The Social System

Introduction

Published in 1951, the same year as the collaborative Toward a General Theory of Action, The Social System is Parsons’s most detailed account of how societies hold together. A social system consists of interactions structured by roles and institutionalised norms; through socialisation individuals internalise shared values, and mechanisms of social control deal with deviance. Parsons introduces the “pattern variables”, pairs of alternatives such as affectivity versus affective neutrality or particularism versus universalism, to classify social relationships. A chapter on modern medical practice defines the “sick role”, which became a basic concept of medical sociology. Critics such as C. Wright Mills and Ralf Dahrendorf objected that the theory could not account for conflict and change.

Connections

Builds on

• The Structure of Social Action1937 · Talcott Parsons

Taken up in

• Social Systems1984 · Niklas Luhmann

Criticized in

• The Sociological Imagination1959 · C. Wright Mills
• The Constitution of Society1984 · Anthony Giddens

More works by Talcott Parsons

• 1937The Structure of Social Action