general system of
action, the other primary constituents being cultural systems, personality
systems, and behavioral organisms; all four are abstractly defined relative to
the concrete behavior of social interaction. We treat the three subsystems
of action other than the social system as constituents of its environment. This
usage is somewhat unfamiliar, especially for the case of the personalities of
individuals. It is justified fully elsewhere, but to understand what follows it
is essential to keep in mind that neither social nor personality systems are
here conceived as concrete entities.
The
distinctions among the four subsystems of action are functional. We draw
them in terms of the four primary functions which we impute to all systems
of action, namely pattern-maintenance, integration, goal-attainment, and
adaptation.
An
action system's primary integrative problem is the coordination of its
constituent units, in the first instance human individuals, though for certain
purposes collectivities may be treated as actors. Hence, we attribute primacy
of integrative function to the social system.
We
attribute primacy of pattern-maintenance--and of creative pattern change--to
the cultural system. Whereas social systems are organized with
primary reference to the articulation of social relationships, cultural
systems are organized around the characteristics of complexes of symbolic
meanings--the codes in terms of which they are structured, the particular
clusters of symbols they employ, and the conditions of their utilization,
maintenance, and change as parts of action systems.
We
attribute primacy of goal-attainment to the personality of the
individual. The personality system is the primary agency of action
processes, hence of the implementation of cultural principles and requirements.
On the level of reward in the motivational sense the optimization of
gratification or satisfaction to personalities is the primary goal of action.
The
behavioral organism is conceived as the adaptive subsystem,
the locus of the primary human facilities which underlie the other systems. It
embodies a set of conditions to which action must adapt and comprises the
primary mechanism of interrelation with the physical environment, especially
through the input and processing of information in the central nervous system
and through motor activity in coping with exigencies of the physical
environment. These relationships are presented systematically in Table 1.
|
Subsystem |
Primary Function |
|
Social |
Integration |
|
Cultural* |
Pattern Maintenance* |
|
Personality* |
Goal Attainment* |
|
Behavioral Organism* |
Adaptation* |
* These are the social
subsystem's environment.
There are two systems of reality which are environmental to action in
general and not constituents of action in our analytical sense. The first
is the physical environment including not only phenomena as understandable
in terms of physics and chemistry, but also the world of living organisms so
far as they are not integrated into action systems. The second, which we
conceive to be independent of the physical environment as well as of action
systems as such, we will call ''ultimate reality" in a sense
derived from traditions of philosophy. It concerns what Weber called
"problem of meaning" for human action and is mediated into action
primarily by the cultural system's structuring of meaningful orientations that
include, but are not exhausted by, cognitive "answers."
In
analyzing the interrelations among the four subsystems of action -- and
between these systems and the environments of action -- it is essential to keep
in mind the phenomenon of interpenetration. Perhaps the best-known case
of interpenetration is the internalization of social objects and
cultural norms into the personality of the individual. Learned content of
experience, organized and stored in the memory apparatus of the organism, is
another example, as is the institutionalization of normative components
of cultural systems as constitutive structures of social systems. We hold that
the boundary between any pair of action systems involves a "zone" of
structured components or patterns which must be treated theoretically as common
to both systems, not simply allocated to one system or the other. For
example, it is untenable to say that norms of conduct derived from social
experience, which both Freud (in the concept of the Superego) and Durkheim (in.
the concept of collective representations) treated as parts of the personality
of the individual, must be either that or part of the social
system.
It
is by virtue of the zones of interpenetration that processes of interchange
among systems can take place. This is especially true at the levels of symbolic
meaning and generalized motivation. In order to "communicate symbolically,
individuals must have culturally organized common codes, such as those of
language, which are also integrated into systems of their social interaction.
In order to make information stored in the central nervous system utilizable
for the personality, the behavioral organism must have mobilization and
retrieval mechanisms which, through interpenetration, subserve motives
organized at the personality level.
Thus,
we conceive social systems to be "open," engaged in continual
interchange of inputs and outputs with their environments. Moreover, we
conceive them to be internally differentiated into various orders of
subcomponents which are also continually involved in processes of interchange.
Social systems are those constituted by states and processes of social
interaction among acting units. If the properties of interaction
were derivable from properties of the acting units, social systems would be
epiphenomenal, as much "individualistic" social theory has contended.
Our position is sharply in disagreement: it derives particularly from
Durkheim's statement that society--and other social systems-- is a
"reality sui generis.''
The
structure of social systems may be analyzed in terms of four types of
independently variable components: values, norms, collectivities, and
roles. Values take primacy in the pattern-maintenance functioning
of social systems, for they are conceptions of desirable types of social
systems that regulate the making of commitments by social units. Norms,
which function primarily to integrate social systems, are specific to
particular social functions and types of social situations. They include not
only value components specified to appropriate levels in the structure of a
social system, but also specific modes of orientation for acting under the
functional and situational conditions of particular collectivities and roles. Collectivities
are the type of structural component that have goal-attainment primacy.
[…W]e speak of a collectivity only where two
specific criteria are fulfilled. First, there must be definite statuses of
membership so that a useful distinction between members and nonmembers can
generally be drawn, a criterion fulfilled by cases that vary from nuclear
families to political communities. Second, there must be some differentiation
among members in relation to their statuses and functions within the
collectivity, so that some categories of members are expected to do certain
things which are not expected of other members. A role, the type of
structural component that has primacy in the adaptive function, we
conceive as defining a class of individuals who, through reciprocal
expectations, are involved in a particular collectivity. Hence, roles comprise
the primary zones of interpenetration between the social system and the
personality of the individual. A role is never idiosyncratic to a particular
individual, however. A father is specific to his children in his fatherhood,
but he is a father in terms of the role-structure of his society. At the same
time, he also participates in various other contexts of interaction, filling,
for example, an occupational role.
The
reality sui generis of social systems may involve the independent
variability of each of these types of structural components relative to the
others. A generalized value-pattern does not legitimize the same norms,
collectivities, or roles under all conditions, for example. Similarly, many
norms regulate the action of indefinite numbers of collectivities and roles,
but only specific sectors of their action. Hence a collectivity generally
functions under the control of a large number of particular norms. It always
involves a plurality of roles, although almost any major category of role is performed
in a plurality of particular collectivities. Nevertheless, social systems are
comprised of combinations of these structural components. To be
institutionalized in a stable fashion, collectivities and roles must be
"governed" by specific values and norms, whereas values and norms are
themselves institutionalized only insofar as they are "implemented"
by particular collectivities and roles.