Knowra Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) was an American sociologist whose structural functionalism analyzed how social systems maintain order through interdependent institutions, roles, and shared norms.
Action theory : A sociological approach that explains conduct through actors’ choices, purposes, and situations. Parsons built his general theory around action shaped by norms and social conditions.
AGIL paradigm : Parsons’s framework of four functional requirements: adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency. It condenses his account of the tasks that systems must perform to maintain themselves.
The Structure of Social Action : Parsons’s 1937 book interpreting major European theorists and proposing a voluntaristic theory of action. This work established the theoretical synthesis that shaped his later sociology.
Conflict theory : A family of sociological approaches that explain social arrangements through competing interests and unequal power. It challenges Parsons’s emphasis on shared values and system integration as sources of order.
Structural functionalism : A sociological approach that explains social structures by the functions they perform in maintaining a social system. Parsons became its leading postwar theorist and gave it an especially systematic form.
Social system : A patterned network of interactions among people and groups, organized by shared expectations and roles. This is the central level at which Parsons analyzed interdependence and social order.
Adaptation : The process by which a system secures and distributes resources in response to its environment. In AGIL, adaptation is the economic task Parsons assigned to the social system.
Max Weber : A German sociologist whose work examined social action, authority, religion, and rationalization. Parsons translated Weber into English and drew on his analysis of meaningful social action.
C. Wright Mills : An American sociologist who criticized abstract grand theory and examined power, institutions, and social structure. Mills attacked Parsons’s theoretical style for detaching social analysis from concrete historical problems.
Neil Smelser : An American sociologist who worked on social change, collective behavior, and economic sociology. Smelser developed structural-functional analysis and collaborated with Parsons on theories of social change.
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